The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,982 posts.
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
Vote for my SxSW panel! VCs are increasingly unnecessary to get companies started, and I haven't heard cogent arguments for why a founder should elect to go with them for an early round. Until that changes, they'll continue to be useful for growth-stage but less and less useful for early-stage companies.
As you've probably heard by now, Oracle has decided to file suit against Google, claiming multiple counts of infringement against Java or JVM patents and copyrights they acquired when they assimilated Sun Microsystems this past year. Since I'm unlikely to keep my mouth shut about even trivial matters, something this…
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…
Have a great idea? Prove it by finding ten customers ready to hand over cash. Everything else is avoiding the truth.
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…
Though Frank Sinatra says it best , “I’m leaving today” isn’t exactly accurate; my last day as a Microsoft employee was July 23rd, 2010. This post is almost two weeks delayed as Felicia and I have been on the road since the 26th, driving cross-country to the east coast; we also decided to leave Seattle in favor of New…
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…
I’ve said a bunch of times on this blog that the perfect pitch is a very short intro to provide context followed immediately by a demo. Last night at the NY Tech Meetup, John Britton of our portfolio company Twilio showed how it is done. If you do a lot of pitches, spend the six […]
Japan's debt crisis has been building for a decade. Back in 2001 I wrote an essay on Japan's exploding debt and the dire consequences of what I called Japan's Runaway Debt Train (2001) :
"The conversation I'm going to have with my parents now that I've turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job," he said.
Blueleaf is building the world’s first truly personal financial planning platform. It’s a complex product with a lot of features to meet all the different problems that our customer discovery has...
Now that I’ve stepped down from RescueTime, I’m pondering my next thing (whether it’s a product role at a very early stage startup or spinning up my own for the 3rd time). I figure it’s a good time to be introspective and consider my motivations. Why do startups? For me, it’s more about having the choice to work on…
