These categories were originally about abusive men, but my friend Stephanie noticed these categories could be adapted to describe abusive companies, too. From the book "Why Does He Do That?":
1. Drill Sergeant: Micromanages you, wants to control everything.
2. Mr. Sensitive: Builds up a public image of being a great company so people think you're crazy if you criticize them.
3. The Water Torturer: Is an expert at not doing anything OBVIOUSLY wrong, you feel wronged but can't pinpoint why and wonder if you're crazy.
4. The Demand Man (or Company): Everything seems fine if you never ask for anything, like a raise. If you do that, you're suddenly painted as ungrateful and treated poorly.
5. Mr. Right: Everything is fine so long as you don't question the company's actions or say anything critical about them.
6. The Player: Never lets you feel like the job is stable. Acts interested in you only to hook you in, then you're neglected and treated poorly again.
7. Rambo: Treats everyone like shit, but tells you you're special and an exception.
8. The Victim: You caused the company so much trouble, you really messed up that one time, any mistreatment happening to you now is making up for that.
9. The Terrorist: Reminds you of the power they have to ruin your career or life, so you better not go against them.
10. Bipolar: The company oscillates between being angry and then happy with you depending on the state of your current project. They become angry when a problem is identified, and when you fix it they are temporarily happy.
Sunday, February 4, 2018
Friday, November 24, 2017
Universal GPU texture codec update
I've reduced the size of the key lookup tables used by the universal transcoder to approx 85KB. Some example encodings:
Original:
ETC1 near-optimal:
ETC1S (the universal texture):
DXT1:
DXT5A:
Original:
ETC1S (the universal texture):
Thursday, November 23, 2017
More universal GPU texture format examples
I've improved the quality of the ETC1->DXT1 conversion process. All of these images come from the same exact compressed data. Only a straightforward transform is required on the compressed texture bits to derive the DXT1/DXT5A version. It's simple/fast enough to do in a Javascript transcoder.
ETC1:
DXT1:
DXT5A:
ETC1:
DXT1:
DXT5A:
ETC1:
DXT1:
DXT5A:
ETC1:
DXT1:
DXT5A:
ETC1:
DXT1:
DXT5A:
ETC1:
DXT1:
DXT5A:
ETC1:
DXT1:
DXT5A:
ETC1:
ETC1:
DXT1:
ETC1:
ETC1:
ETC1:
ETC1:
Universal GPU texture format: DXT5 support
Got grayscale ETC1 to DXT5A conversion working, using a small table. This work is for DXT5 support in the universal texture format. Now that this is working I can proceed to finishing the full universal encoder.
Note none of these images were created with my best ETC1 encoder. They use an early prototype from late 2016 that has so-so quality. The main point of these experiments is to prove that the idea is workable.
All stats are dB vs. the original image. This image's subtle gradients are hard to handle, you can see this in the DXT1 version.
To those who argue that a universal GPU texture format that is based off ETC1/DXT1 isn't high quality enough: You would be amazed at the low quality levels teams use with crunch/Basis. This tech isn't about achieving highest texture quality. It's about enabling easy distribution of supercompressed GPU texture data. It's a "JPEG-like format for GPU texture data", usable on mobile or desktop.
Original
ETC1 near-optimal 48.903
ETC1S 46.322 (universal format base image in ETC1 mode)
ETC1S->DXT1 45.664
ETC1S green channel converted to DXT5A (43.878)
Original
ETC1 near-optimal 51.141
ETC1S 46.461
ETC1S->DXT1 44.865
ETC1S green channel converted to DXT5A 46.107
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
"Universal" GPU texture/image format examples
All PSNR figures are luma PSNR. Each image was transcoded from the same compressed texture data.
ETC1 41.233
DXT1 40.9
ETC1 45.964
DXT1 45.322
ETC1 46.461
DXT1 44.865
ETC1 43.785
DXT1 43.406
ETC1 33.516
DXT1 33.339
ETC1 41.233
DXT1 40.9
ETC1 45.964
DXT1 45.322
ETC1 46.461
DXT1 44.865
ETC1 43.785
DXT1 43.406
ETC1 33.516
DXT1 33.339
Sunday, November 12, 2017
On whiteboard coding interviews
I'm in a ranty mood this evening. Looking through my past, one thing that bothers me is the ritual called "whiteboarding".
