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What I Learned Selling a Software Business
Some lessons learned in selling a bootstrapped software business. Relevant to buyers or sellers.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 146 posts.
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Inequality and Skin in the Game
(Chapter from Skin in the Game)
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Why are the Microsoft Office file formats so complicated? (2008)
Last week, Microsoft published the binary file formats for Office. These formats appear to be almost completely insane. The Excel 97-2003 file format is a 349 page PDF file. But wait, that’s not al…
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Building a Modern Bank Backend
At Monzo, we’re building a banking system from scratch. Our systems must be available 24x7 no matter what happens, scalable to hundreds of millions of customers around the world, and very extensible. This first post in a series about our platform explains how we’re building systems to meet these demands using modern…
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Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?
In fiscal year 2024, the federal government spent $6.9 trillion, amounting to 24 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), according to the June 2024 estimates of the Congressional...
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The American Middle Class Is Losing Ground
After more than four decades of serving as the nation's economic majority, the U.S. middle class is now matched in size by those in the economic tiers above and below it.
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Who Owns the Federal Reserve Banks?
Is the Fed public or private? It's both: the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations.
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Trump
I'm going to say something very unpopular in my world: Trump is right about some big things. He's right that many Americans are getting screwed by the system. He’s right that the economy is not...
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Proebsting's Law
This means that while hardware computing horsepower increases at roughly 60%/year, compiler optimizations contribute only 4%. Basically, compiler optimization work makes only marginal contributions.
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John T. Reed's analysis of Robert T. Kiyosaki's book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Part 1
An in-depth, factual analysis of Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad. Discover the dangerous advice, factual errors, & misleading claims exposed by John T Reed.
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Funding, Incentives, and Governance
In my first blog post I focused on the most important thing: our values. Now I turn to the next-most-important issue for our mission: funding. Here’s how we’ve gathered the necessary resources to get…
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Developer hiring and the market for lemons
Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes,
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Bots won't replace apps, only better apps will replace apps
Why conversational UI fails in practice and what the West can really learn from Asian messaging apps.
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The Moral Economy of Tech
This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The other panel participants were Kieran Healy (whose remarks are here ), Stuart Russell and AnnaLee Saxenian .
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Dash developer's response to Apple's response
Dash provides instant offline access to 200+ API documentation sets, code snippets, and cheat sheets. Features MCP support for AI integration with Claude and other AI agents.
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Dropbox: Going Deeper with Project Infinite
Dash knows your context, your team, and your work, so your team can stay organized, easily find and share knowledge, and keep projects secure, all from one place.
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Startup Failure Post-Mortems
It's hard to say goodbye. Find out how 483 startups have failed and why in the words of their investors and founders.
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Why some businesses aren't allowed on Stripe
We’re building business infrastructure. As with other kinds of infrastructure (like hosting or electricity), we'd like to make it available to as broad a set of users as possible.
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OpenTimestamps: Scalable, Trust-Minimized, Distributed Timestamping with Bitcoin
I’ve spent the past few weeks working on1 an old2 project of mine,OpenTimestamps, and it’s ready for a public alpha release. It’s timestampinginfrastructure ...
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Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
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Against Intellectual Property
Would a libertarian society recognize patents as legitimate? What about copyright? In Against Intellectual Property, Stephan Kinsella, a patent attorney of many
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Bionic Office
Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a repl…
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High-income Americans pay most income taxes, but enough to be ‘fair’?
By design, wealthier Americans pay most of the nation’s total individual income taxes.
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RethinkDB is shutting down
Today I have sad news to share. After more than seven years of development, the company behind RethinkDB is shutting down. We worked very hard to make RethinkDB successful, but in spite of all our efforts we were ultimately unable to build a sustainable business. There is a lot of information to unpack – over the next…
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BYOT: Bring your own team
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
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The 2016 Election
I am endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. I've never endorsed a presidential candidate before, but I'm making an exception this year, because this election is exceptional. Donald Trump...
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Why the MacBook Pro Is Limited to 16GB of RAM
A 2016 technical analysis of the 16GB RAM limit in Intel MacBook Pro models, including Phil Schiller’s direct response and two corrections.
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Apple’s Organizational Crossroads
A core part of what makes Apple Apple is its organization structure; Tim Cook has said it will never change. However, if Apple is serious about being a services company, change it must.
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The Lack of Options for Startup Employees’ Options
One of the many tradeoffs that early startup employees choose to make is between cash, and options. For some employees however this may end up being a Faustian bargain of sorts. At first glance, the calculus seems simple: the employee will take more stock options for less cash, because over time the payoff could be...