The Contractor's Guide to StartupLandia
A Word From Our Sponsors
We wish you well and if you have voluntarily arrived here, please keep reading. If you have involuntarily arrived here, please turn off your infinite improbability machine.
Hitchiking through Startuplandia can involve some interesting, quirky mashups of context, process and outcome. This guide, if written correctly, might help you along the way.
Before we continue, please pause for a moment, go look in them mirror and say to yourself, “I’m not a business person, I’m a business, person”.
To make reading a bit more cozy, we have organized this guide into various sections, each section contains critical information, cute gifs and a few todos. Upon completion, there will certainly be a quiz. The quiz, you will know you have passed when you find yourself sailing a catamaran in Cozumel spending your well earned profit share. (just like this)
Contractorship vs Employment and Time Value of Money Fallacy
We hear it all the time, “Time is Money”.
Think about the bulshido contained in this simple phrase, “Time is Money”. Any reasonable developer would consider ‘is’ to be an equivalency operator, something like ==
or ===
but certainly not =
.
So again, “Time is Money” == Time is Money
== Time == Money
Think about the properties of time, you cannot charge interest on it, you can spend time together but a person cannot share pieces of their own time, for life itself is time, and time constantly passes.
Money, any government or cyptobro can make it, a $10 bill can easily be split and then two $5 bills shared amongst friends, reserve fractional banking does all kinds of useful things for economies.
By our count Time != Money
in fact, Time contains so much more value than Money, there exists no mathy formulae or operators that adequately express this difference.
For Startuplandia to make sense, YOU MUST VALUE TIME MORE THAN MONEY.
With time you can create things like happiness, relationships, wealth, code, cookies, love, time enables life and we choose to live.
If you value Money more than time, please stop reading this post, call up your local tech recruiter and go get in a line for a major 55+hr/week, give yourself to your work kind of thing.
Startuplandia exists as a community for people who want to work between 20 and 40 hours per week at an hourly rate that reflects a good deal for them and for the founders who put us to work. (Sounds just like Supply and Demand, right?)
If you think of your hourly rate in terms of “well at Google developer x makes y yearly salary” please stop reading, immediately close this browser session.
Requirements for Contractorship
Everyone working with Startuplandia conforms to a handful of of conditions.
- Independent Contractor
- Paid an hourly rate
- Log all time and work performed
- Submit details invoices for payment
- No expectation of exclusivity with Startuplandia
Contracting is a process where organizations agree on financial terms in exchange for work performed. If you go to work “full time” for a large company, you are still a contractor, you just don’t know it (and have usually waived your rights to further negotiation). If you care deeply about your time, contracting makes a ton of sense. Make everyone continually meet your needs or switch to a different contract, welcome to the new new.
Profit Sharing vs Paid Time Off
Startuplandia does not offer contractors any type of paid time off.
We do this because we don’t own all your time and are not in a position to give some of it back to you.
After you have worked with us for a period of at least 6 months and have excellent, stellar, mind blowingly good feedback from our founders and from John D (CTO/Founder of Startuplandia), you become eligible for semi-annual profit sharing. With this profit share you become a stakeholder in the collective success of our business, you also become eligible for cool, paid meetups (like this one in Mexico).
In addition to general profit sharing (like of cash income) Startuplandia likes to earn equity in startups and in the very un-probable situation that some of the equity we earn becomes valuable & liquid, we will also distribute some of that wealth to whoever happens to be standing around.
How to accurately log time
We use harvest to log our time. Generally speaking a single calendar day of work might contain up to 8 hours of logged time, we like to see small chunks of time logged with a description of what actions were performed (yes, thinking is an action!, yes being stuck is an action as are coding, designing, debugging)
Good time logging looks like;
- Small chunks of time
- Reasonable description of work
- Varying chunks of time reported
How to accurately submit invoices
Remember, you aren’t a business person, you are a business, person!
Generally speaking, in the non crypto world, businesses pay each other cash every 30 days. There are many reasons why these details could change, but remember, we are generalizing, so generally speaking, we care about cash payments sent at the end of every month.
A good invoice from a contractor to Startuplandia;
- Clearly identifies the contractor
- Documents the time window of the invoice
- Documents the services provided and the cost for the services
- Has a unique, sequential invoice number
Not too complicated right ? Word to the wise, use something like slimvoice.com
We the People & a Box Full o’ Guarantees
There are a few details that Startuplandia guarantees;
- We guarantee all payments to contractors
- We guarantee you have the ability to control your schedule
- We guarantee that no one in our organization will ever treat you negatively for cultural, social or political reasons
- We guarantee there will be lots of startup turbulence, in fact, we kind of like it
- We guarantee that you will work with extremely motivated founders, engineers and designers
- We guarantee that if you are open to possibilty, we can have a lot of fun together
In closing, if you still felt like we haven’t clearly answered how to ride the Startuplandia like a proper boss, well, then I’d like to share something..
Cheers & Thanks for the Fish,
John D Founder, CTO