The Scariest Fun : notes from a web startup

Some people have been wondering what Dan and I are up to these days. For various reasons, we wanted to keep quiet about our new project until now.

We're currently working hard on Devver, which will provide web-based services for Ruby developers. You can keep up with our adventures on our new Devver blog. Since Pretheory/Seekler is on the back burner for the foreseeable future, we won't be updating this blog, so be sure to check out our new one.

We're both really excited about this project and can't wait to release more details about it as it matures. The really great news for us is that TechStars decided to include Devver as one of its teams for its Summer 08 program. We're incredibly honored that we were chosen and are super pumped about participating in the program.

Well, it's been an incredibly busy month since we last posted on this blog. In addition to coding and pursuing funding, we've been thinking hard about our future here at Pretheory.

After a lot of thought, we've decided that Seekler, while interesting, is probably not going to be become a viable business for us in the near future. As such, we've decided to pursue an entirely new project.

What will happen to Seekler? Our plan is to put it into maintenance mode. We'll fix critical bugs but won't be adding any new features for the foreseeable future. We may revisit the project in the far future, but for now, it'll stay in its current state.

We apologize to those of you who are using Seekler and want us to continue development. We appreciate your support and we don't make this decision lightly.

But at this point, we feel the best decision is to take all of the lessons we have learned while creating Seekler and pour them into our new venture. This new project is still in stealth mode, but we've secured some early funding and have gotten good feedback about the core product. Watch this space for links to more information about this exciting new development.

Finally, I'd like to thank all of our friends, family, and other alpha and beta users who gave us feedback, linked to Seekler, and generally gave us support. We certainly could not made it this far without you.

Have fun!

www is deprecated. There are many reasons people have been slowly moving away from the www subdomain: most of them are covered on no-www.org. For Seekler, we decided to go for short URLs, hence we build all our URLs for the non-www domain. I think it is nicer. Unfortunately, I couldn't remove the www on old sites as they had already built up a ton of links to both the www and non-www URLs. But Seekler is starting fresh with no-www and supporting no-www.org.

... and may God have mercy upon your soul.

*Sigh*

Recently, we've had more problems with spam comments on the blog. We're working on some stuff that will hopefully fix the problem (but still let our valued readers comment on our posts easily).

However, as we make the changes, the blog may look pretty funny and/or have weird problems (especially related to comments).

You can still contact us at our contact page with any thoughts or questions. If you can't post a comment - please let us know via our contact page as well.

Sorry for the inconvenience - we hope to be up and running very soon.

We know this blog has needed some usability and design attention for a long time. We finally decided to put a little bit of work into it. We are trying to keep this blog as simple and easy to read as possible. So, the biggest change is that we are now using more clear, larger, and easier to read fonts. The fonts along with a few splashes of color hopefully give the blog a much nicer look. Let us know what you think, any suggestions are welcome.

So you're having a problem with your computer, eh? Yes, you're right, I do know something about computers and yes, I was a computer science major. Will I fix your problem?

I'll certainly try. I'm more than happy to help you to the best of my ability. You're a friend and I'm glad I can help you. I know you'd do the same for me and in all likelihood, I'll be hitting you up for free financial/legal/medical/automotive advice in the near future. I happen to have an area of expertise and I genuinely don't mind helping you out.

That said, here's some friendly advice that will make this experience as painless as possible for both you and me:

1. I probably don't know the answer off the top of my head. So please don't get annoyed if I can't answer your question if we happen to be at a bar, driving around town, or anywhere else I'm away from my computer. You may be surprised to discover that my first step will almost certainly be searching Google. My only real skill in this situation is that I have enough domain knowledge to follow the directions I find on Google.

2. Speaking of Google, I'd really appreciate it if you would try searching before you ask me. I get a lot of computer-related questions, and it's somewhat aggravating when the answer to your question comes up on the first page of search results. Don't spend all day, but take five minutes and do a search. If you happen to find your answer, you'll save us both time, and you might even learn something cool that you'll be able to apply in the future.

