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Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company
Reflecting on selling Smart Bear in 2007, offering insights for entrepreneurs facing similar decisions.
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 There Aren't More Googles (2008)
April 2008 Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.
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Reddit reveals their traffic numbers, compares to Alexa/Compete etc
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
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The Future of Web Startups
October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very…
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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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Steve Blank If I Told You I’d Have to Kill You: The Story Behind “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”
About a month ago I had one of the strangest phones call of my life. “Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote…
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How to Convince Investors
August 2013 When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be…
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Y Combinator's Founding Principles
Y Combinator's Principles, as written by its founders.
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How Y Combinator Started (2012)
On March 11 2005, Jessica and I were walking home from dinner in Harvard Square. Jessica was working at an investment bank at the time, but she didn't like it much, so she had interviewed for a job as director of marketing at a Boston VC fund. The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically familiar thing for a VC…
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Upcoming changes to user limits on Free tier of Gitlab SaaS
5 user limit per top-level group on GitLab SaaS Free tier
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Diversity and Startups
Sexism in tech is real. One of the most insidious things happening in the debate is people claiming versions of “other industries may have problems with sexism, but our industry doesn’t.” Both men and women claim this, even though it keeps getting harder to do in the face of shocks like the Tinder texts. We know there…
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VC Insanity, Explained
…or, why VCs do what they do (Note: this post also appeared as a guest post on Techflash) VC behavior sometimes looks insane, but generally it’s just sound economics. It’s crazy but true: if you know how a VC gets paid, you can pretty much read their mind. Here’s a few examples: VCs don’t actually seem to want to take…
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Selling pickaxes during a gold rush
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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The Tech Bust of 2015
Maybe instead of a tech bubble, we’re in a tech bust. No one seems to fervently believe tech valuations are cheap, so it’d be somewhat surprising if we were in a bubble. In many parts of the...
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Please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder.
Listen guys, I’m sorry. But, I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep having this conversation with every non-tech founder. It’s just too painful. On you, on me, and everyone else that you’ve approached. I was once on the search for a technical co-founder, so I can empathize.
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Why Free Plans Don’t Work
The following is a guest article by Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch . Not too long ago it seemed like every product I knew was offering some sort of free plan. The strategy was brilliant: get loads of people using your product and eventually turn them into paying customers. Everywhere I looked the
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Epitaph for an Entrepreneur - Balancing Family and Work
For the next few months I’ll be posting a series of posts on family, startup culture and careers. These vignettes are about how I’ve lived my life trying to make my dent in the universe and trying …
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I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business
Four years after starting TinyPilot from scratch, I’ve sold the company and handed complete control over to a new owner.