Attitudes towards the Facebook platform have changed Recently, Bill Gurley of Benchmark wrote a great piece on how platform companies like Facebook, iOS, Android, eBay, and others manage the ecosystem around them. It’s an important essay and I’d recommend you all read it. I found myself nodding my head as Facebook was…
As in stop being in stealth mode. Stop asking for advice. Stop doing your start-up. You’re not ready.
Agentic coding presents an existential threat to a broad set of low-code tools.
I had the privilege of leading PlanGrid to $100M in ARR before I stepped down as CEO and passed the baton to Autodesk Construction. I’ve had years to dissect the mistakes I have made in my first...
After 14 years running my own businesses, I’ve failed a lot. I haven’t kept count thankfully, but I’d say I’ve started at least 50 businesses / ideas and out of those, 3 have worked. And when I say worked I don’t mean staying in business, I mean resulting in either a decent income for me […]
On Software, life and everything in-between
In January 2020 I closed a $5.1M seed round, my first financing for my first company. I’ve closed another ~$6M since then. This is how I raised that first round.
I sent this email to the whole team at YC yesterday: When I joined YC 7.5 years ago, there weren’t many people around. PG and Jessica were still running things. We had offices in Mountain View,...
This is the story of five years spent wandering around the JavaScript tech stack, wasting time, getting lost, and finally taking off.
Considering every startup confronts this question at some point, I was surprised by how little has been written about it. Particularly anything actionable. So I decided to do my own digging. I spent the past month personally reaching out to founders, scouring interviews, and tapping the Twitterverse. Below, you’ll…
Part five of my seven-part series on kickstarting and scaling a B2B business
I'm a full stack web developer with a preference for Python. I also enjoy discussions on entrepreneurship and software marketing.
The value of human thinking is going down. The value of human attention is going up. Those two facts are pointing in very different directions.
2008 is a leap year. That means that three hundred and sixty six days ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting alone in a booth at Zeke’s Sports Bar and Grill on 3rd Street in San Francisco. I wouldn’t normally hang out at a sports bar, let alone a sports bar in SOMA, but back then Thursday was “I Can Has Ruby” night…
Founders predictably underestimate the importance of hiring marketers. Here’s why many startups don’t get round to marketing their product…
October 2011 If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide. I wondered about this for years. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions…
