simon koldyk » Business

My First Cheque

Simon Koldyk — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:09:44 +0000

Everybody else seems to like posting cheques so I wanted to do it as well. Its a few years old now; but, it was my first move from doing this for fun to that I can make money doing this as well. And that was when the US > CAD was a little better, so it was just over $10K.

Visit to BootupLabs

Simon Koldyk — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:19:51 +0000

So I went and stopped by Bootup Labs yesterday on my way to VEF. They have some really nice offices (a few blurry iPhone pictures are at the bottom), they have 4 companies + Bootup Labs in there. It was great to talk to some of the people there and find out some interesting tidbits on some things going on. If your nearby and have some time, definitely go and check it out.

So I then went to VEF to listen to a talk by Haig Farris (one of the founders of Ventures West) and it was amazing. Farris talked a lot on the investor side, although their was many things that I saw to make my own presentation to investors better.

VEF also does these 100 second lightning pitches (elevator pitches), I barely understood any of them. One person had a slide with like 20 different boxes in it that was super hard to follow. I’m sure in the presenters mind everything made sense, in the crowd nobody got it. Taught me some lessons though, 1. Always practice on a few people before hand that no nothing of your project and 2. Keep it simple; make sure what you are doing is laid out clearly before going anywhere else.

Posting Exploits

Simon Koldyk — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:57:19 +0000

TechCrunch made a post today (that they got from Hacker News) about a exploit in Tumblr that would allow you to access the administration area of the site simply by logging in and adding /admin/ to the url. You could add posts, change peoples emails and reset their password; easily a few bad people could do a lot of damage and apparently some were affected. While this is a stupid programming mistake by Tumblr their should be quite a bit of security on the administration panels, I want to talk about what TechCrunch did.

They posted it without notifing Tumblr and waiting the hour for them to fix it or deny access to the /admin/ url. I believe in publishing when a company makes a mistake of this magnitude to show people why they should be concerned with security, and showing the specifics so people can learn from this. Publishing this information before a fix is made or before a fix is out (withing a resonable time frame) is crazy.

Just think about if this was your startup and TechCrunch blogged about your startups exploit, it could screw over a lot of your users.

Email in Business

Simon Koldyk — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:00:16 +0000

I’m still learning this one; but, in business all your emails should be replied to in 1 business day (vacations don’t count). And getting into the routine of this is freaking hard. You have to create a system to get through them, now that doesn’t mean that you have to do whatever they want; but, send them an email back saying what your doing and when you’ll be able to get it to them. Although I’m guessing you can get most of those things done. My routine to get this to work has been to do a few through the day; but, most likely you’ll get my reply at about 11PM-1AM. I’m not a person with a large audience, I just run a startup so I only get about 200 emails per day that I have to deal with. About 50 or so of those are done throughout the day, another 125 of those are quick replies at night, and then the other 25 I add to my todo list or foward for other people to deal.