The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,552 posts.
It took losing something important to understand the difference between a commodity and an opportunity. Along the way I also learned yet another way entrepreneurs see the world differently from the…
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Everyone knows what a startup is for – don’t they? In this post we’re going to offer a new definition…
I had coffee with an ex student earlier in the week that reminded me yet again why startups burn through so many early VP’s. And after 30 years of Venture investing we still have a hard time …
Sometimes when talking to people about YC I get this reaction: “hey, I’d love to apply but I am sorely unqualified and don’t even know where to begin.” As the summer has officially ended and I’m back in NYC I just wanted to put it out there that every single YC founder, at some point in time, was totally unqualified…
I am a big fan this whole “minimum viable product” philosophy. I’ve probably adapted it to my own interpretation, but basically I look at it as bootstrapping on crack, get your pr…
September 2010 The reason startups have been using more convertible notes in angel rounds is that they make deals close faster. By making it easier for startups to give different prices to different investors, they help them break the sort of deadlock that happens when investors all wait to see who else is going to…
I personally find the people who are in the software startup game just for the money to often be nearly delusional about their chances of success and the likely magnitude of it when it happens. Before I get into the details for founders, let me talk about options-hungry employees. If you are in it for the money and…
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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.
Governments round the world are trying to stimulate entrepreneurship. The Chilean government recently announced a bold initiative that stands apart from the usual innovation and start-up handwaving…
All you need to know on Ruby on Rails. Know what you should go for & why. Read up to understand RoR in 2021.
Have a great idea? Prove it by finding ten customers ready to hand over cash. Everything else is avoiding the truth.
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…
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...
March 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.) You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A…
