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A Bank for Student Hackers
It was February 2nd, 2018 at 2 PM when I got a call from Jake Reilly, the founder of Kapaa High School's Hack Club, our first chapter in…
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Kickstarter is Debt
Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other crowdfunding platforms are often misunderstood. It definitely isn’t investment: It’s debt. Hardware startups struggle to manage their cash. It’s common to pay for large expenses (like tooling and inventory) 9–12 months prior to selling your product. This is why pre-
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I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again
For almost two years now, the vast majority of our backend code was written in Rust (aside from a little bit of Python). I love Rust, it’s by far my favorite language. I find myself missing match in pretty much every other language I go to. However, if I was doing it over, I wouldn’t choose Rust. This advice is…
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Just did the Y Combinator interview: here are my notes
I did the Y Combinator interview. It's for entry to the Winter 2020 batch. I'm excited, but also a bit divided. Here are my notes.
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Startup School is going global
In the past few years, we’ve seen more founders from around the world coming to Silicon Valley to start startups. In YC’s W14 batch alone, we had founders from 22 different countries, and every year we see an increasing number of international applicants. We want to help founders from all over learn about startups, so…
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How 1 HN post compelled me to leave Intuit and create a new startup for startups
On October 26, 2010, Shereef Bishay - of BetterMeans and the recently launched ClassParrot - told the HackerNews community about some copywriting work I did for him:
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New research indicates ‘Unicorns’ are overvalued
New research examines fair market value of startups worth over $1 billion and finds huge discrepancies in their purported worth.
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Stripe opens its Atlas program to US-based startups
We're excited to roll out a bunch of improvements to Stripe Atlas today.
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Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia
Retool raises $50M led by Sequoia
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Updated Request for Startups
The application deadline for YC Summer 2018 is on March 24, and in honor of the deadline, we published an update to our Request for Startups [http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/] (RFS). While many of the best ideas we’ve funded were ones that surprised us, there are always a collection of ideas we wish more founders would…
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The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup
We share how AI-native founders are using Claude at every stage of the startup journey, with practical exercises, frameworks, and prompts.
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A/B Testing You'll Actually Use: Optimizely (YC W10) Launches Out of Beta
Everything marketing and digital teams need to create content fast, test and personalize, and prove business impact.
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How to Email Early Stage Investors
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
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Stripe acquires Clerky
We're happy to announce that Clerky has agreed to join Stripe!
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Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: Things We Learned the Hard Way (by Posterous S08)
There are a bunch of basic functional elements to building out a popular Rails app that I've never really seen explained in one place, but we had to learn the hard way while building Posterous....
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You do need a technical co-founder [video]
Based on the thousands of companies YC has funded over the years, companies lacking a technical co-founder underperform. In this episode of Dalton + Michael, we’ll discuss exactly why that is.
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The YC Founder Directory
Today, the YC community is made up of nearly 10,000 founders, from all different backgrounds – each with a unique road to entrepreneurship. Discover founders who have had experiences that reflect your own and learn more about their journey.
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The profitable startup
For years, startups have been taught to prioritize growth over everything else. Profitability was seen as unambitious or even wrong – something to worry about when you hit scale. Why focus on profits when money and valuations were easy to come by?
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Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker
TLDR: 30 member tech team formed over seven years built India's largest stock broker. Unconventional setup. The long pending tech blog is finally here. Some backstory and context.
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The SaaS Opportunity of Unbundling Excel
The unbundling of Excel is just as important as the unbundling of Craigslist. Here's what you need to know about the Excel Economy and how SaaS companies can take advantage of different verticals and use cases that Excel has dominated.
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Pitch: Collaborative presentation software for teams
Today, we’re launching Pitch to the world. Learn how we’re modernizing presentation software to help teams stay connected and do their best work.
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YC W20 Online-Only Demo Day
Edit: YC W20 Demo Day is now on March 16. See here [https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-w20-online-demo-day-now-on-march-16/] for more info. On March 23, YC will host our 30th Demo Day online. With the growing concern over COVID-19, we believe this is the right thing to do for the safety of all attendees, including our…