I wrote Dropbox their first investment check on June 26, 2007. What strikes me as I look at a copy of the check is that Drew and Arash must have been fairly effective at getting all their incorporation paperwork completed. I often had to chase startups well into July. Little did I know back then what a momentous check…
We’re hosting Startup School again this year. Startup School is a free, 10-week, online course. It’s designed for any startup founder who would like to get help through the earliest, most difficult challenges of starting a company. The course will begin on August 27, 2018 and applications are now open at…
Why is SaaS taking over the world? Learn about the SaaS business model, why SaaS businesses work, and how to grow them.
How to approach pricing and packaging a new SaaS app, by example
If you’re here, we assume that you’re a developer/hacker who’s intrigued by the blockchain. You’re convinced that you understand how it works and now you’re itching to figure out what the blockchain means for you and your developer skill set.
Last month, Buffer spent $3.3 million – about half of all the cash we had in the bank – to buy out our main venture capital (VC) investors. Here is the full journey of how we decided on this path for the company, including all the details and numbers involved in carrying out a stock buyback.
We're thrilled to announce that we have raised a Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Marc Andreessen and Andrew Chen championing the deal. We're also sharing that a million users are now using Repl.it. Moreover, our developers have shipped 250,000 websites/apps since our hosting platform launch in March…
We’re excited to share a list of Y Combinator’s top companies [http://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies]. The top 100 YC companies are listed by valuation1 (including the top 12 exits), as of October 16, 2018. We put this list together to help people get to know some of the fastest growing alumni in the YC community…
Companies Aim to Improve Information Exchange Across All Construction Project Teams SAN RAFAEL, CA, Nov 20, 2018 — Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) has signed a definitive agreement to acquire PlanGrid, a leading provider of construction productivity software, for $875 million net of cash. This acquisition will enable…
LLCs are the entity of choice for many small teams, side projects, and bootstrapped businesses.
We operate a platform called Bookface for YC founders to connect with each other, ask questions, find intros, and share advice. Recently on Bookface Zach Dixon [https://twitter.com/zachdixongg], cofounder of the gaming company Players’ Lounge [https://playerslounge.co/] (W18), asked a great question: 1. What are some…
Before I left Google to work on my own startup, I hadn’t thought much about monetization. I believed that, because so many websites do it everyday, charging people for online services would be straightforward. But as I started growing Kapwing, my video editing website, [https://www.kapwing.com/] with
Edit: Read this update [https://blog.ycombinator.com/an-update-on-yc-china/] on YC China. I am delighted to announce that Qi Lu [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSydk0XzxEE] is joining YC to launch and run YC China. I have been trying to recruit Qi for many years—he is one of the most impressive technologists I know…
Two weeks ago we announced Startup School 2018 [https://blog.ycombinator.com/announcing-startup-school-2018/]. Our free, online course will kick off in just three weeks, on August 28th. We also let founders know that 100 of the companies that complete the course will receive $10,000 in equity-free funding from YC…
In our years of coaching dozens of Silicon Valley SaaS startups, we've seen a lot of things trip otherwise great teams up. One of the biggest fundamentals? How to sell. With that in mind, we've to developed our first-ever guide, How to Sell, designed to give you and your team the tools you need to understand how to…
Wondering how to make a Slackbot that drives revenue? Check out this step-by-step tutorial. It's a case study of how we built a profitable business on Slack with thousands of USD in revenue.
Founders and executives of new companies, particularly those seeking to raise capital, will inevitably be confronted with the prospect of building a financial model. The goal of this guide is to give you an idea of what a financial model is, why you might want one, and how to go about building one.
Steli Efti explains how to price a product, sell it to customers, and build a sales team.
