Stephan Tual

Stephan Tual voted up an answer.

You can't. The personality required to start your own company is made up of a few basic traits which unfortunately are all required. Besides the ones you mentioned like passion, skill, integrity etc. there's another required trait which is the willingness to take risk and go on adventures. No matter how you spin it, a start-up is risky business. If I'm optimistic and see the world with rose tainted glasses I'd say maybe at the most 10% of them won't die violently. Of those 10% only a few will actually make it, and even fewer will have founder-exits you'll read about in techcrunch. So unless your friend posses that risk taking adventure gene, forget it. He won't leave his secure job so easily.
I've been trying to hire a friend of mine (who is in a cushy job) into my current start-up. He kept declining and still does. I keep asking just for fun now. I don't expect a different answer.

Edit: I must also add that in a previous start-up where the same friend declined (I've been trying for 2 start-ups already to grab him), it turned out to be the right choice as the company tanked at some point due to 'people-issues'. So another moral of this story is "do not push your friend into a start-up unless you're willing to accept responsibility to his financial doom in case it suffers the real death".

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In 9/11 Conspiracy Theories: Stephan Tual voted up an answer.

According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology's draft report, the collapse was due mostly to uncontrolled fire with some small help from structural damage caused by the collapse of the north tower.

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No, this is not an optimal use case for Vertica, which is a specialized OLAP database -- built for handling relatively few concurrent queries that process large quantities of data. 

You might want to consider its OLTP cousin, VoltDB: http://www.voltdb.com -- built for many concurrent queries that process very little data each, but a lot of data in aggregate.

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To get a job, yes, but if by 'Entrepreneur' you mean to start a company, probably not if you aren't a permanent resident of the USA.

I lived in San Francisco from January 2000 – April 2001. I will not paraphrase the other answers which accurately portrayed the positive points, as it's undeniable SF and the Valley are THE place to be when it comes to the technology industry. (see http://gigaom.com/2011/01/28/wha...)

That said, the keyword here is Entrepreneur, and I'm surprised no one has mentioned the issues you will face if you attempt to start a company AND make it your primary source of income. See my answer on  Is it feasible for Silicon Valley investors to fund a company with H1B1 founders?.

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There is not a single location for getting this information across grocery chains. Your best bet would be to contact the grocery chain directly. While not precisely a secret (you can, after all, walk into a store and see it for yourself) you'll find most chains do treat it as a trade secret anyway.

Someone with a title like VP of Sales and Merchandising would generally be the person to give you the info, though a store manager or category manager might be willing to as well. Some parts of the store (e.g., salty snacks, soda) are often managed by a separate company (like Fritos or Coke) and they may have their own planograms.

Note, I only really know about the US.

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In Backups: Stephan Tual added an answer.

Online, because if you are a consumer it's unlikely you'd have access to a proper off-site storage facility.

Easiest way would be to get yourself an Amazon S3 account (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/) then an S3 client such as Bucket Explorer (http://www.bucketexplorer.com/) to upload your data.

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In Twitter: Stephan Tual voted up an answer.

I initally created the Fail Whale Graphic.

It was originally named Lifting a Dreamer in 2002 as an e-greeting card for friends of mine overseas.

At that time the picture was featuring an elephant and the original name is Lifting a Dreamer 

Then in 2006, I studied overseas again and changed the version into a Whale since I was from New South "Wales"

In-depth story here:

http://mashable.com/2010/08/02/f...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/ar...

* Fail Whale Name Origin Discussion on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/scr...

* Nick Quaranto (@qrush)'s “Eureka” moment on "Failwhale" Name:


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I will post an answer to my own question hoping for other points of views. I had originally posted this answer on LinkedIn without much feedback. 

I think the technology is already there at Google, just not deployed. While that technology is affordable enough to be implemented anywhere, as of today privacy concerns would stem only if either of the two biggest players in the field implemented such a thing. This is due to the sheer size of their catalogs, and therefore the increased likelihood of 'unwanted' pictures being tagged. These players are of course Facebook (90 billion photos indexed so far) and Google (beyond 1 trillion).

