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Excuse me, is there a problem?
Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem. This explains why, so you can avoid their fate.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 520 posts.
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When ‘he’ll be kept on payroll, somewhere’ is where you are
On August 31, 2015, I started a Ph.D. in cryptography at TU Eindhoven, working with Tanja Lange and Dan Bernstein. On December 2, 2016, I…
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Is revenue model more important than culture?
HN Discussion Here: I always loved getting problems of the type “What is the limit as x approaches infinity” type in high-school/college. You’re given an equation (of the classic y=x format), and a…
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Apple Interview – 1995
In the 1990’s, I had access to the early internet (before the web) and made use of a public forum ( Usenet ) where I could ask and respond to questions about programming the Macintosh computer. I’ve mentioned before how this caught the attention of engineering at Apple ( Tom Dowdy , in any event). Perhaps too, the…
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How Software Companies Die (1995)
Home Page for Charles Rosenberg
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On Succeeding Steve Jobs
A new Apple CEO would need credibility with two highly disparate factions: Apple’s rank-and-file employees, and Wall Street. The only candidates who could satisfy both factions, to any degree, already work at Apple.
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How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)
I was talking with a friend the other day about that perennial subject of conversation in the Valley, Google. And finally she gave me the clue that made the whole place make sense. “It’s about infantilizing people,” she explained. “Give them free food, do their laundry, let them sit on bouncy brightly-colored balls…
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Early employees take the most risk today
Why are we still using old 1990’s cap tables and the same tiny option grants for employees as we did back then? Is that fair? To whom? Is…
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How to build great products
If you believe that sales fix everything, it follows that most startups fail because they don’t ship a great product in a growing market before they run out of money. Assuming you’ve picked an explosive market, how do you go about building a great product?1
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Life at a startup
As a child, I had read about the Homebrew Computer Club, where Osborne and Apple were born - and I wanted to be part of a big movement like that ever since. When I first heard about Y Combinator I thought here was something happening right now that might be looked back on in the same way. I worked my way through the…
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Resumes suck for hiring engineers
In this experiment, I wanted to see how good engineers and recruiters were at resume-based candidate filtering. Going into it, I was pretty sure that engineers would do a much better job than recruiters. However, that’s not what happened at all. As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the…
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Fred Wilson's response to "Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies"
I don't disagree with PG when he says that Facebook's IPO performance (or lack thereof) has the potential to impact valuations in startup land. I think it will be particularly impactful on the late stage and secondary markets where most of the IPO valuation speculation is happening. But let's put Facebook's current…
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Rolling the ladder up behind us
Who will take over for us if we don't train the next generation to replace us? A critique of craft, AI, and the legacy of human expertise.
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Don't Outsource Your Thinking (2015)
One of the most useful lessons I learned from working at Facebook had nothing to do with technology: Doubt the media. Always doubt the…
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We Looked for Work as a Software Development Team
Part of this story is a common one. Established company in an industry undergoing major disruption hires developers to innovate back to viability. Management lacks clear vision of what that means and so chops and changes ( not pivots, that’s something else) technology strategy several times. After two years of hard…
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How cold calling (properly) works better than AdWords
How cold calling succeeded where AdWords failed, producing a 100% conversion rate and all the information needed to create a scalable business.
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An epic treatise on scheduling, bug tracking, and triage
[Note 2017-12-29: the news.ycombinator.com discussion of this post is unusually useful. You may want to read it first.] [Note 2018-09-01:...
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Tips for Noogler Engineers (Noogler = New at Google)
I'm surprised by the number of people inside Google who actually read my blog. I once did contemplate writing a "career guide for Googlers",...
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My platonic ideal for how engineering hiring should work
I’ve become increasingly disgruntled at the state of hiring, and now I’m mad enough to write this blog post.
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C++ in Coders at Work
One of the topics I asked most of my Coders at Work interviewees about was C++. I am not an expert, or even a competent C++ programmer and recognize that my own opinions about C++ are not well-info…