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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 37 posts.
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Starting a Business in Silicon Valley
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...
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Questions to Ask Before Joining a Startup
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…
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Pivot or Fail?
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 […]
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The red flags and magic numbers that investors look for in startup's metrics
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…
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Sales results from getting 3M views on YouTube
How getting your subscription box covered on a popular YouTube channel is not necessarily a shortcut to riches.
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YouTube marketing horror story
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.
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How I’ve Attracted the First 500 Paid Users for My SaaS
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..
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TinySeed – A Startup Accelerator Designed for Bootstrappers
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
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Startups I Want to Fund
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…
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Is the Lean Startup Dead?
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 …
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Sounding the Alarm: Now Is the Time to Be a Cockroach
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…
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The Benefits of Thinking Small (2010)
In previous posts I wrote about visionary entrepreneurs, and how to constantly ask how you can 10X your business. However, many startups fail because the founding team thinks *too big* from day one, and doesn't take the time to really define the short term, immediate value their product or business provides.
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You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL
On Software, life and everything in-between
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Unequal Cofounders
One of the big myths in Silicon Valley is that co-founders should be equal. However, if you look at the most successful tech startups of the last 50 years, almost all of them had a dominant co-founder for most of the life of the company. This includes[1]:
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Pulumi – A new open-source cloud development platform
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
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Guide to Angel Investing
I’ve been dabbling in startup investing for a few years now. Nothing extraordinary, and I’ve definitely not made it a career, but I have developed a guide of sorts that I follow when ma…
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Do VCs really add value? Founders say sometimes
NOTE: If Hacker Noon & Medium allowed multiple authors, this post would carry 2 other important names. The study referenced below, its…
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Lessons on product and marketing from the growth of Domino’s Pizza
Startups can learn some of the most valuable lessons on product and marketing from the growth of the world’s biggest pizza chain. The story of Domino’s Pizza is a hero’s… Keep reading
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Why Entrepreneurs Start Companies Rather Than Join Them
If you asked me why I gravitated to startups rather than work in a large company I would have answered at various times: “I want to be my own boss.” “I love risk.” “I want flexible work hours.” “I …
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How I've built a profitable Slack bot as a side project in Rails
I've built a Slack anonymous messaging bot in Ruby on Rails and it is profitable. In this blog post I will describe what I did and tools I used to create, promote and monetize a simple SAAS product.