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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 913 posts.
The Future of Startup Funding
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…
How To Pitch A Product
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 […]
Google Kills Wave
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Why Japan Is Doomed
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) :
This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach
"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.
Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud: GitHub
Below: Q&A with Chris Wanstrath, CEO and Co-Founder of GitHub. This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Chris and Tom from GitHub have also answered reader questions i…
Ten Steps To Ten Thousand Sign Ups Before We Even Launch Our Startup
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...
Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
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…
Tips for Noogler Engineers (Noogler = New at Google)
I'm surprised by the number of people inside Google who actually read my blog. I once did contemplate writing a "career guide for Googlers",...
How to pick a company name
Every founder struggles to find a great name for her company; I sure did! In some ways it's important to pick a good name, but in my experience a lot of it isn't as important as some people would have you believe.
How to Start a Startup (2005)
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…
Back Office Exposed: Bingo Card Creator
Jul 30, 2010 • Paul Singh If you spend just a few minutes on Hacker News, you’ll come across Patrick McKenzie in one way or another (I’m convinced that he must comment on every single HN post). He lives in Japan and recently left his cushy full-time job to focus on Bingo Card Creator — … Continue reading Back Office…
Kindle is OK
But it's summertime, and I'd rather read in the park, or on a bench looking out over the Hudson.
Red Hat, 16%. Canonical, 1% contribution to GNOME
(Warning: ill-advised rant ahead. Read the apology here.) In case you missed it: $SUBJECT is the percentage of contribution to the GNOME codebase. Thanks, Dave Neary. An upside of not working for…
Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects
Java's not even *fun* enough to laugh at. I expect after your sabbatical you would be trolling at Scala or Haskell or Go ! What's next ? Jokes about making GUIs in VB ? Pshh. Seriously though, I can get the attack on privateness and finality. From someone with a strong dynamic tropism, that makes sense. But that good…