The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 244 posts.
Facebook is an amazing success as a social network. Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos. But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop. It’s getting beyond ridiculous and when even…
Today, Keynotopia is two months old. What started as a single blog post in June of 2010 became a product that got over 1,500 customers in the first 60 days. Before jumping into the story and lessons learned, here are some quick stats:
It took losing something important to understand the difference between a commodity and an opportunity. Along the way I also learned yet another way entrepreneurs see the world differently from the…
Every time a young, promising start-up is bought out by a stodgy, old incumbent, the world is flush with congratulations. Congratulations to the team, island mojitos now await them. Congratulations to the venture capitalist, their past nine flops can fade in the background for a week. Congratulatio…
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Everyone knows what a startup is for – don’t they? In this post we’re going to offer a new definition…
I had coffee with an ex student earlier in the week that reminded me yet again why startups burn through so many early VP’s. And after 30 years of Venture investing we still have a hard time …
Sometimes when talking to people about YC I get this reaction: “hey, I’d love to apply but I am sorely unqualified and don’t even know where to begin.” As the summer has officially ended and I’m back in NYC I just wanted to put it out there that every single YC founder, at some point in time, was totally unqualified…
I am a big fan this whole “minimum viable product” philosophy. I’ve probably adapted it to my own interpretation, but basically I look at it as bootstrapping on crack, get your pr…
September 2010 The reason startups have been using more convertible notes in angel rounds is that they make deals close faster. By making it easier for startups to give different prices to different investors, they help them break the sort of deadlock that happens when investors all wait to see who else is going to…
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I personally find the people who are in the software startup game just for the money to often be nearly delusional about their chances of success and the likely magnitude of it when it happens. Before I get into the details for founders, let me talk about options-hungry employees. If you are in it for the money and…
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
The following is a guest article by Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch . Not too long ago it seemed like every product I knew was offering some sort of free plan. The strategy was brilliant: get loads of people using your product and eventually turn them into paying customers. Everywhere I looked the