3. If Google doesn't solve your problem, feel free to ask me. However, please understand that it's nearly impossible to diagnose a large percentage of problems over the phone or through email. I know you feel like you've described your problem adequately, but it's actually very difficult to accurately describe a computer problem if you're not exactly sure what to look for.

4. If I drop by to work on your computer, please don't talk to me the entire time. I know you're just being polite, but your problem is likely somewhat tricky and I need to concentrate. I almost certainly have never run into your particular problem before, and if I have, it's not something I fix every day. That means that I'm probably going to need to read up on the issue, and my reading comprehension goes down the toilet when you start telling me about your weekend.

5. However, if you feel like bringing me a drink or a snack, that would be very much appreciated.

6. Please be realistic about the time it will takes to fix the issue. This isn't the movies - I'm not going to type super-fast for thirty seconds and fix everything. I need to figure out the issue and then work on a solution. It might take half an hour or even an hour. So please don't invite me over when you have to be somewhere in twenty minutes.

7. If it does take longer than you expected, please don't repeatedly apologize about taking up my time or ask me to stop because "it's taking too long." I really do appreciate your concern, but this doesn't help at all. First of all, I had a pretty good idea of how long it would take before I came by and I scheduled my time accordingly. Secondly, by the time you say this I'm probably already engaged in the problem and I hate nothing more than leaving problems unsolved. I'll let you know when I get fed up and decide to quit, but until then, let me be the judge of whether I've done enough.

8. On the other hand, please be realistic about my time. If I tell you I can't fix it in any realistic amount of time, don't guilt me. If it's going to take three hours to fix, guess what - I have stuff to do. There are people who get paid good money to fix complex issues like this, and I'm not one of them.

9. If I can't fix it, comments like "I thought you knew computers" really don't help. I know the software I use i.e. mostly Unix programming tools, not desktop publishing software written for Windows 98. There's a lot of software out there and I know the intricate details of a very small percentage of it.

10. Here's another unhelpful comment: "I thought you majored in computer science." Computer science is not about fixing computers. It's much closer to math than it is to tech support.

11. Finally, and most importantly - don't keep rebuilding your house in a flood zone. If I get done solving your problem, please listen and follow any advice I have for preventing the issue in the future. Nothing is more annoying than solving the same problem over and over, especially if it can easily be avoided. In college I recovered at least three papers for a girl who lived next door. Every time I told her she needed to install anti-virus software, and every time she ignored me. I'm happy to help, but everyone's altruism has limits.

Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Great. So what seems to be the problem?

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for all the feedback! There's also a discussion going on at programming.reddit.com if you're interested.

We officially released version 0.1 of our web app today to a very small number of friends and family. If you haven't been contacted, please don't take it personally - we wanted to get the site a little more polished before we showed it to everyone (it's really ugly right now).

I will say this - it was a big rush watching the server logs as the first users (besides Dan and I) started playing around on the site. I was completely fascinated for a good 45 min. anxiously wondering which page they would visit next.

All in all, this first iteration went well. We wrote a lot of important features and the site is coming together nicely. I think the biggest issue was that it took more than a week to get the code into shape and release it. I'd really like to get that down to just two days or less. That's almost entirely a function of our tests (which are good, but still need a lot of work in my opinion) and our deployment automation (I need to take a weekend and work through Pragmatic Project Automation).

Onto the next release...

Yet again, I apologize for the utter lack of posts. I'm shocked and ashamed when I realize it's been almost a month.

I'd like to say that it's because we're so being so incredibly productive - and, truth be told, that's part of it. Since Dan quit his job, it's been pretty crazy around here. We've gotten a whole lot of code written - in fact, we're hoping to get an early limited-issue release out very soon. Right now, the site feels like my '93 Saturn: it might be ugly, but dammit, it works (most of the time).

