The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,603 posts.
On March 11 2005, Jessica and I were walking home from dinner in Harvard Square. Jessica was working at an investment bank at the time, but she didn't like it much, so she had interviewed for a job as director of marketing at a Boston VC fund. The VC fund was doing what now seems a comically familiar thing for a VC…
Over the past ten years, we have invested in and worked with close to 100 startups. Along the way, we have seen teams, ideas, and practices work spectacularly well. And, we’ve seen others that didn’t work out as expected. We decided to take the experiences and insights learned over the past decade and compile them […]
In the summer of 2018, Qi Lu joined [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-china-qi-lu/] Y Combinator to help create YC China, a localized version of our U.S. program. As we worked to establish YC China, we had a change in leadership [https://blog.ycombinator.com/geoff-ralston-for-president/]. With this, our strategy…
How I built and sold a bootstrapped Micro-SaaS business in five years. A guide for founders to selling a SaaS business.
August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk…
I did the Y Combinator interview. It's for entry to the Winter 2020 batch. I'm excited, but also a bit divided. Here are my notes.
☝️Above: Michelle Rial ( follow her at @TheRialMichelle ), then working at Buzzfeed, posted this hilarious infographic with all the “X for Y” ideas. Here’s the original article .
Hidden away in Juicero’s bad week of press is one of the most powerful lessons we preach to hardware startups: unconstrained development is lethal. Last week Bloomberg published an article exposing how easy it is to “hack” Juicero’s produce packs by squeezing them with your hands, deeming the $69
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Let me tell you about the only time in history a new technology has been adopted by almost everyone virtually…
We got rejected from YC S19. Read on to learn more about this canon event and how it drove us to create an impromptu plan to get our first paying users.
The Start of Our Company Hard Lessons Learned Some Solid Advice What's Next for Us? My brother, Justin, was an engineer at Google, and I was a data
This November we’re hosting a hackathon at YC. You can find out more about the event and apply here [https://apply.ycombinator.com/events/236]. Applications close on 10/25/19 at 11:59PM PST. We’ll send out the first round of acceptances shortly afterward. The top team will get a YC interview and the top three teams…
Money can be only a short-term motivation / Make it “better” rather than “bigger” / Figuring out “enough” / Life is one shot
I recently visited a friend who runs Keycult , a business that designs and sells $500 keyboard kits.
Today, Firebase has a large team with hundreds of engineers. Before the Google acquisition, however, we had a small team of just 24 exceptional people that I firmly believe was among the strongest of its kind in the world. A big part of that success was the way we interviewed software engineers. I’m sharing our…
“My biggest regret is that our first customer was $1M ACV*,” my friend lamented over coffee the other day. “I wish I could take it back.”
Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel [https://twitter.com/mwseibel] on how to cold email investors. Topics 00:00 [https://youtu.be/A3MmYbH1hbs?t=0s] – Intro 00:17 [https://youtu.be/A3MmYbH1hbs?t=17s] – Make it short, i.e. 60 seconds or less to read 00:58 [https://youtu.be/A3MmYbH1hbs?t=58s] – Interested in: the…
[orig published in 2019; re-published & updated in 2023 & 2025] The outdoor patio was filled with dude ranchers. It was their yearly conference at Tanque Verde Ranch in Tucson, and I was there as a vendor (and first-time attendee). I remember saguaro cactus lining the landscape. It was early evening, the sun was…
Airbnb, Inc. announced today that it expects to become a publicly-traded company during 2020.
How a quick weekend app for sharing book quotes, Snaplight, got featured by Apple—and the lessons that matter more than star ratings.
Everyone is faced with raising prices at some point. It's hard not to upset your customers let alone get them to rave about it. Here's how we did it.
Today we’re unveiling Dark and moving into private beta.
