The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,552 posts.
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…
How I built and sold a bootstrapped Micro-SaaS business in five years. A guide for founders to selling a SaaS business.
August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk…
☝️Above: Michelle Rial ( follow her at @TheRialMichelle ), then working at Buzzfeed, posted this hilarious infographic with all the “X for Y” ideas. Here’s the original article .
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Money can be only a short-term motivation / Make it “better” rather than “bigger” / Figuring out “enough” / Life is one shot
I recently visited a friend who runs Keycult , a business that designs and sells $500 keyboard kits.
Today, Firebase has a large team with hundreds of engineers. Before the Google acquisition, however, we had a small team of just 24 exceptional people that I firmly believe was among the strongest of its kind in the world. A big part of that success was the way we interviewed software engineers. I’m sharing our…
“My biggest regret is that our first customer was $1M ACV*,” my friend lamented over coffee the other day. “I wish I could take it back.”
[orig published in 2019; re-published & updated in 2023 & 2025] The outdoor patio was filled with dude ranchers. It was their yearly conference at Tanque Verde Ranch in Tucson, and I was there as a vendor (and first-time attendee). I remember saguaro cactus lining the landscape. It was early evening, the sun was…
How a quick weekend app for sharing book quotes, Snaplight, got featured by Apple—and the lessons that matter more than star ratings.
You should be multi-faceted, never work purely to your technical abilities, think about how you can make your entire company better
Discover which seed-stage sectors are booming in 2019: AI startups grew from 0 to 400, Blockchain surged 200x, while FinTech & Food tech show exponential growth.
Preface: the assumption for this essay is that you’re building a B2B app, and you have something built but you’re having trouble getting people to pay for
Pioneer paints a pretty picture of a fair tournament for ambitious people of the world. In reality though, the organizers will manipulate…
I’ve been tinkering with different startup ideas and needed a good checklist to think through them. There are great templates for this already: The YC application, Amazon’s internal press release, and Sequoia’s Writing a Business Plan. I found myself mixing and tweaking these templates because they don’t exactly match…
It’s easy to buy into the ‘overnight success’ story. But in reality, building a venture is a five- to seven-year endeavour. It requires…
How my app’s keywords mysteriously disappeared from search results and downloads were slashed by 44%
Most business ideas are neither objectively good nor bad. The quality of an idea for you (as a founder) depends on your goals, your skill set, and your risk tolerance.
Here I sit, in a cabin on Lake Superior by the fire, with late-season snow pelting the windows and ominous waves crashing against the rocky shore.
This tweet made me think a lot: First of all, as much as I hate this idea, I think this notion is correct. This trend has been happening for a long time, and it’s going to keep happening. I th…
Over the last few years the number of people and businesses online has ballooned.
Discuss these two things before the business makes money. Make decisions on the important, specific issues raised by this post.
Vidalia Onions to be exact. They’re classified as a sweet onion, and because of their mild flavor (they don’t make your eyes tear up), some folks can eat them like an apple. Most of my customers do. During a phone order one season – 2018 I believe – a customer shared this story where he ... Read more
