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The CADT Model
In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported against various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were all closed as follows:
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 150 posts.
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How to Start a Startup (2005)
March 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.) You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A…
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What We Look for in Founders
(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.) 1. Determination This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most…
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Spolsky on "Commoditizing Your Complements"
When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood u…
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What Happened to Yahoo
August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the…
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My First BillG Review
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
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Organic Startup Ideas
April 2010 The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you? There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than…
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Why airlines tend to be unionized
The explanation lies in the interaction of labor laws and aviation regulations. Let's consider labor laws first. The law compels a company to negotiate with a labor union. If it cannot reach an agreement, however, and the union goes out on strike, the company is able to hire replacement workers and continue its…
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How Not To Run An A/B Test
Are you falling victim to the peeking problem? Learn how to design and run an experiment properly.
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Steve Blank What’s A Startup? First Principles.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Everyone knows what a startup is for – don’t they? In this post we’re going to offer a new definition…
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A/B Testing You'll Actually Use: Optimizely (YC W10) Launches Out of Beta
Everything marketing and digital teams need to create content fast, test and personalize, and prove business impact.
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A new approach to China
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
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Founders at work: Interview with Steve Wozniak
Interview: Steve Wozniak , Co-Founder, Apple Computer If any one person can be said to have set off the personal computer revolution, it might be Steve Wozniak. He designed the machine that...
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How little musicians earn online
Recently, the UK government passed The Digital Economy Act which included many, perhaps draconian, measures to combat online music piracy...
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In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome (2001)
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
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How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
I feel for Google – Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too. In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphica…
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What Happens At Y Combinator
Y Combinator provides a small amount of seed funding for startups. We work with startups on their ideas and help founders deal with investors and acquirers. We fund four batches of companies each year. Companies apply for the program by filling out an application form. Y Combinator is occasionally described as a boot…
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Themes are GPL, too
If WordPress were a country, our Bill of Rights would be the GPL because it protects our core freedoms. We’ve always done our best to keep WordPress.org clean and only promote things that are compl…
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Where to See Silicon Valley
October 2010 Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's different from other places. 1. Stanford University Stanford is a strange…
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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.