But another factor is that it's surprisingly difficult to blog while you're writing lots of code. I sort of assumed that blogging would be a nice break from coding, an activity that I would look forward to in order to organize my thoughts and keep any interested parties up-to-date.

But man, that code lives with you, day and night. You that feeling when you're positive you know some name or detail but you just can't remember it? It's right on the tip of your brain, and it drives you crazy trying to remember it. And usually a day later, you're having an unrelated conversation with a friend, and you're like "Battle Cat! He-Man's tiger was named Battle Cat", which really confuses the hell out of your friend.

Well, it's kind of like that, although the Battle Cat moments come less often, and as soon as you solve one issue, your brain immediately starts working on some other problem without your permission. So I end up thinking about code in the shower. And I dream about it. And I catch myself not really listening to friends' stories because I'm trying to solve some obscure technical problem, even though I'm supposed to be relaxing.

The point is that I've got code on the brain, which makes it really hard to do other activities. As much as I tell myself that things like writing blog posts and actually reading (I'm still trying to get through Crossing the Chasm) are worthwhile uses of time, writing more code always seems more pressing. I guess that's a balance I'll learn to strike better as time goes by. Or I can always sleep less...

The last, but not least, reason I haven't posted is that I've spent the last five days desperately trying to get our sites back up after our server totally ate it. It's been quite an adventure, but I'll save all the thrilling details for another post (and in less than a month, I promise!).

We have readers checking this blog, asking what we are working on, how things are coming, or when we will do X? So I feel like we should post an update to briefly talk about what we are up to. We currently aren't spending much time on company details (thankfully, much of it is now taken care of), and we are getting into coding. We have a pretty good idea of what features we will be trying to complete for the first release. We are currently trying to build the simplest version that will be useful. I think we have made good progress towards that goal.

Personally, I feel like my mind is starting to finally switch gears into the whole new project, language, and framework. I was expecting some downtime as my head flipped from the projects I was working on to this project, but it hasn't been as bad as I was expecting. Today I think I was actually so deep and focused on the code that I wasn't aware of anything going on around me. I think it is a good sign that I am starting to really get into the zone on our new project.

As far as the specifics of the code on our project, I don't feel like there much I can reveal. We have been writing, refactoring, and reworking the code, along the way we have discovered some ups and downs of the ruby and rails. Hopefully, we will be able to share more about our discoveries when we get to a more stable and battle-tested code base.

I will mention briefly one specific issue we have run into with RoR: the templating engine Haml. We started working with Haml templates for some of our more complicated views. It was making the more complex views simpler, easier to read, and reducing LOC. Unfortunately we started to get some cryptic errors related to Haml, and we saw that Haml is still young and actively changing. On one occasion new Haml updates caused errors in our code. After spending some time tracking down the issues on a few occasions, we decided that Haml, while very cool, isn't quite stable enough for our project. Since it is fairly easy to convert views back and forth between Haml and rhtml, we decided we would drop Haml for now. We are planning to take another look at it later after our changes slow down a bit, and see if the Haml project is a little more stable. For now, while nice, it just doesn't provide a large enough benefit to deal with the extra debugging issues that have occurred. If you are working with RoR, I would recommend checking the project out, because it is definitely worth keeping your eye on.

This isn't directly related to startups, but since it is the loudest megaphone I have - DO NOT, under any circumstances, bank with Bank of America!

Well, I guess it's a little bit related, because it will be a cold day in hell before I use any of BoA's small business services.

I signed up with BoA freshmen year of college and have never switched since they were generally just barely good enough and I didn't want to go through the hassle of switching.

I tolerated their terribly designed online banking. And I handled the fact that they didn't have their shit together so I had to close my Missouri account and open up a brand new account in Seattle, WA when I moved (Washington in on a different system due to a merger. A merger that happened years ago and yet, they still have not integrated the systems as I write this).

But today was the last straw. I have a BoA checking account and a BoA credit card. Last month, I tried to pay of my credit card with my checking account. You know what? I messed up. I thought there was slightly more money in my checking account, and I overdrafted it.

