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Black Swan Seed Rounds
I started seed investing in 2010 (and much more actively in 2012) before becoming a full-time YC partner. In this period, I invested in about 40 companies. So far, five of them are in the “really...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,552 posts.
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Real-Life Angel Investing Returns 2012–2016
I have been doing angel investing since 2012 after the Facebook IPO. Since then I have invested in more than 150+ startups. 50+ of them…
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How to price your SaaS product
Guest post by Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell
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I’m a Female Y Combinator Founder and You Can Be Too
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…
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How I launched a profitable minimally viable product in 3 hours
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:
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How a Large Customer Can Kill a Startup
I often hear a founder get very excited about the prospect of a large customer. The implied expectation is that this out-sized customer is going to shower the startup with cash & confer on them the imprimatur of legitimacy. However, when I hear a founder start talking about “the big one” I cringe. I start …
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Trello, Inc
Hello? is this thing on? I’m not sure if I even know how to operate this “blog” device any more. It’s been a year since my last post. I’m retired from blogging, remember? Want to hear something fun…
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Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)
October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
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$100k Revenues in One Month
Friendly and helpful customer support that goes above and beyond. We help you get the perfect domain name.
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How to sell to 20M software devs with amazing onboarding
20M software developers in the world— if you can convince this set of people in the world to use your software, you've got a very very valuable startup. Today I wanted to sit down with the folks...
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Story of Odoo: Open-Sourced Competitor to Oracle, SAP
The most underrated Open Core Company out there
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Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company
Reflecting on selling Smart Bear in 2007, offering insights for entrepreneurs facing similar decisions.
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"Build something people want" is not enough
Most people take “Build something people want” to mean “Pick a problem to solve and solve it well.” This is not sufficient to build a world changing company. “Why now?…
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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…
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The case for building something wonderful alone
I’ve been building Derw alone since sometime last year.
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The Stanford Startup and the MIT Startup
Message from a Jedi to a Young Padawan When I graduated and was considering pursuing startups, an alum from my fraternity gave me some advi...
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How and why we acquired our .com domain
The story of acquiring and migrating from supertokens.io to supertokens.com
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Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
Trello was so focused on building its free customer base first and monetizing later that by the time it looked to its paid subscribers, it was too late.
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Startup Anti-Patterns
An anti-pattern is a commonly used process, structure, or pattern of action that, despite initially appearing to be an appropriate and effective response to a problem, has more bad consequences than good ones.Simeon Simeonov first wrote an introduction to the value of startup anti-patterns back in 2013. To sum it up…
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