Jason Shen

From Burned Out Tech CEO to Amazon Warehouse Associate

After a 23-year career at Microsoft, Facebook, and a Gates Foundation nonprofit, Philip Su burned out and found unexpected recovery working as an Amazon warehouse associate.

Sci-Hub Is Blowing Up the Academic Publishing Industry

There has been an explosive new development in how scientific research is read and distributed. It’s name is Sci-Hub [https://web.archive.org/web/20181007100235/https://sci-hub.cc/]. Founded in 2011 by Alexandra Elbakyan (who was, at the time, a 22 year-old graduate student based in

Winning Isn't Normal

Compelling Startup Pitch Archetypes (with examples from YC companies)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve helped a handful of startups work on their YC applications and interviews. I spent much of the time brainstorming with the founders on the best way to explain their business in the most clear and compelling way possible. These founders knew a lot

How to Be Relentlessly Resourceful [a practical guide]

Relentlessly resourceful. This is the essential quality of a good startup founder according to Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator. When asked by Forbes what he looks for in founders, four out of the five elements [http://paulgraham.com/founders.html] relate to resourcefulness. He’s written two essays (Relentlessly

How to Give Your Product Personality

There’s a really great post on Fred Wilson’s blog (AVC [https://web.archive.org/web/20160320050249/http://avc.com/]) about building a “ Minimum Viable Personality [https://web.archive.org/web/20160320050249/http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/09/minimum-viable-personality.html] “. Of course, this is a

Taking Cold Showers

This post is about why you might want to start taking cold showers. I’ve been doing it for over a month now and I really like it. The seed was planted in my mind afterreading an article about it [http://gettingstronger.org/2010/03/cold-showers/]on a blog