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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 337 posts.
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Why Silicon Valley Works
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
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Oculus Joins Facebook
We started Oculus with a vision of delivering incredible, affordable, and ubiquitous consumer virtual reality to the world. We’ve come a long...
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Climbing the wrong hill (2009)
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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The New Funding Landscape
October 2010 After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations. The trends we've been seeing are…
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Financial Misstatements
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
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The Bubble Question
Everywhere I go, everywhere I speak, I get asked this question. Are we in a bubble? I’ve been getting asked that question for at least four years now. It’s hard to sustain a bubble for four years. But we are also not in a normal valuation environment for high growth tech companies and we have […]
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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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The unprofitable SaaS business model trap
Marketo filed for IPO. They have $60m in revenues and a nice growth rate; unfortunately they're *losing* $35m/year. Why do SaaS business fall into the trap of being forever unprofitable, and what is the secret to the ones who overcome this trap?
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Lessons from GitHub's First Year
The end of the year is a great time to sit down with a glass of your favorite beverage, dim the lights, snuggle up next to the fire and think about what you’ve learned over the past twelve months.
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Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
An in-depth blog post talking user retention and lifecycle email marketing for startups.
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Trello, Inc
Hello? is this thing on? I’m not sure if I even know how to operate this “blog” device any more. It’s been a year since my last post. I’m retired from blogging, remember? Want to hear something fun…
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The Unauthorized Story of Andreessen Horowitz
Why media whisperer Margit Wennmachers is going direct.
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The “Interview” with Y Combinator That’s Not
So, in our last installment of the Y Combinator saga, we talked about applying. Since a handful of folks will be gearing up for their interviews shortly, it seems a fine time to move on to the next step in our journey.
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How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure (2019)
The story of its last-minute pivot and epic comeback.