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5 side projects in 6 years, earning $0
This is a story about me dreaming of building an online project that generates revenue, seeking financial independence and creative freedom. After five years and no success, it's still a dream. Let me tell you more about my failed projects. Planetoid (2015-2016) It's all started with a game. Who doesn't
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How I Screwed Up My Google Acquisition
I began building a web-based version of PowerPoint called Preezo back in the Spring of 2005 after switching the direction of my angel-funded startup for the third time in less than a year. Prior to that I had been working on a web collaboration concept akin to JotSpot , but after awakening to the the potential of AJAX…
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The end of Airplane.dev
I worked at Airplane, an internal tooling startup, for nearly two years. Earlier this year, it was announced that the company was being acquired by Airtable and that the product would be shut down. In this blog post, I want to explain what happened from my perspective as a former employee.
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Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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Building apps in minutes, not months
In order to build the many experiments for my research on the future of personal computing, and the subsequent demos for these Lab Notes, I needed a way to build much faster than was presently possible...
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The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers. We Hired the CFO Last week as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board me…
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Startups I Want to Fund
I hear a lot of startup pitches. I’ve been angel investing now for ~4 years, and I’m an LP and advisor to a number of VC funds. I also heard a lot of pitches through my work at Firebase (the company I co-founded), as many of its customers are startups. I like being pitched – partly because I enjoy meeting smart…
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Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office.
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6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far
It's been 6 months since the official launch of Lunch Money and I've been sharing milestones, both big and small. But that's hardly the full picture.
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Hard Tech is Back
First of all, congrats to Kyle, Dan, and the rest of the Cruise team. You all have made amazing progress and we look forward to seeing more in the future. A popular criticism of Silicon Valley,...
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How to Invest in Startups
There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I should point out that this is a...
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FarmLogs
I recently got to be a guest at a FarmLogs board meeting. I was struck by how much of an impact the company was having on the world, and how just a couple of years ago it seemed like they were...
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Use Pixar's story formula to win over investors
A framework to make your pitch 10x more compelling in a few minutes
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Storemapper: Bootstrapped to $50k/year in 2 years
Two years ago I launched Storemapper an embedded store locator service that runs on any website or ecommerce platform. Today around 500 brands use Storemapper to help their customers find the closest place to buy their stuff. The service has grown from bootstrapped to over $50,000 per year. It’s not cool like a…
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Is the Lean Startup Dead?
A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review Reading the NY Times article “Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture,” I realized it was time for …
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Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)
How a quick weekend app for sharing book quotes, Snaplight, got featured by Apple—and the lessons that matter more than star ratings.
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Training LLMs from ground zero as a startup
Chronicles of training strong LLMs from scratch in the wild
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How Not to Die (2007)
August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk…
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Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea
Should you tell everyone your business ideas, or keep them as your closely guarded secrets?
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Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
How to figure out what the user experience should be when you don’t have time, budget, or a design team.