Tech company benefits

Employers can be short-sighted and stingy with benefits. In the back of my mind, I've always kept the ambition that some day I would start my own software business. I'd like to think I'd be more enlightened. It's not about generosity in and of itself; I think that generous benefits can be a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace for talent. That makes it easier to get the best people and make sure they stick around. So far, I've come up with a list of ideal benefits I'd like to see:

• 4 weeks of vacation per year at start, with 6 weeks available for those who have been around for a while.


• 2 weeks of personal/sick time per year.


• Fully paid health insurance premiums for employee and spouse.


• 401(k) contribution of 5% no matter what the employee does, with matching of another 5%


• A severance fund created the moment an employee starts. This fund would have 2 months of salary in it. If the employee is terminated without cause, such as in a layoff, they get the whole thing. If the employee is terminated with cause, they get 2 weeks. I don't know what to do in the case of the employee leaving by choice; I'm wavering between giving half and giving nothing. The important thing is that the money would be funded (using, say, TIPS) as soon as the employee started. That way, no matter what happened to the company, the employee wouldn't be left in the lurch.


• 3 months fully paid paternity leave - it would be half pay for 3 months, with the balance paid out after the employee has been back on the job for a while, perhaps 9-12 months. If the employee quits before then, he doesn't get it. I've seen too many people take excessive advantage of this kind of benefit.


• 4 months fully paid maternity leave - same conditions.


• 4 day work weeks (maybe)

I have only a rough idea what this would cost. I think the vacation, sick time, and shortened work week would be free. People would be at work less, but more effective when they were around. The severance fund is less pricey than it looks; severance is normal, and this only differs in the quantity and the timing of the funding. The parental benefits would be expensive, but would only apply to some of the employees some of the time. I expect this would add 25%-40% to payroll costs on an annual basis. My hope is that these benefits would drastically reduce turnover and make hiring much easier. Vacancies are expensive, as is filling them. I haven't run the numbers, but my gut says it's the right thing to do. Hopefully, one day I'll get the chance to test this, and I'll end up being right.

Mac laptop as iPod

You should be able to plug a Mac laptop into anything you can plug an iPod into and have it work just like it was an iPod. For instance, if and when I get my iPod-capable car stereo, I should be able to plug in my work MacBook Pro and be able to control iTunes from the stereo's buttons just like I could an iPod.

GimmeMyData.com

That's one possible name for the Web 2.0 backup service. The .COM domain is available.

Web 2.0^2.0

One worrisome trend with the shift to web-based applications and services is that your data no longer live under your control. Companies have outages, cancel products, go out of business, etc. With local data, you can back up to physical media or use an online service. Data important to you can disappear, and you can do nothing about it. This is a problem, which means it's also an opportunity.

Any Web 2.0 startup worth using gives you access to your data. GMail supports POP and IMAP, Blogger and Facebook have APIs, and nearly everyone has some kind of RSS feed. It's too much to expect the average person to use those protocols directly. What we need is a product to do it for us, something that knows how to talk to Flickr or Tumblr or whatever and get a copy of our data somewhere safe.

This product would take one (or both) of two forms. One would be a web-based service. That's a gimme for a Web 2.0 offering. You pay them $5/month, they suck down and store your data. Naturally, they themselves would need a 2-way API. They'd have plugins for all the sites their customers use. You'd be able to view your emails or tweets or whatever on the site to make sure they're there. You'd also be able to download all that data in a single blob that you could back up yourself locally. Perhaps there would be two levels of service, one where they store your data, and the other where they merely provide a single point of access. They would also provide some way to reconstruct an account from their backups in case the original service had a catastrophic failure.

The other possible form would be as a desktop application. After all, if the goal is to protect you from failures in web-based services, a web-based service might seem beside the point. The desktop application would do exactly what the web-based service did, except the data would be stored locally. What you did from there would be your problem. You pays your moneys, you downloads your softwares. I can see a good case for either form, or even both.

If this is such a good idea, why don't I do it? Simply put, the risk is too great at this time in my life. I can't take 6 months off unpaid to work on something like this. Mortgage, kids, insurance... It's too much. However, I do know a few people (hint hint) who are ideally placed for this. I'll even try to come up with a good name for it.

Cheap sound-proofing

With a noisy 3-year old in the house, I spend a lot of time thinking about sound proofing. A lot of time. It's pretty expensive to get it done right, but I think I have an idea for doing it on the cheap: bubble-wrap. I gather that effective sound insulation is like insulating for temperature. You want to avoid solid surfaces touching each other and use lots of layers. Bubble wrap seems perfect. All those cells of air and layers of plastic. I figure a few sheets ought to do a pretty good job. I haven't gotten desperate enough to try it yet, or maybe I just haven't hit on the right way to do it.

A secondary loan market for Prosper

I've been dabbling in peer-to-peer lending at Prosper for a couple of years now. It's an interesting experiment, but I think it needs a couple of economic cycles to validate the idea; it's been a little worrisome for me seeing the spike in late accounts recently.

One thing that Prosper lacks is a secondary loan market. I cannot transfer the loans owed to me to another party. I like the idea of secondary markets in general; I think they're a natural and healthy thing. More practically, it means that I can't quit Prosper. I can't liquidate my holdings; I have to wait until the term is up. Hopefully they'll eventually add that.

For the time being, one could potentially work around that missing feature by borrowing an equivalent amount through Prosper at a lower rate. That's no guarantee, but there's no guarantee of getting a "fair" value for loans sold on.

bandwidth booth (tm?)

We switched to slower DSL because it was cheaper. It makes uploading videos so sloooooow. For everything else it's fine. I think there's a market opportunity there. Customers can come, plug in, and get access to a super fast connection. Charges would be either by the minute or by the megabyte. You could use it for either upload or download. Put them in grocery stores, Kinko's, libraries, or whatever. They could be basically completely automated. In a lot of ways, it's similar to an Internet cafe, but the modes of use would be different.