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What is Tixpire?
Tixpire: Go Now, Pay Later.
Attend your favorite events now and pay later with monthly payments with no added interest and no credit checks!
Who are you, and what’s your role at the company?
(more…)Founder – Devin Lofland
When you set out to hire someone, it makes sense that you gather as much information about them as possible. Not just professional qualifications, but personal information like their interests and passions, may influence your subjective decision about whether they’ll be a good fit for your company. After all, hiring and training require a lot of your company’s resources, so you have every right to do your due diligence and increase the odds that you new hire will (1) be able to do the job, and (2) stick around for long enough to make the onboarding costs worthwhile.
However, you can get into some sticky situations when you start perusing a potential hire’s social media accounts. Scrolling through someone’s Facebook or YouTube channel may give you more insight into their personality, but it could also give you some information you’re better off not having.
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After college and before law school, my first job was as a mid-level manager at a company with a crazy high rate of turnover. It was the organizational culture, there; employees were in and out the door constantly because of high performance expectations. This meant that as a brand new, 22-year-old manager I was involved in firing people within six months of my tenure at the company.
As you can imagine, it was not a fun job. As you can also imagine, it taught me a couple things about the number-one worst aspect of being an employer: letting people go. First, there’s no great way to do it. There’s just no way to come out of it best friends and with everything water under the bridge — at least not right away. Second, on the other hand, most people do understand that you’re just doing your job.
If you’re an owner or nonprofit director right now, and you’re thinking about laying people off, you’re not alone. Maybe it’s your first time going through it, or maybe you just haven’t done it in a while. Here are some general guidelines — legal and practical — to help you navigate this downer of a situation.
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What is Pocket Punch?
Pocket Punch is a hand-held multifunctional self-defense device. The company was created by five female UT students. The mission of Pocket Punch is to empower individuals to take charge of their own safety. Pocket Punch is patent-pending.
Who are you, and what’s your role at the company?
My name is Ashley Raymond and I am Co-Founder and the CEO of Pocket Punch.
What motivated the creation of Pocket Punch?
Pocket Punch began as a group project my Sophomore year at the University of Texas. We were assigned into a random group and had to invent a product. Recently, unfortunately an on campus stabbing had occurred. We were all shaken up, so we sought out to create a product to help students feel safer both on and off campus. The class loved the product, and we decided we wanted to make it a reality. Now, graduation is a few weeks away and myself and another team member have given up full-time jobs to pursue Pocket Punch.
What’s your favorite KPI and why?
Performance is my favorite KPI because you can clearly see how the effort you’re putting in is paying off. These past few months, that has been the waitlist for Pocket Punch. This past month the waitlist grew over 60%!
What’s a fond memory you have of overcoming an obstacle as an entrepreneur?
Crowdfunding – as a team we were SO excited to launch a crowdfunding campaign. We quickly realized that many platforms unfortunately considered the Pocket Punch a weapon replica. KickStarted and Indiegogo won’t allow us on their sites so we took an untraditional route and went with GoFundMe. Our campaign was approved, we were up on their site for a week, we were trending and we were gaining features with local media stations. Then, without warning everyone was refunded and our campaign was shut down. Apparently, GoFundMe’s payment processor didn’t approve of our campaign. We were disappointed to say the least. To counteract this, we are now launching pre-orders on our own site!
Which local businesses or individuals inspire you?
If I had to choose one, it would be Capital Factory. It’s amazing to be in an environment with so many other entrepreneurs who are serious about making their dreams a reality. Sara Blakely is my favorite female entrepreneur, I’m obsessed!
How are you getting networking done during the quarantine?
I’ve been attending Women@Austin’s weekly meetup via Zoom on Wednesdays. Additionally, the Longhorn Startup Lab class has provided additional networking!
How have you been keeping yourself busy during quarantine?
I’ve really been focusing in on our marketing strategy. I walk town lake and message individuals about Pocket Punch!
How can people get in touch with you?
They can visit www.thepocketpunch.com or follow us on their favorite platform @thepocketpunch
When it comes to privacy at work, employees really don’t have much. The protections available under federal and state law generally don’t apply in the private workplace. That’s in part because there are good reasons for companies to monitor work-related communications. For instance, customer service: you may want to make sure that customers are having quality phone experiences with your sales representatives. Or liability: reviewing employee emails may help you spot and address criminal activity or workplace bullying sooner rather than later.
Still, employers don’t have a free pass to listen in on any and every conversation at work. Here are some high-level guidelines for what is and isn’t allowed in Texas.
Invasion of Privacy Claims
When you listen in on employee phone calls, monitor their email, or search their workspace, you risk what’s called an “intrusion on seclusion” lawsuit. Basically, the employee could sue you for intruding on their private affairs if (1) you as the employer purposefully intruded, and (2) the intrusion would be ”highly offensive” to a reasonable person.
Obviously this isn’t the clearest guidance in the world. Whether or not the intrusion is offensive depends a lot on the context.