I've taken and given a lot of these interviews. I personally find the process demeaning, dehumanizing, biased, and subjective. And if the company uses the terms "cultural fit" or "calibration" when teaching you how to whiteboard, be wary.
My first software development interview was in 1996. I walked in, showed my Game Developer Magazine articles and demos (in DOS of course), spoke with the developers and my potential manager, and they made me an offer. Looking back, I was so young, inexperienced and naive at 20 years old. It was a tough gig but we shipped a cool product (Montezuma's Return). There was no whiteboard, all that mattered was the work and results.
Anyhow, my interview at Blue Shift was similar. No whiteboard, just lots of meetings.
At Ensemble (Microsoft), I got a contract gig at first. This turned into a full-time gig. The interviews there were informal and very rarely (if ever) involved problem solving on a whiteboard.
Right before Ensemble, I also interviewed at Microsoft ATG. It was a stressful, heavy duty whiteboard interview with several devs. It was intense, and that night I fell asleep at the table of an unrelated dinner with friends. I got an offer, but Ensemble's was better. I later learned it was basically a form of "Trauma Bonding". Everyone else did it, so you had to go through it too to get "in". Overall, I remember the Microsoft engineers I interviewed with seemed to be all tired and somewhat stressed out, but they were very professional and respectful.
After Age3 shipped, I interviewed at Epic. I was tired from crunching on Age3, and was unprepared. It was the most horrific interview I've ever taken or seen. Incredibly unprofessional. The devs didn't want to be interviewing anyone. I flopped this interview (and probably dodged a bullet as the working conditions there at the time seemed really bad). Nobody at Ensemble knew I interviewed there, and I'm glad I didn't leave.
Years later, I interviewed at Valve. It was another exercise in Trauma Bonding. I was so stressed it was ridiculous, and I found Dune's "The Litany Against Fear" helpful. Somehow I got through, and looking back I think Gabe Newell (who visited Ensemble and met me there) might have helped get me in without my knowledge. I was lucky to get in at all, because I interviewed as a generalist. If I had interviewed as a graphics specialist I never could have gotten in. (Because at the time the gfx coders at Valve had a pact of sorts, and unless you were Carmack it was virtually impossible to survive the whiteboard. So many graphics specialists got turned down that after a while the high-ups at Valve took notice and changed things.)
Anyhow, one of my points is, I've been pretty lucky to get to work at these places. I learned a lot. Most of the companies I worked at didn't use whiteboarding. Interestingly, the cultures of the non-whiteboarding companies were much healthier.
I sometimes wonder: if I wasn't a white male, or overweight, with all other things unchanged, would I have got these gigs? I very highly doubt it.
I've implemented and shipped tons of algorithms, products, etc. But I hate whiteboarding.
I think the tech companies use this process to slow down horizontal movement between companies. It keeps labor in place, and developer wages/prices down. The "price" of moving between companies (in terms of stress, and potential "whiteboard defeat") is purposely held high. Independent of whether or not this is done purposely, this is the end result.
If you've got to whiteboard, it can't hurt to practice like crazy. And read a few whiteboard coding interview books. Also, tap your social network and find devs who interviewed at your target company, and ask them what happened. If companies are going to do this, at least make them put some effort into it.
One trick I've seen done: After a big layoff, a group of devs gets together and starts interviewing at various companies. After every dev interviews at a particular shop, everything about the interview, and the whiteboard questions, are discreetly shared with the group. The first dev to be sent to a particular company won't be expected to get in (and very well might not want to work there in the first place). Once developers start acting as a group the entire process gets "gamed" particularly effectively.
I've taken and given a lot of these interviews. I personally find the process demeaning, dehumanizing, biased, and subjective. And if the company uses the terms "cultural fit" or "calibration" when teaching you how to whiteboard, be wary.
My first software development interview was in 1996. I walked in, showed my Game Developer Magazine articles and demos (in DOS of course), spoke with the developers and my potential manager, and they made me an offer. Looking back, I was so young, inexperienced and naive at 20 years old. It was a tough gig but we shipped a cool product (Montezuma's Return). There was no whiteboard, all that mattered was the work and results.
Anyhow, my interview at Blue Shift was similar. No whiteboard, just lots of meetings.
At Ensemble (Microsoft), I got a contract gig at first. This turned into a full-time gig. The interviews there were informal and very rarely (if ever) involved problem solving on a whiteboard.
