On the issue of talent pool we have another experiment going. We don't require anyone to work from our office, work from wherever you feel like. I'll blog about that next but to answer your question, it has an extremely positive effect on hiring highly skilled people.
I absolutely agree with your second point but your first point is pretty centred around your personal point of view. I, for one, don't see defensive registrations as a smart way of spending money. your costumers know that if you are a mail hosting provider you are most probably not trading under a .bike domain, so why bother blocking that name on every TLD no matter if it is relevant to your business or not.
We see new regs coming in that go nTLD only. new customer, finds an awesome .guru domain and wants to use it, instead, and that is important, a .com or a regional alternative. We would really like to make it easy for that customer to use that domain but seems like many just missed the whole topic.
ok, you won, Wellington is clearly less remote than Arrowtown. iWantMyName is based in NZ and we love it. I see the valley not as a requirement to be a successful startup "in the US".
it is funny to see that you go for a masters degree but want actual coders that have experience. in my experience hireing developers you are on the wrong track.
if you want good coders in the mid cost tier you go for those guys that dropped out of uni and actually did coding for a while compared to those that did uni but never touched an editor. also, if you want good guys, think of maing them. expecting to get only the good ones without investing into education is a bit arrogant in my view. get the most promising ones and get one really good senior guy who mentors the rest. a team of heros will never get anything done ... they only fight for the best algorhythm :-)
Well first of all, I don't dictate the hiring strategy at my company. I try to help in that department but i'm a developer myself. There is indeed an emphasis on academic requirements but I think other successful companies (google) have this bias. Management at my company tends to think that people with no university are "too close to the code", meaning they don't have the ability to abstract things.
http://iWantMyName.com - built by 2 1/2 guys over the last two years out of frustration with the domain registrar business practices. we are not hugely profitable yet but we can live off it and work on our own project which is rewarding enough for the moment.
i try to go down that track now - decided to bill them for business analysis and see how things turn out ... i'll report here :-)
billing only for the hours would be under value i think, i simply see it as a business analysis and even offer them to give them deeper insight in their own business if desired - simply change the seats ... lets see.