Like, I said, my fault. No excuses. And I was willing to pay a fee for that. I looked at the credit card fee - $39 fee. Ouch. I looked at my checking account - $20 fee. Ouch again.

But the real kicker was the additional $35 fee on my checking account for the same charge. OK, enough is enough.

I called up BoA checking, asking why there was a second charge (now that I think about it, I'm also pretty confused as to why the fees were different, but whatever). They said I tried to post it twice. Well, I didn't, and my online account log for the credit card shows that.

So I figured the credit card division had posted the charge twice. So I asked to be transferred to them. Nope - they claimed they posted it once.

So I got transferred back to the checking division. I explained that the credit card division (of their own company!) states there was no second transaction.

They offer to take off the $20 instead of the $35, effectively charging me $15 for their error. And of course, this is a courtesy to me, but for the record, they won't remove charges in the future unless it's a bank error.

I do my best to calmly explain that, according to their credit card division - it is a bank error. No dice. I ask talk to a supervisor, who explains that it's not their fault, and since I'm a long-time and loyal customer, she'll take away the $35 charge ... but that's my one courtesy charge removal for the next year, because, after all, it's my fault according to them.

You know what? That's fine, because I won't be banking with BoA by next week.

You know what's really amazing? The entire time I talked to two different divisions and nicely explained to them how I was getting screwed, each division claimed their innocence, blamed me - and never ONCE did I hear anyone offer to sort it out with anyone else in the company. I'm alerting them of their error, and no one had any interest in determining the cause of the error - which might just save their customers frustration in the future.

Well, Bank of America, I know one small customer like me means nothing to you, but I hope that the money you made today is worth losing a customer for life. It would have been so simple to turn this situation around and make me sing your praises, but instead, I'm going to tell everyone I know about how you'd rather resort to finger pointing than solve a customer's problem.

===============================================

Update: After emailing BoA's customer service several times (and waiting days for them to reply), I finally got an answer to my question.

It turns out that this was, technically my mistake. Let me explain: buried in my cardmember agreement, it says (according to the customer service rep, still trying to track down a copy so I can check)

"if a payment is returned one due to Insufficient Funds, we will automatically send it for a second attempt to be cashed. If the payment is returned unpaid a second time, we will then remove the credit from the credit card account."

As I said earlier - my fault. I signed the agreement, and didn't know the details of the policy closely enough. That said, I think I have still learned a lot about BoA, and none of it is flattering.

Lesson 1: BoA's customer service still sucks. It took me over ten days to get someone who could actually clear up this issue, and I had to talk to or email over five different people. Everyone before the last email was unwilling to track the issue down.

Lesson 2: BoA's customer service is ignorant of their own policies. The credit card representative insisted multiple times that they would not have, under any circumstance, tried to post the payment twice. As it turns out, that's exactly what they did.

Lesson 3: BoA is intent on screwing customers out of money. I'll say it again - I overdrafted my account and I signed the policy. It's my fault. That said, to have a policy that charges your customers $90 for one mistake is not a very customer friendly policy, especially when the overdraft itself could not have caused more than a few dollars of cost to BoA, at max. I would have paid $20, $30, even $40 without complaint. But $90 is ridiculous.

I'm certainly happy in my decision to leave BoA for good.

===============================================

Update 2: My brother called me recently asking me whether he should join BoA or another bank. I don't remember what the other bank is, but the string of profanities I unleashed into the phone convinced him to stay away from BoA.

We're the number one result when you Google "pretheory". Yes, I realize this is somewhat less impressive since it's a sort of made-up word (others have used it but we haven't found it in any dictionary). Now, if we can just get big enough for Google to drop "Did you mean: pre theory" from the results page, we'll know we're sitting pretty.

There are a lot of perks when you work for yourself. For instance, you can work when you're most productive (which is definitely not between 9-5 for me), you can take naps instead being a zombie all day long, and you can easily run errands during the day.

