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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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Crash Course: Design for Startups
A detailed brain dump about how to go about starting web design for startups. Including design process, inspiration and required reading.
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Jessica Livingston: What Goes Wrong
This is my talk from 2012 Startup School, pretty much exactly as delivered. It's been more than 7 years since we started YC. In that time, we've funded 467 startups so I've seen a lot of patterns....
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Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Mi…
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Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model
Bronze/Starter is being phased out and current customers have over a year to transition.
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Founder Control
December 2010 Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. Ten years ago that was true. In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A…
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Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
At CMU yesterday, I heard a story about how Yahoo Trip Planner has pretty much zero adoption. It has never taken off, though it remains online even today. Yahoo keeps it around because it's...
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The Merge
A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced...
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Born in a Garage
We started a computer company!!! The Oxide Computer Company started in my garage, this is a story about its origins.
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Startup Equity For Employees
2020 PREFACE: I originally wrote this back in the mid-2000s and have resurrected it by request.
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Why We Prefer Founding CEOs
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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What is the minimum viable product?
Eric Ries and I recently sat down to talk about minimum viable products: the product with just the necessary features to get money and feedback from early adopters. The minimum viable product (MVP)…
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Startup Stock Options – Why a Good Deal Has Gone Bad
A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review VC’s have just changed the ~50-year old social contract with startup employees. In doing so they may have removed one o…
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Pricing low-touch SaaS
How to approach pricing and packaging a new SaaS app, by example
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How We built a $1M ARR open source SaaS
We’ve reached a significant milestone of $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) with Plausible Analytics. This post is a recap of how we got to this point.
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Reflections on Palantir
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
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Kagi raises $670k
Kagi has successfully raised $670K in a SAFE note investment round, marking our first external fundraise to date. This was made possible with the participation of 42 accredited investors, most of whom are actual Kagi users....
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Facebook is not worth $33 billion
Facebook is an amazing success as a social network. Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos. But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop. It’s getting beyond ridiculous and when even…
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The Future of Startup Funding
August 2010 Two years ago I wrote about what I called " a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:" the growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest large amounts, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. Increasingly, startups want a couple…
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Let a thousand flowers bloom, then rip 999 of them out
For the past eleven months I’ve been the tech lead for Twitter’s Engineering Effectiveness group. Engineering Effectiveness is our name for what elsewhere might be called Developer Tools, Developer Productivity, Engineering Infrastructure, or Developer Efficiency. We provide the tools and processes that allow the rest…