For a good business reason, you can probably:
It’s less clear whether you can:
You definitely can’t:
If you’re looking to do something in that middle, gray area, you should consult an attorney. And no matter what you’re looking to do, clearly communicate to your employees where they do and do not have an expectation of privacy — and then stick to that promise.
The Bottom Line
If the situation or conversation is clearly personal, and there’s no good business reason for you as the employer to know about it, give your team their privacy.
On the other hand, if you have a good business reason for monitoring certain communications, and the average person would sort of expect the company to keep an eye on those communications, you’re probably good to listen in.
No matter what, just make sure you let employees know up front that those communications may be monitored, preferably in a policy that is distributed and signed by everyone on your team. That — and limiting any monitoring activities to the bare minimum required to achieve your purpose — is your best defense against invasion of privacy law suits. Not to mention your better bet for a happy, healthy workplace.
Stay tuned for another post on a tricky privacy issue: social media and hiring practices.
To a small business trying to stretch a budget, interns seem like a dream come true. They are mostly students, early in their career and eager to prove themselves. Best of all, the economic realities of job-hunting and the catch-22 of needing “experience” to land their first job mean that many students will intern for you free of charge. What’s not to love?
But before you go out and create a part-time workforce of students, know that federal law actually prohibits you from using interns as free labor. If you bring on an unpaid intern for a position that looks and functions just like an employee role, you risk violating the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).
Below are some factors the Department of Labor uses to distinguish between internships vs. employee positions that are simply disguised as internships. If the answer to most of the following inquiries is a firm “yes,” you’re likely safe not paying your intern. If not, your intern might technically be an employee entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay.
True interns aren’t free. Even if they don’t cost money, they cost time — you need to be willing to spend time training and teaching them, more as you would with a mentee or a student rather than a new hire. You need to be giving them opportunities to learn that don’t necessarily “pay off” for you, like letting them sit in on interesting meetings or shadowing you or your employees as they work.
If you don’t invest time to make your intern’s experience truly educational, and if they’re doing basically the same work as your other employees, paying them less than minimum wage may well be an FLSA violation.
Video conferencing software company Zoom has been featured in the news for misleading claims that if provides “end-to-end encryption” for users. As it turns out, it does no such thing. The level of encryption it provides is actually much more standard, basically the same protection you get when browsing the internet.
This revelation has put Zoom in the national hot seat, just as its product has become the go-to remote work tool during Covid-19. What lessons can we learn from Zoom’s current predicament?
1. It’s never too early to do things the right way.
Zoom was founded in 2011 and hit $151 million in revenue by the end of 2018. In 2019 they went public. Yet Zoom only just hired its global compliance officer a couple months ago. Compliance professionals will tell you that your best bet to mitigate risk is to incorporate the value of ‘doing things right’ into your company culture. And as every business owner knows, you start building your culture from day one.
Don’t wait until the whole country is using your product or service to start crossing your t’s and dotting your i’s. Decide now to value compliance. It’ll be easier and cheaper to put controls in place early and build them out as your business scales up.
2. Apologize, Apologize, Apologize
On April 1, Zoom published a blog post apologizing for incorrectly (and misleadingly) using the term end-to-end encryption. The post also provided a little more clarity on Zoom’s real level of security. The same day, Zoom’s CEO also wrote a post taking responsibility for Zoom’s mishandling of user data: “we recognize that we have fallen short of the community’s – and our own – privacy and security expectations. For that, I am deeply sorry”.
If you’ve missed the mark on something, and the public finds out, you may be tempted to defend your decisions. You’re working with limited resources and competing priorities, after all. Something was bound to slip through the cracks!
Resist that temptation. No matter how good your reasons, they won’t translate well to the public. Instead, make a sincere apology. It’ll go a lot farther in the long run.
3. Publicly Commit to Improve — and Follow Through!
Zoom has publicly committed to a number of steps, including devoting all engineering resources to privacy and security, publishing a transparency report, consulting with third-party data security experts, and forming a certified information security officer (CISO) council to spot and address problems proactively.
This is exactly the kind of detailed, public accountability every company should embrace when they’re trying to fix a systemic issue. By delivering a plan to the community — with a 90-day timeline — Zoom has put itself in a position where failure to deliver on these promises could deal a huge blow to its reputation. Of course this is risky, and it’s important to pick a feasible timeline, but this is an excellent way to get back on track when you’ve lost some of your customers’ trust.
The Upshot
Zoom is still dealing with the fallout of its privacy failure. It’s still getting negative press coverage and may even face an FTC enforcement action. As a business owner, don’t make the same mistake: get your house in order now. Get a bare-bones compliance program in place that can grow with you. And when something does fall through the cracks, apologize and put things right as quickly and transparently as possible.
In these strange times, many businesses are having to adapt to remote work for the first time. Now that we’re a couple weeks into this new normal, hopefully you’ve figured out processes for getting the mail, collaborating with team members, and coordinating to get documents signed and notarized. Maybe you’re starting to settle into the reality of an all-remote, all the time, workforce.