Here's an awesome perk: I get to visit Boston, MA to see my sister and a good friend for ten days. No need to ask for time off. I got an awesome deal on my flight since I could arrive and leave weird days. And, since this is a software company, I am still working every day - in fact, I'm writing this from the spectacular Bates Reading Room in the Boston Public Library. Not a bad change of scenery from our cramped little office.

Some alert readers may have noticed that a number of your comments have mysteriously disappeared from this blog. There is a simple reason for this phenomenon: this blog is a one way street and we don't care about your worthless opinions or feedback at all.

Just kidding. We actually really appreciate all the feedback we're getting - we do read it and it does really help us. Unfortunately, someone who shall remain nameless got a little over-zealous deleting some spam comments from other blogs and accidentally deleted your comments. I'll give you a hint: it's not me and his last name sounds like an elected official (and it's NOT Johnny Aturneygennurall). It's that kind of attention to detail that will make this venture successful.

We'll be more careful, we promise.

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It seems that you should not skimp on dry-erase markers. We bought the cheaper brand (Foray), thinking "How could someone possibly mess up dry-erase markers?" Well, as it turns out, the markers were rather dry, but most certainly did not erase. That would seem like a pretty crucial property of dry-erase markers, but maybe I just don't understand the budget office supplies market well enough. We ended up going with the Sanford Expos, and they work great.

Another key lesson - when first testing your dry erase markers, draw something rather small and unoffensive. Let's just say someone drew something out a junior-high health textbook very largely on the whiteboard to test out the markers and we had quite a scare when it wasn't erasing.

Final dry-erase-related lesson for today: - when you have to get something permanent off your dry-erase board, use this trick

This blog will hopefully serve a few purposes, and, although we'd like to claim otherwise, not all of them are totally selfless. But let's start with the one that is:

1. To let other entrepreneurs (especially other technology startups) learn from our mistakes. We'll be honest, we don't really have the slightest idea what we're doing (yet) and we're certain we'll make a ton of mistakes. Our only hope is that a) our mistakes aren't catastrophic b) they make funny stories later in life and c) someone else can learn from them.

And as for the selfish purposes?

2. To keep anyone who may be interested in our progress up to date (while minimizing repeating ourselves) We're incredibly lucky to have such a great support structure of friends and family to wish us well and ask about our progress. But we're going to be pretty busy working 22 hours a day and eating Ramen, and unfortunately, it's inevitable that we'll be unable to keep everyone up-to-date on the details as much as we'd like. Watch this spot for details of our thrilling exploits so we don't feel quite so guilty for not calling.

3. To ask for help. We most definitely do not know it all, and so we'll probably post questions and hope to get some feedback from anyone else out there who can help us out. In theory, we'll be asking the same questions some other startups have, and you'll find the responses as interesting as we will.

4. To hold ourselves accountable. It can be pretty easy to allow ourselves some wiggle room on various topics, both technical and otherwise, when they are just rustling around in our heads. But, we've found that if we're taking the time to write them down (especially with the expectation that someone's going to actually read it), we're more likely to dot our Is and cross our Ts. In other words, we're pretty sure someone is going call us on our BS (please do), which is extra incentive to get all our mental ducks in order.

Of course, blogging is also a incredibly good way to put off doing real work.

Got questions? Comments? Drop us a line. Or, if you prefer, you can just email us at contact@pretheory.com.

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10. General Representation and Warranty. You represent and warrant that (i) your use of the Website will be in strict accordance with the Pretheory Privacy Policy, with this Agreement and with all applicable laws and regulations (including without limitation any local laws or regulations in your country, state, city, or other governmental area, regarding online conduct and acceptable content, and including all applicable laws regarding the transmission of technical data exported from the United States or the country in which you reside) and (ii) your use of the Website will not infringe or misappropriate the intellectual property rights of any third party.

