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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 120 posts.
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How YC Has Changed
As YC grows, founders are wondering how it’s improved over time. This is a valid line of questioning – clearly much has changed about YC over 13 years. We have new leadership [http://www.ycombinator.com/people/], much larger batch sizes [https://blog.ycombinator.com/category/batch-stats/], we invest more money…
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New Standard Deal
We are changing the standard deal at YC and increasing our investment from $120K to $150K. The $150K investment for 7% will be made on a post-money cap safe. We believe the post-money safe is simpler, making ownership and dilution easier to understand. This new deal will start with our Winter 2019 batch, and replaces…
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Rejected Then Recruited: Our Journey into Y Combinator
"The intoxicating delight of sudden understanding"1 best describes what I felt the first time I derived the Y Combinator (guided by the Little Schemer book). Learning Lisp (by way of Scheme) is how I first came about Paul Graham's essays. Which was, of course, a gateway drug to startups. Since then, Y Combinator (the…
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How to make your first sales hire – a guide for SaaS startups
Here's the reality: Your first sales hire is the most important non-executive growth hire you will make. But most B2B startups have no clue what they're looking for in making this hire—much less how to find them.
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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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We Spent $3.3M Buying Out Investors: Why and How We Did It
Last month, Buffer spent $3.3 million – about half of all the cash we had in the bank – to buy out our main venture capital (VC) investors. Here is the full journey of how we decided on this path for the company, including all the details and numbers involved in carrying out a stock buyback.
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How to Succeed with a Startup [video]
Sam Altman [https://twitter.com/sama], President of Y Combinator, shares his thoughts on how you can succeed with a startup. Learn more at https://www.startupschool.org/
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Financial Modeling for Startups: An Introduction
Founders and executives of new companies, particularly those seeking to raise capital, will inevitably be confronted with the prospect of building a financial model. The goal of this guide is to give you an idea of what a financial model is, why you might want one, and how to go about building one.
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How to Hire Your First Engineer
Harj Taggar [https://twitter.com/Harjeet] is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte [https://triplebyte.com/] (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC…
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Companies from the YC Summer 2018 Batch
At YC, founders decide when they want to announce that they’re part of the program. Meet 16 of the companies who recently announced that they’re part of the YC Summer 2018 batch. See more companies from the S18 batch here [https://blog.ycombinator.com/15-companies-s2018/], here…
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YC China and Qi Lu
Edit: Read this update [https://blog.ycombinator.com/an-update-on-yc-china/] on YC China. I am delighted to announce that Qi Lu [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSydk0XzxEE] is joining YC to launch and run YC China. I have been trying to recruit Qi for many years—he is one of the most impressive technologists I know…
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Startup School 2018 – Curriculum
Two weeks ago we announced Startup School 2018 [https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-startup-school-2018/]. Our free, online course will kick off in just three weeks, on August 28th. We also let founders know that 100 of the companies that complete the course will receive $10,000 in equity-free funding from YC…
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From developer to entrepreneur: Learning to build an indie startup
I always liked to build, to make stuff. When I was a teen, I use to spend all my free time studying networks and computers. I wanted to be a cyberpunk, hack things and write sci-fi novels. I was the typical shy geek.
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The Next 10 Years Will Be About “Market-Networks”
Market-networks will produce a new class of unicorn companies and impact how millions of service professionals will work and earn their living.
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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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YC Startup School 2018: a free, 10-week, online course
We’re hosting Startup School again this year. Startup School is a free, 10-week, online course. It’s designed for any startup founder who would like to get help through the earliest, most difficult challenges of starting a company. The course will begin on August 27, 2018 and applications are now open at…
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Interview with Sam Altman from the High Growth Handbook
Elad Gil [https://twitter.com/eladgil] is a serial entrepreneur (Mixer Labs – acquired by Twitter, and Color Genomics [https://www.color.com/]), operator (Google, Twitter) and an investor in a number of YC companies including Airbnb (W09), Checkr (S14), Coinbase (S12), Front (S14), Gusto (W12), Instacart (S12), Stripe…
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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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Why Does Your Company Deserve More Money?
The hardest conversation I have to have with a founder is when they’ve spent their 1-2 million dollar angel round but haven’t found product market fit [https://blog.ycombinator.com/the-real-product-market-fit/]. Unfortunately, I have to ask them a very unforgiving question: why does your company deserve more money?…
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You don't need ML/AI, you need SQL
On Software, life and everything in-between
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A Bank for Student Hackers
It was February 2nd, 2018 at 2 PM when I got a call from Jake Reilly, the founder of Kapaa High School's Hack Club, our first chapter in…