A Personal Story (This is the text of an essay I read in a presentation at African Leadership University in Mauritius. Please see the video of that presentation here. For the other lectures from that trip, please see this playlist.) When it comes to starting a business, Silicon Valley is...
Plus: My interview with Oscar co-founder Mario Schlosser
Data analysis reveals 50% drop in San Francisco startup funding, with Series C & D rounds falling 66-75%. Key insights on shifting venture capital trends in 2016-17.
I spent most of my free time after work over the last month working on a project and today I'm giving up.
“David, this one, tell me about it …” He’d let me look at his domain name portfolio. Not names he owned and parked, but domains he owned & developed. This was another early project of his – a job board solely focused on the ranching industry. All aspects – cattle, outfitters, dude/guest, hunting, and even ... Read more
by Paul Hontz
It started out as a Medium post, turned into a software product, and eventually got acquired for…
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…
Mixergy's feature today inspired me to dig up these old video interviews I did years ago with some YC founders. We talked about things like how they got started, what went wrong, and what surprised...
Nvidia's $110B vendor financing strategy mirrors Lucent's telecom bubble playbook. Analyzing customer concentration, GPU-backed debt, depreciation schedules & cash flow patterns to assess AI bubble risks.
last month, i posted about my website basement community on hacker news and it sorta blew up. you can view the post here. it blew up so much, i was totally u...
“Hell is other people.” Sartre I’ve come to view the idea that you absolutely need a co-founder as one of the most harmful memes in Silicon Valley. It’
Fresh AI generated startup ideas from the current Hacker News front page. Powered by Claude.
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Choosing to be the CEO or CTO after raising a seed round.
Over the last 6 months, we have been learning what it means to support a launched product.
Today, Firebase has a large team with hundreds of engineers. Before the Google acquisition, however, we had a small team of just 24 exceptional people that I firmly believe was among the strongest of its kind in the world. A big part of that success was the way we interviewed software engineers. I’m sharing our…
A long-form guide on building your first micro-SaaS business on the Shopify platform.
Discover proven SaaS pricing frameworks from 10 years of startup investing. Learn 3 key strategies and 4 components to optimize your revenue model.
October 2010 After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations. The trends we've been seeing are…
Note: This is the talk I gave at Startup School Europe, which was held last Saturday in London. You've heard a lot of great startup advi...
