I personally find the people who are in the software startup game just for the money to often be nearly delusional about their chances of success and the likely magnitude of it when it happens. Before I get into the details for founders, let me talk about options-hungry employees. If you are in it for the money and…
First-time startup CEOs make a lot of mistakes, mostly due to ignorance. One particularly bad one is misunderstanding or misusing basic financial terms. I started noticing this in Y Combinator...
We must look to the past — to the World's Fairs — to build the future.
A few years ago I met a guy, let’s call him Jim, who was trying to break in tech by going to a bootcamp to become a developer. In the meantime, he worked as a bartender and had been living off the support of his girlfriend, who was from a well-off family and Jim was her trophy boyfriend. He approached me because he…
I spent many years working with founders and now I work with researchers. Although there are always individual exceptions, on average it’s surprising to me how different the best people in these...
March 2009 A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays…
August 2010 Two years ago I wrote about what I called " a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:" the growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business model requires them to invest large amounts, and a large class of startups that need less than they used to. Increasingly, startups want a couple…
You're afraid that looking like being a small company means you'll lose sales. It's actually the opposite -- you're alienating your best customers.
A failed founder’s survival guide
Zapier has 3M+ users and generates $125M in ARR. At a $5B valuation, its fast-growing horizontal platform is unable to meet the demands of all of its customers. The increase of underserved Zapier customers presents an opportunity.
Sharing everything I learn along the way and blog about my progress daily.
Everywhere I go, everywhere I speak, I get asked this question. Are we in a bubble? I’ve been getting asked that question for at least four years now. It’s hard to sustain a bubble for four years. But we are also not in a normal valuation environment for high growth tech companies and we have […]
About a year and a half ago, my mother’s partner was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given less than six months to live. Since then it has been treatments, pain, and truly miraculous victories - but the word “terminal” is pretty clear; at some point you will lose. I flew home as soon as things started to take a…
uglify the UI for non-paying consumers
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Nowadays in the internet it is pretty well known that you should validate your product before you even start building it. However, if the product already exists, then the market is already validated for you. Therefore you can consider yourself in a low risk position.
This is my new hugo site
