Hard Tech Startups
Some people think YC only funds straightforward software startups. That’s definitely not the case — YC’s largest exit to date is a self-driving car company, Cruise Automation [http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-startup-for-more-than-1-billion/] , and we’ve funded many other hard technology…
A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw
over the past week the discourse around openclaw (fka clawdbot) has absolutely exploded. it has felt to me like all threads of conversation have veered towards the extreme and indefensible. some are running openclaw with unlimited permissions on their main computers. others are running it in the cloud and blowing…
Paul Buchheit on Lessons Learned from Investing in 200 Startups
Jasper Kuria of Capital & Growth [https://capitalandgrowth.org/index.html] interviewed YC Partner Paul Buchheit about his experience as employee #23 at Google and his key investing insights. Jasper : You came up with Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto in 2000. Sixteen years later, do you feel they have stayed true? Paul …
How to Sell – a guide for SaaS startups
In our years of coaching dozens of Silicon Valley SaaS startups, we've seen a lot of things trip otherwise great teams up. One of the biggest fundamentals? How to sell. With that in mind, we've to developed our first-ever guide, How to Sell, designed to give you and your team the tools you need to understand how to…
Successful Solo Founders
Note* Since publishing this, a research study came out by MIT with more information and data on this. See 2 founders are not always better…
Founder Control
December 2010 Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. Ten years ago that was true. In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A…
Revenue is easy, profit is harder
The fundamentals needed to run a business in the next economic cycle.
30kloc and $0 revenue. Lessons from my failed startup (& code release)
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Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley
A demonstration of power by Silicon Valley’s top startup accelerator.
37signals valuation tops $100 billion after bold VC investment (2009)
CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1. Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The…
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...
Docker Raises $23M
Palo Alto, Calif., – March 16, 2021 – Docker, Inc.™, a leading provider of collaborative application development platforms for development teams, today
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…
How Trello is different
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.…
RethinkDB raises an $8M Series A
Today we’re delighted to announce our Series A! We’ve raised $8M to fund development, grow the RethinkDB community, and ultimately make database tools feel indistinguishable from magic .
I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
Update: StackVM is now called Browserling. Hey everyone, I have awesome news! I am doing a startup together with James Halliday! I met James on FreeNode several years ago and it turned out that we had very similar ideas about doing great hacking. So we teamed up as equal co-founders to do a startup. We're on…
You’re a little company, now act like one (2009)
You're afraid that looking like being a small company means you'll lose sales. It's actually the opposite -- you're alienating your best customers.
How To Get Media Coverage For Your Startup: A Complete Guide
How to get the press and media to spread your startup's story. A detailed and comprehensive guide for mere mortals.
Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
Rust is awesome, for certain things. But think twice before picking it up for a startup that needs to move fast.