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We turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k debt and broke even
This is Part 3 of “Making The Contender: Conception to Completion”. Here are links to Part 1 (how we made the game) and Part 2 (how we ran…
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Bootstrapping a SaaS Startup from Scratch
No co-founders. No funding. No connections. No customers. No — you’re not nuts.
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Three Years as a One-Man Startup
I’ve spent most of the past 3 years creating one language learning web-app, Readlang.
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Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean , so the…
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Building a Startup in 45 Minutes per Day While Deployed in Iraq
You may one day find yourself in a position where you’re eager to work on a startup but limited by the amount of time you can put into it due to a day job, family or other obligations. In this post…
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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 get hired at a startup when you don't know anyone
A few years ago I saw an early stage startup that I knew I had to be a part of. The only problem was that it was 900 miles away and I had no connection to them. The startup was Formlabs . At the time they had 10 employees, and like most startups reduced risk by hiring people they knew. They were also situated…
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Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Mi…
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Frog and Toad are Cofounders
The Characters you loved as a child, all grown up and working in San Francisco
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Before Growth
We tell startups all the time that they have to grow quickly. That’s true, and very good advice, but I think the current fashion of Silicon Valley startups has taken this to an unhealthy...
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When to join a startup
<p>Something has changed in the last few years which has made an increasing number of people want to join startups. It seemed to start around ...
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Twilio's Seed Pitch
I read yesterday evening that our portfolio company Twilio, which priced its IPO last night, is going to live code from the NYSE this morning. That brought a powerful flashback to the first time I met Jeff Lawson, founder and CEO of Twilio. It was 2008 in our old offices on the 14th floor of […]
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Paypal froze our funds, then offered us a business loan
About a year ago, we made the decision to use Paypal as the primary payment method for our company, Hacker Paradise. After about a month…
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'We're in a Bubble'
A lot of people have been saying we’re in a tech bubble for quite some time. Someday they’ll be right, but in the meantime, I thought it'd be fun to look back at some articles from the last 10...
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From Losing Money to a Profit Margin in 5 Months
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…
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Opendoor, a startup worth emulating
OpenDoor has a unique yet high-risk approach to residential real estate; that’s a great thing, both for its prospects and for society.
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