The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,552 posts.
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…
Some time ago my friend (and co-investor in Clio , Jobber and Unbounce ) Boris Wertz wrote a great blog post about "the only 2 ways to bui...
I remember the early days at my startup almost a decade ago. It was just me and my co-founder and we were enjoying our journey of building a small product and making a few people’s lives a bit better. The empathy we had for our early customers, for each other and for the first people […]
Angel investing plummets 81% as institutional seed dominates startup funding. New data shows dramatic shift in early-stage venture capital from 2010-2018.
Today we have a special guest post. There have been a few guest posts here at AVC. Maybe a half dozen in total. One of my favorites was this one by JLM during the financial crisis of 2008/2009. But this one today may top that gem. It's from our favorite Giant Robot Dinosaur and it's […]
Every year I take a step back and ask if there are common themes in technology.
A Personal Story (This is the text of an essay I read in a presentation at African Leadership University in Mauritius. Please see the video of that presentation here. For the other lectures from that trip, please see this playlist.) When it comes to starting a business, Silicon Valley is...
When I first joined a startup in 2012 I did my best to ask the right questions when interviewing. My engineering background prepared me for engineering tasks and helped me write a resume, but it didn’t prepare me well for how to evaluate a startup offer. While this might be obvious to some, this is what I wish I knew…
The Pivot is celebrated in startup land. Huge successes like Twitter and Slack are all the results of pivots. So surely pivoting is a good thing, right? Well, I am not so sure. And I certainly don’t want entrepreneurs to think that pivoting is the right thing to do when their original idea fails. It […]
Growing startups and evaluating startups share common skills Earlier this year, I joined Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner, where I focus on a broad spectrum of consumer startups: marketplaces, entertainment/media, and social platforms. This was a big moment for me, and the result of a long relationship that…
How getting your subscription box covered on a popular YouTube channel is not necessarily a shortcut to riches.
Results from asking 180 YouTubers to make an unboxing video for a subscription box. Includes detailed breakdown of response rate, number of videos made, views and the sales results from them.
You Don’t Have To Get Covered on Large Blogs, Why Churn Rate is Surprisingly Low, Spend a Lot of Time At User Forum, etc..
When you hear the term startup accelerator you likely think of YCombinator, TechStars or 500 Startups. Accelerators traditionally cater to "unicorns" – companies that have the potential to be worth at least a billion dollars. This focus has made them successful in launching startups l
I hear a lot of startup pitches. I’ve been angel investing now for ~4 years, and I’m an LP and advisor to a number of VC funds. I also heard a lot of pitches through my work at Firebase (the company I co-founded), as many of its customers are startups. I like being pitched – partly because I enjoy meeting smart…
A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review Reading the NY Times article “Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture,” I realized it was time for …
I build businesses that high-flying tech startup investors generally don’t like. The businesses I build are profitable, focus on cash flow, and sell commoditized services. They’re considered unexciting to tech startup investors, who want to invest in the new hotness. I’ve tried to contort myself into building that…
