Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 43 posts.
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…
(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…
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…
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…
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…
Everything marketing and digital teams need to create content fast, test and personalize, and prove business impact.
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…
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…
Get the latest product news, company announcements, and user insights from the official Reddit blog.
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
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…
2020 PREFACE: I originally wrote this back in the mid-2000s and have resurrected it by request.
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
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…
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…
It's not a question of if someone copies your business idea, it's when.
A few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into our laps, or spend time doing the Sand Hill Road rounds, meet…
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
By now, everyone is tired of hearing about the iPad, but the negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it would be wrong to waste t...
Below: Q&A with Chris Wanstrath, CEO and Co-Founder of GitHub. This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Chris and Tom from GitHub have also answered reader questions i…
You're afraid that looking like being a small company means you'll lose sales. It's actually the opposite -- you're alienating your best customers.
