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Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 882 posts.

2016
304

Losing Money

I remember back in the mid 90s, I used to say with some pride that I had not lost money on any of my VC investments. Then one day, someone told me “then you are not taking enough risk.” I ended that streak of not losing money on VC investments in the late 90s in […]

310

Google’s AMP is a gilded cage

AMP is Google's attempt to re-fight the transcoding wars of the early 2000s. It is actively dangerous to the web ecosystem, helps disseminate propaganda, and is disliked by many users. If, like me, you made the mistake of trying out AMP on your website - you're in a tricky position if you try to remove it. Google…

311

Investor Day

Below is a copy of an email I sent to investors who attend YC’s Demo Day. It discusses some of the changes we’re making and how they will impact Demo Day. > YC Demo Day Investors,We’re making some changes to Y Combinator’s Demo Days – please take a minute to read below because they are material. As with previous…

313

So You Wanna Go On-Prem

If you run a successful SaaS platform, at some point someone is going to come to you with the question: can I run it myself? If you’re considering offering a private version of your SaaS, this post might be for you.

319

How Startup Options and Ownership Work

One of the things that struck me most during our recent pieces on startup employee option plans is how things that impact the value of those options aren’t well understood, even if communicated or known at the onset. Many people reported feelings of a sort of “sticker shock” (or reverse!) on leaving their first…

327

From Losing Money to a Profit Margin in 5 Months

A few months ago I wrote about the difficulty of self-funding a rapidly growing startup. If you haven’t read that yet, go and do that now. I’ll wait. Here’s the quick timeline: JAN 2013 — Started on the idea for ConvertKit JUN 2013 — Reached $2,000 a month in recurring revenue (MRR). SEP 2014 — Revenue declines to…

328

Programming Language Rankings: June 2016

With the spring and summer travel schedule drawing to a close, we finally have had time to sit down and run the numbers collected back in June. As always, aside from the fact that we run our own GitHub rankings now, the process used for our bi-annual programming language rankings remains the same as when