Paul Graham on Doing Things Right by Accident
Read more on Y Combinator's blog.
Stocketa – An app I designed, built and never launched
A dive into the app I designed, built and never launched. Stocketa was a personal project developed to serve as a simple stock portfolio tracker for casual investors. The app was built using Swift and SwiftUl and offered a custom UI, comprehensive transaction tracking, and a variety of features.
What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
I spent the last week building an App for the Shopify Marketplace. It was unlike anything I've done before on the Web. Knowing some of the things I'm going to share, before you start building, could save you some headache.
A founder-friendly term sheet
When I invest (outside of YC) I make offers with the following term sheet. I’ve tried to make the terms reflect what I wanted when I was a founder. A few people have asked me if I’d share it, so...
Desingineer – the mythical person every startup is looking for
I’m on an adventure to create beautiful, meaningful products that improve the world for my daughters and their friends.
The Long Grind Before You Become an Overnight Success
Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A. Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter .
Evaluating Modest SaaS Business Ideas
I'm evaluating new SaaS business ideas, and I wanted to share a little bit about exactly how I'm evaluating them.
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...
Please stop asking how to find a technical co-founder.
Listen guys, I’m sorry. But, I just can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep having this conversation with every non-tech founder. It’s just too painful. On you, on me, and everyone else that you’ve approached. I was once on the search for a technical co-founder, so I can empathize.
Guide to Sending Email Like a Startup
Sendwithus helps teams manage transactional emails outside of source code — leading to streamlined workflows and always on-brand emails. Learn more here!
Why I Sold My Company and Didn't Tell Anyone for a Year
"I worried about what would happen to her without me, and what you would think of me for abandoning her. I worried about how I could explain. I worried about it all the time. And when the day finally ca...
Abundant Capital
The venture capital industry was built on the premise that both capital and high quality companies are scarce. For most of the history of the industry, this has been true. I remember sitting at...
What We Look for in Founders
(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.) 1. Determination This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most…
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...
I turned down $500k, pissed off my investors, and shut down my startup (2016)
I just did what no startup founder is ever supposed to do. I gave up. It wasn’t even one of those glorious “fail fast and fail forward” learning experiences. After seven months of hard work and two weeks before we were to start ...
From Show HN to Series D
Read the latest company announcements, partnership news, and press highlights here.
Bootstrapping to €600k MRR and getting killed by Shopify: Checkout X
The Leteyski family — Ruslan & Tihomira. Links, profiles and more.
The rise of the “successful” unsustainable company
We're funding too many unsustainable companies.
Unexpected challenges of making money on the internet
Before I left Google to work on my own startup, I hadn’t thought much about monetization. I believed that, because so many websites do it everyday, charging people for online services would be straightforward. But as I started growing Kapwing, my video editing website, [https://www.kapwing.com/] with
Updates from YC
We have a few updates about YC to share. Things are going well — in the past two years, we launched Startup School [https://www.startupschool.org/], the Series A program [https://blog.ycombinator.com/introducing-yc-series-a-batches/], the YC Growth program [https://blog.ycombinator.com/growth-stage-program/], Work at…
Why I Won’t Be Using BetaPunch for User Testing
Alternate Title: How NOT to Do Social Media for Your Startup This morning, I happily tweeted about the service UserTesting.com, which I’ve been using to ge...
Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed (2011)
I co-founded PrepMe in 2001. We were one of the first education companies online and the first purely online, personalized platform. We were acquired in 2011 by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Lea…