Right before Ensemble, I also interviewed at Microsoft ATG. It was a stressful, heavy duty whiteboard interview with several devs. It was intense, and that night I fell asleep at the table of an unrelated dinner with friends. I got an offer, but Ensemble's was better. I later learned it was basically a form of "Trauma Bonding". Everyone else did it, so you had to go through it too to get "in". Overall, I remember the Microsoft engineers I interviewed with seemed to be all tired and somewhat stressed out, but they were very professional and respectful.
After Age3 shipped, I interviewed at Epic. I was tired from crunching on Age3, and was unprepared. It was the most horrific interview I've ever taken or seen. Incredibly unprofessional. The devs didn't want to be interviewing anyone. I flopped this interview (and probably dodged a bullet as the working conditions there at the time seemed really bad). Nobody at Ensemble knew I interviewed there, and I'm glad I didn't leave.
Years later, I interviewed at Valve. It was another exercise in Trauma Bonding. I was so stressed it was ridiculous, and I found Dune's "The Litany Against Fear" helpful. Somehow I got through, and looking back I think Gabe Newell (who visited Ensemble and met me there) might have helped get me in without my knowledge. I was lucky to get in at all, because I interviewed as a generalist. If I had interviewed as a graphics specialist I never could have gotten in. (Because at the time the gfx coders at Valve had a pact of sorts, and unless you were Carmack it was virtually impossible to survive the whiteboard. So many graphics specialists got turned down that after a while the high-ups at Valve took notice and changed things.)
Anyhow, one of my points is, I've been pretty lucky to get to work at these places. I learned a lot. Most of the companies I worked at didn't use whiteboarding. Interestingly, the cultures of the non-whiteboarding companies were much healthier.
I sometimes wonder: if I wasn't a white male, or overweight, with all other things unchanged, would I have got these gigs? I very highly doubt it.
I've implemented and shipped tons of algorithms, products, etc. But I hate whiteboarding.
I think the tech companies use this process to slow down horizontal movement between companies. It keeps labor in place, and developer wages/prices down. The "price" of moving between companies (in terms of stress, and potential "whiteboard defeat") is purposely held high. Independent of whether or not this is done purposely, this is the end result.
If you've got to whiteboard, it can't hurt to practice like crazy. And read a few whiteboard coding interview books. Also, tap your social network and find devs who interviewed at your target company, and ask them what happened. If companies are going to do this, at least make them put some effort into it.
One trick I've seen done: After a big layoff, a group of devs gets together and starts interviewing at various companies. After every dev interviews at a particular shop, everything about the interview, and the whiteboard questions, are discreetly shared with the group. The first dev to be sent to a particular company won't be expected to get in (and very well might not want to work there in the first place). Once developers start acting as a group the entire process gets "gamed" particularly effectively.
Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Things learned while running your own self-funded startup
Here's a brain dump of the things we've learned while running our business and shipping our first product (Basis).
My experience at Valve somewhat helped prepare me for doing this. Working at Valve was like a microcosm of working at your own company. You needed to find customers, interact with them, and figure out what was valuable to them. (You also needed to identify "competitors" and do your best to ignore or respond to whatever challenges they might throw your way.) Financial concerns weren't an issue, but time and your reputation at the company was. I noticed a feedback loop there: The more success you got at Valve, the easier it was to find projects to help out on. As you earned "Valve Bucks" doors got opened much easier.
Entering Valve with basically zero Valve Bucks was a big challenge. It wasn't enough to merely be a good engineer at Valve. If you were a good engineer with zero communication skills your chances at surviving and thriving when I was there were pretty low. If you acted like an asshole and didn't have many friends it didn't matter how good you were or how awesome your accomplishments were. People like this would be fired sooner or later.
Anyhow, running your own company has a number of additional challenges. There are no bi-weekly paychecks, no free lunches, no PTO, no yearly Hawaiian vacation, and no on-site lawyers. You are now in the real world, and you're leaving the high school like corporate drama behind. Everything, including staying financially solvent, is now your responsibility.
Some things we've learned:
1. This is a dramatically more mature way of working vs. full-timing. Your boss is basically the bank. Keeping your account in the green is like an optimization problem. If you fail you go under, or you wind up in the arms of potentially predatory investors.
2. You want a product ASAP. Contract work is basically linear income relative to time, while products can be exponential. Just choose a product and ship it. If it fails, try again and again, because the things you learned while working on the first product will help you immensely on your second.