If so, don’t forget to address one more desperately important issue that may have been overlooked in the chaos of these last few weeks: system security.
Security Basics
Since the start of Covid-19, phishing and cyber crime have increased exponentially. Bad actors may target your systems for a number of reasons- to steal data, to damage company operations or reputation, or even to hijack your computers for use in an attack on someone else. Hopefully you have a cybersecurity policy and an incident response plan in place to mitigate and respond to those risks.
However, the new work from home setup may be creating new weak spots for hackers to exploit. Here are some simple steps to keep your remote workplace secure:
1. Secure Home WiFi Systems
Hackers can break into an employee computer using their home WiFi network. Make sure all your WFH employees have:
2. Use a VPN
A Virtual Private Network is a secure way to access the internet. It encrypts data so that even if a bad actor intercepts your wifi signal, they’re less likely to be able to actually see any information that you’re sending or receiving over the internet. This is particularly useful when using public WiFi networks, such as at a coffee shop, but having employees use it when working from home means you don’t have to be as worried about their home WiFi security.
3. Vet New Software
Vet any software you’re using for remote collaboration, like Zoom or Skype, to make sure the providers don’t monitor or record your conversations and that they themselves have adequate security. If a hacker breaks into the software provider, they’ll have an open lane into your computers as well.
4. Limit Access
When transitioning to WFH, you may have shared remote files with all employees. Now’s the time to go in and claw back access to folders that employees don’t need. Each employee should only have access to the files they absolutely need to do their work. That way, if one computer does get compromised, the hacker only has access to some of your company’s information- not all of it.
5. Warn Employees
Make sure employees are on guard against phishing attacks. The FTC provides a useful guide on avoiding phishing attacks here. If you’re a Promise Legal client, you may also be eligible for some free vulnerability testing and monitoring to help gauge your level of risk.
Don’t have a cybersecurity policy yet? Consider the benefits of being prepared.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve got hundreds of beautifully designed business cards that are uselessly sitting on your desk when you need them the most. It’s an extra thing to think about, and it can be hard to remember when you’re running out the door during a busy day.
I decided to solve that problem by building myself a personalized digital business card.
It works automatically on about four out of five devices that I come across, and it’s a nifty party trick! To get started, you’ll need a few things.
Your contact info page can look however you want it to. However, I would suggest keeping the page simple and informative. Here’s mine:
It’s a simple image that I embedded with a link to my “Contact Card.” You’re probably familiar with contact cards, but just in case you’re not – a contact card is a file format for storing contact information on a phone. The contact information stored on a contact card include names, email addresses, phone numbers, websites, social media profiles, and more.
Create a contact for your own business on your phone, and add every piece of info you want people to have. I include all contact info, a link to my website, a link to my firm’s social media profiles, and the name of my firm. “Share” your contact card to get the file in the correct format, then upload it to a location that is publicly accessible (such as your website).
Now you’ll put the image and the link together: create a page on your website to place the image, then embed the link to your contact card in the image. Here’s a link to my contact card page.
Open up your NFC-writing app, and find the “Write” option. Your app will probably give you various options on the data you can write to your tag. Options will likely include files, phone numbers, addresses, and various automated tasks, such as automatically logging someone into your WiFi. All you’ll need to add is a URL pointing to the page you set up in Step 1.
You technically could just add all of that information from Step 1 directly to the tag instead of the webpage, but there are a couple of reasons not to do that. First, NFC tags can’t hold very much information, and you might limit what info you can share with your tag. More importantly though, it makes it inconvenient to update the information you share if it ever changes.
Once you’ve selected the URL, select the “Write to Phone” option and tap the upper back of your phone to the tag. You should get a notification on your screen letting you know if the tag was successfully written. If something goes wrong, you can just tap “Write to Phone” and try again – NFC tags let you write to them as many times as you want.
Test the NFC tag by closing the app on your phone and tapping the back of your phone to the tag again. Your phone should prompt you with a link to open.
The final step is the most satisfying – attach the sticker to the back of your business card, and take it to get laminated. Make sure not to fold the sticker around the edge of the card or the NFC tag will break. In fact, I would bring a few cards with a few stickers affixed to them just in case something goes wrong.
If you don’t want to or can’t get the cards laminated, consider sticking the NFC tag to something you always have with you, like a water bottle or cell phone, and cover it with a sticker. It will function just as well, and it will be just as convenient.
Adding new members to an LLC will often mean that you need to write a new operating agreement, or add another agreement, often called a joinder agreement, on top of your current operating agreement. At the very least, adding a new partner will change the percentage of ownership interest that you own, which can have consequences for whether or not you may make business decisions. For example, if your operating agreement states that distributions can only be made with a vote of 75% of the members, and you add a fifth member, you will now need four out of five votes to make distributions. Many times, there are issues caused that are more significant than that, and you will want to be prepared for that before adding a new member. Furthermore, your operating agreement likely requires a new agreement before you can legally add a new member.
