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I’m very excited to share that I’m investing in reddit (personally, not via Y Combinator). I have been a daily reddit user for 9 years—longer than pretty much any other service I still use...
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Before the Startup
October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…
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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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Super successful companies
I spent some time recently thinking about what companies that grow up to be extremely successful do when they are very young. I came up with the following list. It’s from personal experience and...
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A new team at Reddit
Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...
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New RFS – Breakthrough Technologies
We’d like for Y Combinator to fund more breakthrough technology companies—companies that solve an important problem, have a very long time horizon, and are based on an underlying technological or...
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Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
(Background: Dinnr was an ad-hoc, same day ingredient delivery service. Select a recipe on our website, and we deliver everything you need…
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The Worst Part of YC
We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and no) before 10 pm PDT tonight. The worst part of our job at YC is rejecting companies. It leaves me feeling down for many...
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Open Sourcing a Failed Startup
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
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Thoughts on Startup School
Perhaps my expectations were misaligned, but I was astonished at how geek-unfriendly the event was. At conferences like BSDCan , one of the major considerations is the availability of power sockets; at Startup School, not only were the power sockets very limited — we were in a theatre with perhaps a dozen outlets…
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If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else
When you look online for advice about entrepreneurship, you will see a lot of "just do it": The best way to get experience... is to start ...
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Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
At CMU yesterday, I heard a story about how Yahoo Trip Planner has pretty much zero adoption. It has never taken off, though it remains online even today. Yahoo keeps it around because it's...
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Why Silicon Valley Works
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
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Candy Japan crosses $10K MRR
Japanese candy subscription box Candy Japan exceeded $10,000 per month in sales.
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Myths About Working as an Engineer at a Startup
When I first graduated from college and went looking for a job with a startup I had no idea what to expect. I knew what I didn’t want - I had done ...
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My Startup School Europe talk: The Technology
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...
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The Bubble Question
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 […]
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Burn Baby Burn
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 […]