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Find Your People
Thank you to Bucknell University for inviting me to be this year's commencement speaker. And congratulations to the Class of 2025! Watch the speech on YouTube. Thirty-two...
Jessica Livingston
- Popular posts
- 12
- Total points
- 3,600
- HN comments
- 1,555
- Rank
- #370 personal
Visit foundersatwork.posthaven.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2014 – May 2025
Startups 8Tech Industry & Business 6Life, Learning & Writing 4Career & Management 4Software Engineering 1History & Retro Computing 1
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Grow the Puzzle Around You
In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." Today there are hundreds of them all over the world, but in 2005 what we were doing was so unusual that most people in Silicon Valley...
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Y Combinator When No One Cared
Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way...
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The Sound of Silence
I recently heard one of the more interesting insights about Silicon Valley I'd heard in a while. It explained something I’d wondered about for years. But I can't tell you what it was. There's too...
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Women: Learn to Program This Summer
As an investor, I've found that one of the reasons there are fewer female startup founders than male ones is that there are fewer female programmers. So this summer I'm trying an experiment to see...
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My Interviews with Airbnb, Dropbox, Posterous, Reddit, Weebly and Wufoo
Mixergy's feature today inspired me to dig up these old video interviews I did years ago with some YC founders. We talked about things like how they got started, what went wrong, and what surprised...
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The Social Radar: What I Did at Y Combinator
Culture matters for startups. For a startup to succeed, it must have a culture that reflects what it wants to achieve. This is one of my areas of expertise. I've spent the past decade focusing on Y...
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What Makes Founders Succeed
I recently dug up my introduction to Founders at Work, which I wrote in 2006, and I was amazed how accurate it still seems: –––––– Some kind of magic happens in startups, especially at...
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Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls
(This post is derived from a talk I gave at SV Angel's CEO Summit.) A lot has been written about the dangers that early-stage startups face. But startups face a different and equally lethal set...
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Startups: The Very Beginning
This was the talk I gave at Y Combinator's Future Founders Conference for women. I've given a lot of advice to startups over the past 15 years, but today I'm going to focus on just the advice...
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Why I Love Startup School
I realized on the way to Startup School that this was the tenth one I've emceed. We've done one every year since 2005 (plus two this year in NYC and London). It struck me throughout the day how...
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Lessons from Airbnb's Rejections
I am so happy Brian Chesky shared these rejection emails from Airbnb's early days. I am constantly reminded how most every successful startup began small and faced various types of rejection early...