661
Why I stopped angel investing after 15 years, and what I'm doing instead
Plus: My interview with Oscar co-founder Mario Schlosser
662
Scaling YC
One of the most common questions I hear is: “why has YC continued to grow our batch size?”. For each twice-yearly batch, we receive thousands of applicants through our online application [https://www.ycombinator.com/apply]. We have always wanted to fund as many great founders as possible and are convinced that in the…
663
664
A Bank for Student Hackers
It was February 2nd, 2018 at 2 PM when I got a call from Jake Reilly, the founder of Kapaa High School's Hack Club, our first chapter in…
665
The Decline of Investment in San Francisco Startups
Data analysis reveals 50% drop in San Francisco startup funding, with Series C & D rounds falling 66-75%. Key insights on shifting venture capital trends in 2016-17.
666
667
When should you give up on a project that doesn't work?
I spent most of my free time after work over the last month working on a project and today I'm giving up.
668
669
670
671
Kickstarter is Debt
Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other crowdfunding platforms are often misunderstood. It definitely isn’t investment: It’s debt. Hardware startups struggle to manage their cash. It’s common to pay for large expenses (like tooling and inventory) 9–12 months prior to selling your product. This is why pre-
672
Must ride mule to and from work location
“David, this one, tell me about it …” He’d let me look at his domain name portfolio. Not names he owned and parked, but domains he owned & developed. This was another early project of his – a job board solely focused on the ranching industry. All aspects – cattle, outfitters, dude/guest, hunting, and even ... Read more
673
Angry Bird’s “overnight success” only took 8 years.
by Paul Hontz
674
I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again
For almost two years now, the vast majority of our backend code was written in Rust (aside from a little bit of Python). I love Rust, it’s by far my favorite language. I find myself missing match in pretty much every other language I go to. However, if I was doing it over, I wouldn’t choose Rust. This advice is…
675
Just did the Y Combinator interview: here are my notes
I did the Y Combinator interview. It's for entry to the Winter 2020 batch. I'm excited, but also a bit divided. Here are my notes.
676
I sold my side-project for $30k
It started out as a Medium post, turned into a software product, and eventually got acquired for…
677
Startup School is going global
In the past few years, we’ve seen more founders from around the world coming to Silicon Valley to start startups. In YC’s W14 batch alone, we had founders from 22 different countries, and every year we see an increasing number of international applicants. We want to help founders from all over learn about startups, so…
678
How 1 HN post compelled me to leave Intuit and create a new startup for startups
On October 26, 2010, Shereef Bishay - of BetterMeans and the recently launched ClassParrot - told the HackerNews community about some copywriting work I did for him:
679
New research indicates ‘Unicorns’ are overvalued
New research examines fair market value of startups worth over $1 billion and finds huge discrepancies in their purported worth.
680
681
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…
682
My Interviews with Airbnb, Dropbox, Posterous, Reddit, Weebly and Wufoo
Mixergy's feature today inspired me to dig up these old video interviews I did years ago with some YC founders. We talked about things like how they got started, what went wrong, and what surprised...
683
684
685
Stripe opens its Atlas program to US-based startups
We're excited to roll out a bunch of improvements to Stripe Atlas today.
686
687
Retool Raises $50M from Sequoia
Retool raises $50M led by Sequoia
688
689
Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?
Nvidia's $110B vendor financing strategy mirrors Lucent's telecom bubble playbook. Analyzing customer concentration, GPU-backed debt, depreciation schedules & cash flow patterns to assess AI bubble risks.
690
Updated Request for Startups
The application deadline for YC Summer 2018 is on March 24, and in honor of the deadline, we published an update to our Request for Startups [http://www.ycombinator.com/rfs/] (RFS). While many of the best ideas we’ve funded were ones that surprised us, there are always a collection of ideas we wish more founders would…