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Lessons from my first exit
My takeaways from selling TinyPilot
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,552 posts.
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Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem
My best guesses as to why our early stage data startup failed. This isn’t a retrospective, but something closer to advice for past me. Or maybe just exorcism.
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Reflections on Palantir
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
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Bureaucrat Mode
The road to hell is paved via collaboration, consensus, inclusiveness, stability
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Sometimes the product innovation is the distribution
Posted on Friday 27 Sep 2024. 748 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.
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Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth
YC is no longer an exclusive club where membership signals legitimacy—it’s becoming a broad index of tech startups.
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Does your startup need complex cloud infrastructure?
Notes about startups, AI, health-care and overall engineering
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I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it
How I learned the old truth that when building a software product and selling it to people, "building" is just the beginning. And often, it's the easiest part.
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The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)
The ideas behind Product Market Fit (PMF) were first articulated by Marc Andreessen in a detailed blog post around 2007 [https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html].
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Startup Finance for Founders – Part I, Accounting (2016)
When we started Segment , we knew nothing about business finance. My background was in aerospace engineering, and my co-founders came from computer science and design. Beyond the hilariously overcomplicated spreadsheet we used to manage grocery bills as roommates, we really had no experience in finance when we started…
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Annual pre-pay and marketing budgets
Dozens of founders have used this technique to transform the cash-flow of their businesses. Now it's your turn.
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Why AI Infrastructure Startups Are Insanely Hard to Build
Level of difficulty: insane
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Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization
A week ago I got invited to an “innovation hero” award ceremony at a government agency.
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Now is a good time to start a service business
Now is a good time to start a service business. Maybe you should try it! A service business is one where your company sells its work output directly instead of selling a product. Dentists, plumbers, design agencies, pool cleaner, consultants: these are all service businesses. The opposite of a service business is a…
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Being laid off and unplanned entrepreneurship
〰️ it’s weird to look back; I sometimes get confused on how I got here 〰️ Most folks dream of being an entrepreneur; “a path that seemed inevitable“, they say. None of that shit applies to me. I’m only here cause I kept getting laid off and that nonsense infuriated me. I treated my first ... Read more
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Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity
Ask most venture-backed founders why they get 10x more equity than employee #1, 100x more equity than employee #5, and 1000x more equity than employee #15, and you'll get the same answer: "I'M TAKING SO MUCH RISK, IT'S SO HARD TO START A COMPANY, I MADE
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I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business
Four years after starting TinyPilot from scratch, I’ve sold the company and handed complete control over to a new owner.
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Paying freelancers in equity and dividends
Gumroad pays freelancers around the world $125-$200/hr. They choose how much of this they'd like to get in equity–between 0 and 80%. Equity entitles one to annual dividends.
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The danger of the mediocre success when testing startup hypotheses (2023)
Or, how to ensure you learn absolutely nothing.
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How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
A rant-focused guide to founding a GmbH in Germany: 16 steps including Transparenzregister and Rundfunkbeitrag, with tips to avoid common bureaucracy.
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You won't find a technical co-founder
Breakneck is the ultimate SaaS Starter Kit for .net developers. Lettings you focus on your business instead of boilerplate code.
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Signs you're about to be acquired (2020)
Over the course of my tech career thus far, I’ve been through two acquisitions. In each case, I was just a normal employee without any special inside knowledge, and found out only a few days before the deals were publicly announced. In retrospect, however, there were some clear signs in the weeks leading up to the…
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The end of Airplane.dev
I worked at Airplane, an internal tooling startup, for nearly two years. Earlier this year, it was announced that the company was being acquired by Airtable and that the product would be shut down. In this blog post, I want to explain what happened from my perspective as a former employee.
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Training LLMs from ground zero as a startup
Chronicles of training strong LLMs from scratch in the wild
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Frugly vs. Freemium
uglify the UI for non-paying consumers
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