Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,552 posts.
Every software project is a startup that will probably fail
It dawned on me today. Maybe most software fails. Not in the sense that “it eventually dies after a long and respectable life.” In the sense that it never actually achieves flight, never catches on, never produces more value that it cost to develop.
JL: Why I Do YC
I think the past 4 months have been the busiest of my life. We wrapped up YC's winter funding cycle, hosted Startup School for more than 700 people, conducted interviews for the summer funding cycle,...
Lessons learned on SaaS pricing
When starting a SaaS business you eventually arrive at the challenge of pricing and packaging. Many great articles have been written on the subject, we've read them all, and still we missed the mark. Here's our thoughts on version 2.0.
Reflections on Using Haskell for My Startup
Almost exactly one year ago I quit my job to create a Haskell startup as a solo developer. I had about 20 ideas, but eventually settled on the idea of dependency project health tracking with Deadpendency.
When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars
When It’s Darkest Men See the Stars Ralph Waldo Emerson This Thanksgiving it might seem that there’s a lot less to be thankful for. One out of ten of Americans is out of work. The common wisdom say…
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.
Why I don’t usually meet startups in person (2019)
The other day, I tweeted. “Contrarian perspective here – it’s ok to *not* meet a founder in person before deciding to invest.” This set off a tweet firestorm — mostly …
Emotional debt in startups
Three to four years into my startup journey our then CTO Sunil introduced me to a term called “technical debt”. He explained that we would have to account some time to make changes to the product that won’t be seen by customers but that would support us in the long run. I was furious. How […]
How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter .
A summary of my learnings on how to find startup ideas
I’ve been searching for new startup ideas and problem areas to tackle. It’s quite difficult to do, especially when you begin adding constraints to the criteria such as “Am I excited about this problem space?”. The internet is filled with helpful ways to come up with startup ideas and below is the summary of what I’ve…
Minsky Moments in Venture Capital
Markets rise, and markets fall. This much, at least, is well-known. But why do market cycles occur? What causes the pendulum to swing from euphoria to crisis and back? Hyman Minsky was a 20th-century economist whose ‘financial instability hypothesis’ is probably the best-known explanation for the boom and bust cycles…
How To: Spend your investors’ money
I’ve invested in two startups and advise, officially and unofficially, a dozen or so other startups. Recently, a company that I’m involved with, attachments.me , raised $500,000 from Foundry Group . Since their raise, the two cofounders, Ben and Jesse, have been on a tear adding features, solidifying the…
An App Store Experiment
What happened when I built a 7-minute workout app in a single night and launched it quietly.