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Building the Middle Class of the Creator Economy
The American Dream exists, but what is the reality?
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 147 posts.
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Lessons from building and growing an open source SaaS
Here are some lessons learned from building and growing an open source SaaS startup in the highly competitive web analytics market.
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Vercel raise $40M Series B
Today we announce $40M in new funding to help everyone build the next web. Next.js and Vercel help teams collaborate and move faster with greater flexibility.
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Ross Intelligence is shutting down after lawsuit from Thomson Reuters
We have made the difficult decision to shut down operations at ROSS Intelligence. As of Monday of this week, we have no longer been accepting new customers. As of January 31, 2021, the ROSS platform will no longer be available. Between now and then, our priority is to help our current customers transition to other…
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Unlimited is like a Ponzi Scheme
You shouldn’t be surprised when unlimited ends, because unlimited is more often than not an unsustainable Ponzi Scheme.
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Buy Don't Build
This is my new hugo site
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How I got to $9.99 MRR after 7 years
Here's the tell-all behind the scenes story of how Cloakist got to $9.99 MRR after just 7 years
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The Airbnbs
To celebrate Airbnb’s IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. What was special about the Airbnbs was how earnest they were. They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview. Sometimes after we interviewed a startup we’d be…
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DoorDash from Application to IPO
DoorDash is the first company that I’ve had the opportunity to follow all the way from YC application to IPO, so to celebrate I thought it would be fun and interesting to share what a great company like DoorDash looks like at the earliest stages. Meeting startups at the very start of their journey is one of my…
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Lessons for Early Stage Founders
In Segment’s early days, we hit countless problems as a founding team. And at the time, I thought those problems were unique to our own special snowflake of a founding journey. I chalked it up to us being new grads and first-time founders.
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Front: The $1.3B Startup Slackifying Email
Front is a B2B team email product, competitive with Zendesk and Intercom, with 137% net dollar retention. We value Front at $1.3B with a price per share of $11.
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Simple Math to Set Up a Sales Team
How to structure quotas, compensation, and territories for a new sales team.
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Amazon Is Allowing a Chinese Knock-Off to Destroy Our Startup
I’m the inventor of BeltBro.com, a no-buckle belt that uses just 2 belt loops to hold up pants and shorts. I developed this belt because I…
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The Truth About Starting a Startup
(I wrote this for YC’s Future Founders Conference for Women. I’ll add the recording when it becomes available. The actual talk I gave on November 18th should include bonus streams of unconscious...
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Startups: The Very Beginning
This was the talk I gave at Y Combinator's Future Founders Conference for women. I've given a lot of advice to startups over the past 15 years, but today I'm going to focus on just the advice...
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SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
The unassailable advantage that big cloud providers like AWS and Azure have over the rest of the SaaS industry isn’t their quality or pace of innovation; it’s that they’re a single point of purchase for a variety of services. If there was a single vendor that large corporations could contract with and pay for SaaS…
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I sold Baremetrics
2020 has turned in to one of the most unusual years of my life, for both the obvious reasons but also for reasons I definitely wasn't expecting at the
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Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)
April 2008 Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.
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Product-market fit for a B2B company
Some big cloud earnings this week
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YC Startup School for future founders who aren't quite ready to start yet
We launched Startup School as an online program in 2017 to support founders actively working on building their companies. On November 9th, we’re also opening Startup School to potential founders who are interested in starting a company in the future. You can register [https://www.startupschool.org/future-founders] for…
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How to spin your scientific research out of a university and into a startup
This is advice for people who have done scientific research at a university and are considering starting a company to commercialize it. At YC, we’ve funded more than 75 companies in this situation. We also recently went on a Bio Tour [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-bio-tour-2020/] where we went around to research…