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How Pipedrive went from 0 to 10,000 paying customers in SaaS
There's a newer and updated post published 3 years later on a similar topic: How Pipedrive reached 50,000 paying customers Short answer: great product, some marketing and a bit of luck. These things got Pipedrive to pass the 10,000 paying customers milestone earlier in the year. The longer answer is below. This is the…
The Future of Space Launch Is Near
Until recently, the future of space launch looked pretty much like its past. For over 50 years, humanity has blasted thousands of spacecraft and satellites into space. Every launch vehicle that carried them aloft has ended up littering the planet with the broken, twisted remains of expended rocket stages. The scenario…
The Other Money Problem
I admit to feeling a twinge of excitement last summer when I read that Paul Graham was leaving his jillion-dollar job to write more essays. It felt like the thinking man’s equivalent of LeBron James returning home to the Cleveland Cavaliers to play ball. I don’t know; it’s just a good human story when people decide to…
Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy
When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn’t track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we didn’t actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open…
The failed economics of our software commons and what to do about it
Progress in the software industry has been crushed under the weight of technical debt accumulated over the last 40 years. The tools, languages, libraries, and platforms we all rely on suffer from massive incidental complexities responsible for billions of dollars in wasted productivity. Anyone who spends any amount of…
A cautionary tale about subscription services and how not to shut down a startup
As you think about holiday gifts this season, I’d like to warn you about the subscription service Whimseybox. This is also a cautionary…
Why my book can be downloaded for free
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Resumes suck for hiring engineers
In this experiment, I wanted to see how good engineers and recruiters were at resume-based candidate filtering. Going into it, I was pretty sure that engineers would do a much better job than recruiters. However, that’s not what happened at all. As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the…
Hard-won lessons about money and investing
Any time you talk about money, you risk sounding like a jerk. I’m going to take that risk in this post. I’ll start out by talking about a couple ways I shot myself in the foot financial…
Is My Startup Burn Rate Normal?
Self-examination for Seed and Series A startups
How My Book Launch Went
Greetings, superfans! When we last tuned in , I was just about to “launch” my self-published book . I put that in quotes because it’s an awfully serious-sounding word for what was really just doing some clicking on my laptop. If my last post was the climax of my book writing adventure, consider this the denouement…
The TechCrunch Bubble Index: Parsing Headlines to Quantify Startup Hype
The TechCrunch Bubble Index quantifies the startup funding environment by counting the number of headlines on TechCrunch relating to startup fundraises
A new team at Reddit
Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...
Two Microsofts
My well-chronicled frustration with Microsoft’s corporate strategy comes down to one point: I don’t think any company should have both horizontal (i.e. services) and vertical (i.e. devi…
Board Members
Over the last five years, there has been an incredible shift in leverage from investors to founders. It’s good in most ways, but bad in an important few. Founders’ desire for control is good in...