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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,603 posts.
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Unit Economics
Commentators are looking hard for what’s wrong with startups in Silicon Valley. First they talked about valuations being too high. Then they talked about valuations not really meaning anything. ...
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Ben Horowitz’s Best Startup Advice
Ben Horowitz is undoubtedly one of the most well-respected and successful venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. He’s known for being both…
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YC Fall 2015 College Tour
How do you come up with an idea? What makes a great founding team? How do you raise money from investors? Join YC partners and alumni at colleges around the country. Hear their stories and find out what it’s really like to start a startup. You’ll also have the chance to sign up for one-on-one office hours. 9/19: Hack…
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YC Open Office Hours for Black and Hispanic Founders
Startups are often best at solving the personal problems of their founders. The more diverse the founders, the more types of problems can be solved — and the more people who will be positively impacted by technology. As a result, we’re piloting a program called “Open Office Hours”. We are reaching out to…
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Launching a product in just 3652 days
A story about how I learned a lot of things the hard way
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What Did Billion Dollar Companies Look Like at the Series A?
Five key traits of unicorns at the Series A. Some may surprise you.
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Don’t Build a Billion-Dollar Business
The better goal? Keep your head down, make a great product, and build a successful business. Silicon Valley prays at the altar of the billion-dollar
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Your Job as a Founder Is to Create Believers
Before we launched HelloSign, I remember showing HelloFax to a family member. This person was normally supportive, but he took a glance and walked away. He wasn't the only one. A lot of people...
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Ghost: $411k Annual Revenue with a team of 6
It's April 2015, our annual run rate is $411,000 - and today we're announcing the Ghost public revenue dashboard, proudly powered by Baremetrics.
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Financial Misstatements
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
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The Post-YC Slump
At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a...
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Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox (2013)
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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Projects and Companies
In the early days of my startup, I used to get slightly offended when people would refer to it as a “project”. “How’s your project going?” seemed like the asker didn't take us seriously, even...
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Standard Treasury Acquired by Silicon Valley Bank
We're proud to say that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has acquired the assets and team of Standard Treasury. More information can be found in the press release. Dan and I started Standard Treasury...
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Joining a Different YC
I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining Y Combinator full-time. My job is to help our companies make hardware people want faster and better than ever before. Fortunately, our alumni are the best resource in the world for this: they’ve built some of the most innovative startups of the last decade. Coupled with our…
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What Makes Founders Succeed
I recently dug up my introduction to Founders at Work, which I wrote in 2006, and I was amazed how accurate it still seems: –––––– Some kind of magic happens in startups, especially at...
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A Guide to PR for Startups
You’ve built your product and you’re now ready for your first major launch. Or you’ve been through a launch or two, but are looking to scale the process as you’re doing more launches and announcements. You really have two options: do it all on your own, or work with a PR agency. One frequent crossroad is that you’re…