11. Indemnification. You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Pretheory, its contractors, and its licensors, and their respective directors, officers, employees and agents from and against any and all claims and expenses, including attorneys’ fees, arising out of your use of the Website, including but not limited to out of your violation this Agreement.

12. Miscellaneous. This Agreement constitutes the entire agreement between Pretheory and you concerning the subject matter hereof, and it may only be modified by a written amendment signed by an authorized executive of Pretheory, or by the posting by Pretheory of a revised version. Except to the extent that applicable law, if any, provides otherwise, this Agreement, and any access to or use of the Website shall be governed by the laws of the state of Colorado, U.S.A., excluding its conflict of law provisions, and the proper venue for any disputes arising out of or relating to any of the same will be the state and federal courts located in Denver, Colorado. You agree to irrevocably submit to the jurisdiction of those courts and waive all objections to jurisdiction or venue. The prevailing party in any action or proceeding to enforce this Agreement shall be entitled to costs and attorneys’ fees. If any part of this Agreement is held invalid or unenforceable, that part will be construed to reflect the parties’ original intent, and the remaining portions will remain in full force and effect. A waiver by either party of any term or condition of this Agreement or any breach thereof, in any one instance, will not waive such term or condition or any subsequent breach thereof. You may assign your rights under this Agreement to any party that consents to, and agrees to be bound by, its terms and conditions; Pretheory may assign its rights under this Agreement without condition. This Agreement will be binding upon and will inure to the benefit of the parties, their successors and permitted assigns.

The gist

Pretheory will collect certain non-personally identify information about you as you use our sites. We may use this data to better understand our users. We can also publish this data, but it the data will be about a large group of users, not individuals.

We will also ask you to provide personal information, but you'll always be able to opt out. If you give us personal information, we won't do anything evil with it.

We can also use cookies, but you can choose not to store these.

That's the basic idea, but you must read through the entire Privacy Policy below and agree with all the details before you use any of our sites.

Reuse

This document is based upon the Automattic Privacy Policy and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License 2.5. Basically, this means you can use it verbatim or edited, but you must release new versions under the same license and you have to credit Automattic somewhere (like this!).

Pretheory, LLC (“Pretheory”) operates several websites including pretheory.com and blog.pretheory.com (taken together, "the Website"). It is Pretheory’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Pretheory collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Pretheory’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Pretheory’s visitors use its website. From time to time, Pretheory may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Pretheory also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Pretheory does not use such information to identify its visitors, however, and does not disclose such information, other than under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information, as described below. We may also collect and use IP addresses to block users who violated our Terms of Service, including, but not limited to users who post spam.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Pretheory’s websites choose to interact with Pretheory in ways that require Pretheory to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Pretheory gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who post a comment at the Website to provide a name and email address. Those who engage in transactions with Pretheory – by posting a comment, for example – are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal information required to process those transactions. In each case, Pretheory collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Pretheory. Pretheory does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Additionally, some interactions, such as posting a comment, may ask for optional personal information. For instance, when posting a comment, may provide a website that will be displayed along with a user's name when the comment is displayed. Supplying such personal information is completely optional and is only displayed for the benefit and the convenience of the user.

Aggregated Statistics

Pretheory may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, Pretheory may monitor the most popular parts of the pretheory.com and blog.pretheory.com. Pretheory may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, Pretheory does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Pretheory discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Pretheory’s behalf or to provide services available at Pretheory’s websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Pretheory’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Pretheory will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, Pretheory discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only when required to do so by law, or when Pretheory believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Pretheory, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of a Pretheory website and have supplied your email address, Pretheory may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Pretheory and our products. We primarily use our website and blog to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. Pretheory takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the Website each time the visitor returns. Pretheory uses cookies to help Pretheory identify and track visitors, their usage of Pretheory website, and their website access preferences. Pretheory visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Pretheory’s websites, with the drawback that certain features of Pretheory’s websites may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Pretheory may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Pretheory’s sole discretion. Pretheory encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.