3. Products can take a long time to develop and monetize. Contract work can bring in immediate income, but only a trickle. The big challenge is working on contracts to stay afloat in the short term, but also finding time to work on your product for long term success.
4. There are lots of ways to stay funded until your product takes off: You can use savings, loans from friends, investor funds, government grants, and income from short contracts. I would recommend staying away from investors as much as you can, because once you get in bed with investors you no longer totally own your company (and it can be basically taken away from you).
5. Every decision must be made extremely carefully. Bad decisions cost money.
6. The large companies move very slowly. Do not place any bets on getting paid quickly by large companies, no matter how happy they say they are with you.
So, at least with a software middleware product, I would first target small customers because they move more quickly.
7. If you have a product that a very large company really wants, they'll still do everything they can to delay purchasing it for the market price. They'll try to hire you or your partner(s) away individually, or they'll wait as long as possible to see if you encounter hard financial times and go under. They won't come and just offer to license your product or buy you out until they've exhausted all other possibilities.
8. If your product offers evaluation licenses, then be very careful with the eval time period. Some companies will purposely demand very long evals as a form of negotiation leverage.
9. A company can feign interest in licensing your product, get your lawyer bogged down negotiating terms of the license (or eval license), then pull away or suddenly change their mind at the last minute. This costs money. To avoid this, a "put up or shut up" mentality can help. Either the company accepts your eval license with little fuss, or just move on.
10. No Hard Sells: If the company you are negotiating with gets overly emotional about the terms in your eval license, then move on. Either they want the value your product offers, or they don't.
11. Research pricing: Your competitor(s) will publicly advertise low-ball prices to help lure in customers, but once you start negotiating with them the price goes up (sometimes massively). Talk to your competitor's customers and just ask them what they actually paid, and you'll be amazed at how much software middleware is actually worth in the market.
The publicly advertised price is basically just for corporate programmers, who generally don't understand the true market value of their code when properly packaged as a product. The public price is optimized so programmers won't feel bad about how underpaid they are, but it won't be too low so the coders will still perceive the product as having sufficient value.
Research the concept of "Death Prices". If the price is too low, it won't be perceived as having enough value to bother with, and low prices won't sustain your efforts. Set the price sufficiently high and let the market set the actual price. Most likely, if you're a programmer, you'll set the price too low because you've been brainwashed into thinking that your software doesn't have much value.
Large companies will pay high prices to be first to use your software, if it's perceived to be groundbreaking or awesome enough.
12. Find a good lawyer. Get your eval and software license figured out early. This is going to cost money, so save up. A lawyer with patent and software license experience is a huge bonus.
13. Interactions with real customers is priceless. Ask them what they want. For us, we were amazed at all the different ways the open source predecessor of Basis (crunch) was utilized. We pivoted our strategy to RDO encoders based off customer feedback. Our long term roadmap is based off what customers are actually doing with our software right now.
14. Open source is forever: Be extremely careful releasing open source software. "Thou shall not release too much functionality or features as open source". Open sourcing your work is both a blessing and a curse, and can be actually dangerous from a patent troll perspective.
Open source is great, because potential customers will get a chance to try out your work without spending a dime or ever talking to you. This boosts your credibility. On the flip side, if you give away too much, you are basically competing against yourself when you attempt to monetize your work as a product.
Your open source release should be a demo of the product, and no more. Give things away with the goal of eventually converting the users of the free software into paying customers.
Even if you don't intend on turning the software into a product, always keep in mind ways it can be eventually monetized. Your time is worth something.
Talk to every user of your open software software that you can find. Gather intelligence about how they actually use your software.
15. Your company must appear and be stable at all costs. If one year your large and expensive GDC booth isn't present, people will notice and you'll lose business. Even the biggest game middleware vendors have had serious cashflow problems. One almost went under a few years ago until they were bailed out by a big player. Even the biggest players sometimes take contract work to stay in the green, because product income isn't reliable.
16. Align yourself well: Being associated with CoMotion Labs and Khronos was invaluable to us. At CoMotion we were exposed to tons of other startups, and this cultural immersion was valuable.
17. Perception and psychology is extremely important. If you're a programmer, you're probably going to suck at the skills needed to bring your software to market. Find a partner who compliments you well.
18. You need friends, inside and outside of companies. Make as many friends as you can.
19. Some big corps can be very nasty:
"OMG, you can't do this due to patents!"
