I’ve been listening to the excellent Season 2 of the podcast Startup , which gives an inside look at YCombinator startup The Dating Ring (NYT coverage here ). The episodes are all great. They talk about many important topics, but I had some specific comments on fundraising for dating products .
The first year where I managed to keep my focus entirely on a single project.
For the past eleven months I’ve been the tech lead for Twitter’s Engineering Effectiveness group. Engineering Effectiveness is our name for what elsewhere might be called Developer Tools, Developer Productivity, Engineering Infrastructure, or Developer Efficiency. We provide the tools and processes that allow the rest…
When I was 17 years old, I wrote a little Applesoft BASIC program to help myself memorize vocabulary for my Spanish class. When I went to college, I wrote a new version for the Mac, adding special features for Japanese. Senior year I wrote two new versions – one for my
At $5.2-billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. Conceived in 1987 by Motorola and spun out in 1990 as a separate company, Iridium planned to build a mo…
I started investing in startups with the assumption that I don't know what I'm doing (which is always true), but that the only way to actual...
The story behind Duolingo's 350% growth acceleration, leaderboards, streaks, notifications, and their innovative growth model
Atlassian didn't jump through the standard hoops. Instead, they chose an unconventional path that would ultimately help them build a $10 billion business.
Photo by earthlightbooks This is a guest article by Saba Younus. Saba currently works as the operations manager (Sumo) at AppSumo . When she’s not working to create the best experience for each and every user, she spends her time scouring the web for juicy details about the startup worl
As a child, I had read about the Homebrew Computer Club, where Osborne and Apple were born - and I wanted to be part of a big movement like that ever since. When I first heard about Y Combinator I thought here was something happening right now that might be looked back on in the same way. I worked my way through the…
Results from asking 180 YouTubers to make an unboxing video for a subscription box. Includes detailed breakdown of response rate, number of videos made, views and the sales results from them.
Andy sent me a WSJ piece with Bill Gurley yesterday. I don’t like to link to paid content so here’s a good Business Insider summary of the article that is open for anyone to read. Regular readers know that I’m a huge fan of Bill’s. He’s as smart as they come and I generally agree with him […]
Originally posted on the CodeCombat blog.What a crazy weekend! We launched our beta on Friday morning by posting to ...
August 2013 The biggest component in most investors' opinion of you is the opinion of other investors. Which is of course a recipe for exponential growth. When one investor wants to invest in you, that makes other investors want to, which makes others want to, and so on. Sometimes inexperienced founders mistakenly…
I originally wrote this essay for The Information, where it was published on July 6, 2022. I've read a lot of the advice that venture capitalists have given founders on the current state of the...
OpenDoor has a unique yet high-risk approach to residential real estate; that’s a great thing, both for its prospects and for society.
tl;dr; We decided to go to Y combinator with HippyVM , our high performance PHP implementation, and we did not get through after two round...
Are we witnessing a major VC pullback? Is it temporary? What does that mean for startups? Certainly the topic du jour in startup circles. Here’s what I’m seeing
Proposals for new technologies, businesses, startups, satirical or serious.
Marketo filed for IPO. They have $60m in revenues and a nice growth rate; unfortunately they're *losing* $35m/year. Why do SaaS business fall into the trap of being forever unprofitable, and what is the secret to the ones who overcome this trap?