Let’s start with Facebook: on the worrying side, it has an upcoming privacy option called "Suggest photos of me to friends", further described as “When photos look like me, suggest my name”. And Face.com does the exact same thing, today, through an app.

In Facebook’s defense, the fact that the setting exists even before the feature is released is a relief, and there is also a thread on this very site at http://b.qr.ae/epOvEF where Justin Mitchell, one of the Facebook Photos engineer, categorically states that they "will never auto-tag users".

With Google however, things are less evident. The risk to privacy is even greater because if implemented, anyone could then type your name in Google, select the headshots you have tagged yourself in (such as the one on Linkedin), then click 'find pictures where this person might appear'. Imagine the impact of something like this in countries where labor camps for political prisoners still abound, or where government-supported bigotry is the norm.

With its 2006 acquisition Neven Visio, Google Images already has a way to detect the difference between a line drawings and a face (check the 'advanced options' screen). And in 2009, it pulled a feature from its ‘Goggles’ mobile identification service where one could have identified another by just pointing their mobile phone cameras at them. (the service does exist today, but is restricted to objects).

Based on the above, I think Google will implement a global ‘face search’ sooner than later, unless stopped by privacy groups. Further supporting this theory, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was criticized not too long ago for saying : 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.”, and also famously hinted that “If you don't like Street View, move house” (although he claimed for that comment to have been taken out of context).

UPDATE: I'll add to this the compounded issue of geo-tagging, where for example all pictures where one's face appear could be laid out on top of Google earth, and even presented in chronological order.

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In Band Names: Stephan Tual voted up an answer.

To the cloud!

1 2 3 4 5

wget ftp://ftp.musicbrainz.org/pub/musicbrainz/data/fullexport/20110115-000002/mbdump.tar.bz2 tar xvjf mbdump.tar.bz2 cut -f2 -d" " mbdump/artist | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' > artist_names curl http://download.freebase.com/datadumps/2011-01-13/browse/biology/animal.tsv | cut -f1 -d" " | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' > animal_names LC_ALL='C' grep -w -o -f animal_names artist_names | sort | uniq -c | sort -nrk1,1 | head -n10

1. jay (923)
2. dog (287)
3. fox (264)
4. cat (262)
5. wolf (255)
6. fisher (206)
7. human (205)
8. fish (175)
9. ant (160)
10. monkey (143)

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Stephan Tual voted up an answer.

This depends a bit on whether you're funded by angels or institutional capital.

• For angels, I'd say $80-100k is perfectly reasonable assuming you're in a leadership role.
• For institutional (VC/mini-VC fund) you could pay yourself up to $150k if you're a strong contributor (part of this could be year-end bonus based on milestones that you clearly set out in advance).

But at the end of the day, this becomes a business decision. You and your co-founders should still control the company with $1m in funding so legally you can pay yourselves whatever you want. But you need to set the right tone with your investors, give yourselves sufficient runway, etc, etc. So pay yourselves enough that you're not hurting for cash, but don't go overboard. You're in it for the equity value.

Also, consider setting up some form of deferred compensation (for instance you can defer a portion of your salaries until you raise your next round).

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Yes, it feasible for Silicon Valley investors to fund (read: 'invest in') a company with H1B founders. But please read on, it's probably not what you expected.

I am not a lawyer, but I have been in your situation. My understanding is that while you are legally allowed to start a company (a C corp), you won't be allowed to work for it.

You can name a CEO, hire a team and then remain a passive investor, you can even own 100% of the company. But are not allowed to work for any other company than the company that sponsored your H1B. There are no exception to that rule. 

So if your actual question was "Can I quit the company currently sponsoring my H1B after receiving funding from SV investors AND remain in the country legally AND also work for the newly-funded startup", the answer is no, absolutely not.

I could go on with possible options you might have etc, however it would help knowing more about your current situation, expectations etc.

PS: please update your profile using your real name. If you are not comfortable due to the subject matter of this question, you have the option to re-post as anonymous.

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