"You'll never take off because your price is too high"
"You'll run out of money and just come work for us, so we'll just wait you out"
"You must work for us because we're going to write this software ourselves and that'll impact your market share"
Corporate programmers at these megacorps can be horrifically nasty. Also, study and become acutely aware of triangulation when dealing with large hierarchical companies.
20. Some large teams have egos and won't want to license your software because of it. The challenge to licensing software in this situation will be overcoming this institutional ego, or just waiting to see how things pan out.
21. Be aware that companies talk to each other. A larger corp can use a smaller corp to help establish prices.
22. If you're at a company with deep pockets and you want to really have influence, offer the potential of a very large license fee for key software middleware. It works.
23. Do not blindly sign NDA's. Get a checklist from your lawyer and read them very carefully. If you try to negotiate over a clause in the NDA that totally sucks and the company refuses to budge, then move on.
Also, the NDA negotiation process can be very revealing. If the company is hard to deal with at this stage, then it's safer to just move on.
24. Treat your employees well, and with respect. We don't have any employees, but we've learned a lot while talking to employees at other middleware companies.
25. Your company will be defined just as much (if not more) by the customers you turn down vs. the ones you take.
If you get a bad feeling from a potential customer, or they aren't respectful, or they treat you substantially differently vs. how they treat your partner, then it's probably best to move on. Selling software like this is actually the establishment of a relationship, and every new relationship you take on has both risks and rewards. We're careful about who we work with.
My experience at Valve somewhat helped prepare me for doing this. Working at Valve was like a microcosm of working at your own company. You needed to find customers, interact with them, and figure out what was valuable to them. (You also needed to identify "competitors" and do your best to ignore or respond to whatever challenges they might throw your way.) Financial concerns weren't an issue, but time and your reputation at the company was. I noticed a feedback loop there: The more success you got at Valve, the easier it was to find projects to help out on. As you earned "Valve Bucks" doors got opened much easier.
Entering Valve with basically zero Valve Bucks was a big challenge. It wasn't enough to merely be a good engineer at Valve. If you were a good engineer with zero communication skills your chances at surviving and thriving when I was there were pretty low. If you acted like an asshole and didn't have many friends it didn't matter how good you were or how awesome your accomplishments were. People like this would be fired sooner or later.
Anyhow, running your own company has a number of additional challenges. There are no bi-weekly paychecks, no free lunches, no PTO, no yearly Hawaiian vacation, and no on-site lawyers. You are now in the real world, and you're leaving the high school like corporate drama behind. Everything, including staying financially solvent, is now your responsibility.
Some things we've learned:
1. This is a dramatically more mature way of working vs. full-timing. Your boss is basically the bank. Keeping your account in the green is like an optimization problem. If you fail you go under, or you wind up in the arms of potentially predatory investors.
2. You want a product ASAP. Contract work is basically linear income relative to time, while products can be exponential. Just choose a product and ship it. If it fails, try again and again, because the things you learned while working on the first product will help you immensely on your second.
3. Products can take a long time to develop and monetize. Contract work can bring in immediate income, but only a trickle. The big challenge is working on contracts to stay afloat in the short term, but also finding time to work on your product for long term success.
4. There are lots of ways to stay funded until your product takes off: You can use savings, loans from friends, investor funds, government grants, and income from short contracts. I would recommend staying away from investors as much as you can, because once you get in bed with investors you no longer totally own your company (and it can be basically taken away from you).
5. Every decision must be made extremely carefully. Bad decisions cost money.
6. The large companies move very slowly. Do not place any bets on getting paid quickly by large companies, no matter how happy they say they are with you.
So, at least with a software middleware product, I would first target small customers because they move more quickly.
7. If you have a product that a very large company really wants, they'll still do everything they can to delay purchasing it for the market price. They'll try to hire you or your partner(s) away individually, or they'll wait as long as possible to see if you encounter hard financial times and go under. They won't come and just offer to license your product or buy you out until they've exhausted all other possibilities.
8. If your product offers evaluation licenses, then be very careful with the eval time period. Some companies will purposely demand very long evals as a form of negotiation leverage.
9. A company can feign interest in licensing your product, get your lawyer bogged down negotiating terms of the license (or eval license), then pull away or suddenly change their mind at the last minute. This costs money. To avoid this, a "put up or shut up" mentality can help. Either the company accepts your eval license with little fuss, or just move on.
