The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,603 posts.
Facebook sucks you in because everyone you know is using it. You go to eBay to find something because you know someone is selling what you want to buy. Oracle wins in the enterprise because there are tons of experts and plenty of auxiliary software available. All these business rely heavily on the …
What is your company about? Recently I got inspired by Kathy Sierra, whose blog Creating Passionate Users and Head First series of books revolutionized developer education. She kept saying the same…
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Heroku has focused since day one on making the end-to-end application experience as easy as possible. From our git focused workflow to the automated...
Essays by Thomas Petersen
October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.) I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet? I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the…
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
If you're thinking about starting a new venture right now, you need to understand the risks, but you need the real risks. The truth (as always) lies between baseless off-hand remarks about how "95% of businesses fail" (false!) and those startup blogs that show only the rosy side of things.
Reflecting on selling Smart Bear in 2007, offering insights for entrepreneurs facing similar decisions.
In 1985 Ardent Computer was determined to create a market niche for personal supercomputers. To understand our potential markets, we started by analyzing the marketing literature from Cray Research…
Big things are happening at Heroku, so we felt it was time for an overall update. I’m happy to say that not only has the platform doubled in size over the.
As VP of Marketing at our new startup, the CEO literally threw me out of the building and told me not to return until I understood the market and could identify the key applications and customers f…
Some of the most important business lessons are learned in the most unlikely ways. At Ardent I learned many of them with a sharp smack on the side of the head from a brilliant but abusive boss. Not…
Looking for a technical cofounder for RethinkDB.
I’ve decided to do a mini-series of sorts on our Y Combinator experience. Â Originally I was going to fold everything into one ginormus post, but I think it better to break it up and focus on different aspects.
Modern work can be frustrating and chaotic—if you don’t have the right tools. From context engineering to multimodal search, go behind the scenes and hear how Dropbox engineers are building AI that actually understands you, so you can focus on the work that matters most.
