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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310

Minsky Moments in Venture Capital

Markets rise, and markets fall. This much, at least, is well-known. But why do market cycles occur? What causes the pendulum to swing from euphoria to crisis and back? Hyman Minsky was a 20th-century economist whose ‘financial instability hypothesis’ is probably the best-known explanation for the boom and bust cycles…

315

The Dentist Office Software Story

I’ve been telling this fictional story about Dentist Office Software for years to describe why we are so focused on our “networks” investment strategy. Yesterday I told it at a HackNY event we did at the USV office and my partner Albert provided a finishing touch that really drives it home. Since I’ve never told […]

317

“Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006)

[This was originally published on the now-defunct Infogami and was surprisingly hard to find online, so I put it here. I’ve added commentary, with our now internet-decades of hindsight, in brackets. I’ve also summarized the names mentioned (and alluded to) along 7 dimensions: Evocativity, Brevity, Greppability…

321

Starting a Business Around GPT-3 Is a Bad Idea

(Update 2023-03: I wrote this in 2020 when GPT-3 was highly hyped, but ultimately made only <1% of the splash that the monstrous ChatGPT made 3 years later. If I had to rewrite this today, I’d 1) think more kindly about defensibility, especially through deep product, user experience, and marketing/distribution (see…

322

A Statistical Portrait of a Y Combinator Batch

ไลฟ์สไตล์ ธุรกิจ กีฬา ไอที บันเทิง แม่และเด็ก ความรู้รอบตัว รถยนต์ สัตว์เลี้ยง อสังหาริมทรัพย์ กิน-เที่ยว การเงินและการลงทุน สุขภาพ การศึกษา บ้านและสวน

328

Tips for Startup Companies (2006)

Having rich parents is great. In fact, it is the best and surest way to get rich in these United States. Unfortunately, having a low cost of capital is no guarantee of success because, as formerly poor countries have become ridiculously rich, capital has become very cheap. Your competitors can probably get a home…