10. No Hard Sells: If the company you are negotiating with gets overly emotional about the terms in your eval license, then move on. Either they want the value your product offers, or they don't.
11. Research pricing: Your competitor(s) will publicly advertise low-ball prices to help lure in customers, but once you start negotiating with them the price goes up (sometimes massively). Talk to your competitor's customers and just ask them what they actually paid, and you'll be amazed at how much software middleware is actually worth in the market.
The publicly advertised price is basically just for corporate programmers, who generally don't understand the true market value of their code when properly packaged as a product. The public price is optimized so programmers won't feel bad about how underpaid they are, but it won't be too low so the coders will still perceive the product as having sufficient value.
Research the concept of "Death Prices". If the price is too low, it won't be perceived as having enough value to bother with, and low prices won't sustain your efforts. Set the price sufficiently high and let the market set the actual price. Most likely, if you're a programmer, you'll set the price too low because you've been brainwashed into thinking that your software doesn't have much value.
Large companies will pay high prices to be first to use your software, if it's perceived to be groundbreaking or awesome enough.
12. Find a good lawyer. Get your eval and software license figured out early. This is going to cost money, so save up. A lawyer with patent and software license experience is a huge bonus.
13. Interactions with real customers is priceless. Ask them what they want. For us, we were amazed at all the different ways the open source predecessor of Basis (crunch) was utilized. We pivoted our strategy to RDO encoders based off customer feedback. Our long term roadmap is based off what customers are actually doing with our software right now.
14. Open source is forever: Be extremely careful releasing open source software. "Thou shall not release too much functionality or features as open source". Open sourcing your work is both a blessing and a curse, and can be actually dangerous from a patent troll perspective.
Open source is great, because potential customers will get a chance to try out your work without spending a dime or ever talking to you. This boosts your credibility. On the flip side, if you give away too much, you are basically competing against yourself when you attempt to monetize your work as a product.
Your open source release should be a demo of the product, and no more. Give things away with the goal of eventually converting the users of the free software into paying customers.
Even if you don't intend on turning the software into a product, always keep in mind ways it can be eventually monetized. Your time is worth something.
Talk to every user of your open software software that you can find. Gather intelligence about how they actually use your software.
15. Your company must appear and be stable at all costs. If one year your large and expensive GDC booth isn't present, people will notice and you'll lose business. Even the biggest game middleware vendors have had serious cashflow problems. One almost went under a few years ago until they were bailed out by a big player. Even the biggest players sometimes take contract work to stay in the green, because product income isn't reliable.
16. Align yourself well: Being associated with CoMotion Labs and Khronos was invaluable to us. At CoMotion we were exposed to tons of other startups, and this cultural immersion was valuable.
17. Perception and psychology is extremely important. If you're a programmer, you're probably going to suck at the skills needed to bring your software to market. Find a partner who compliments you well.
18. You need friends, inside and outside of companies. Make as many friends as you can.
19. Some big corps can be very nasty:
"OMG, you can't do this due to patents!"
"You'll never take off because your price is too high"
"You'll run out of money and just come work for us, so we'll just wait you out"
"You must work for us because we're going to write this software ourselves and that'll impact your market share"
Corporate programmers at these megacorps can be horrifically nasty. Also, study and become acutely aware of triangulation when dealing with large hierarchical companies.
20. Some large teams have egos and won't want to license your software because of it. The challenge to licensing software in this situation will be overcoming this institutional ego, or just waiting to see how things pan out.
21. Be aware that companies talk to each other. A larger corp can use a smaller corp to help establish prices.
22. If you're at a company with deep pockets and you want to really have influence, offer the potential of a very large license fee for key software middleware. It works.
23. Do not blindly sign NDA's. Get a checklist from your lawyer and read them very carefully. If you try to negotiate over a clause in the NDA that totally sucks and the company refuses to budge, then move on.
Also, the NDA negotiation process can be very revealing. If the company is hard to deal with at this stage, then it's safer to just move on.
24. Treat your employees well, and with respect. We don't have any employees, but we've learned a lot while talking to employees at other middleware companies.
25. Your company will be defined just as much (if not more) by the customers you turn down vs. the ones you take.
If you get a bad feeling from a potential customer, or they aren't respectful, or they treat you substantially differently vs. how they treat your partner, then it's probably best to move on. Selling software like this is actually the establishment of a relationship, and every new relationship you take on has both risks and rewards. We're careful about who we work with.
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