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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,603 posts.

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1634

Why Startups Die

Startups die due to a variety of causes. Over the course of the last three years, I've watched many of my friends pour their hearts and souls into companies that, for one reason or another, just fizzled out of existence. In 2007, Paul Graham gave a variety of causes for…

1636

Startup = Growth

September 2012 A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups…

1641

Black Swan Farming

September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best…

1646

“Me-too” products are fine

This is a guest post from Alex Yumashev. Alex is a founder of Jitbit – a UK-based self-funded startup with a suite of customer support oriented products. You can find his blog at blog.jitbit.com and meet him at the Business of Software 2012 this October. —————————————————————————————————————————————– Does this sound…

1648

Tacocopter Basics

The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are already available for around a…

1649

Introducing human.io

My small startup, Tasty Labs, has recently launched human.io . Human.io provides a simple way to allow a publisher to turn a passive audience into a mobile army of participants. This allows publishers to easily create missions and activities to get people involved more directly than just reading stuff on a screen. If…