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A Story Of Starting A Business In Japan
Making It In Japan is a first hand account of the process of starting a business in Japan. Elizabeth interviews five other entrepreneurs and gets their advice on how to go about setting up your business.
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Navigating Mid-Success
When you start a startup, you get pushed off the side of a cliff with a bag of aerospace parts.1 You hope they are the parts for a spaceship, and they look like they might be, but it’s impossible to tell when they’re all in a bag. So you start figuring out how the parts fit together as you fall. Every once in a while…
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How a Large Customer Can Kill a Startup
I often hear a founder get very excited about the prospect of a large customer. The implied expectation is that this out-sized customer is going to shower the startup with cash & confer on them the imprimatur of legitimacy. However, when I hear a founder start talking about “the big one” I cringe. I start …
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Why Trello Failed to Build a $1B Business
Trello was so focused on building its free customer base first and monetizing later that by the time it looked to its paid subscribers, it was too late.
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Why We Said “No” to a $40M Round
Parse.ly's CEO explains why he said no to a large VC capital investment, and why other start-ups should consider doing the same.
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Avoiding Startup Tarpits
Startup growth can be painfully slow. So slow that many entrepreneurs just give up and quit when their launch doesn’t go as expected. When…
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Building a startup in public: from first line of code to frontpage of Reddit
I show how I built a mini startup called Hoodmaps in public from the first line of code to a functioning web app that I got to the frontpage of Reddit with ove…
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Building a One-Person SaaS App Offers a Profound Sense of Personal Achievement
It's Raining Mobile Out of 20m global software developers, very few have built a profitable SaaS business. To give some context, consider
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Request for Education Startups
At YC, we’re deeply interested in education because of its power to transform lives and societies and to maximize human potential. On a micro level, we believe technology can help reverse the trend in K-12 of spending more and more money to achieve the same learning outcomes. We believe tech can also create…
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A CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate from the Bay
Wade Foster [https://twitter.com/wadefoster] is the CEO of Zapier [https://zapier.com/] (YC S12). Read Zapier’s de-location post here [https://zapier.com/blog/move-away-from-sf-get-remote-job/]. If you are interested in remote work, you can also check out our interview with Gitlab…
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How to Pick Your Next Gig: Evaluating Startups
Samvit Jain writes on startups, the tech industry, machine learning, and what he has learned along the way.
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SAFEs are not bad for entrepreneurs
Pascal Levensohn and Andrew Krowne recently published an article: “Why Safe Notes are not safe for entrepreneurs [https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/why-safe-notes-are-not-safe-for-entrepreneurs/] .” The authors were critical of the safe, describing it (as the click-bait title suggests), as bad for entrepreneurs. But…
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Fundraising Rounds Are Not Milestones
When meeting with founders for the first time I sometimes hear, “We’re a Series A company.” Meanwhile, YC alumni I talk to tell me that their angel investors regularly ask them, “When are you going to raise a Series A?”. I’d like to make the point that success isn’t the same as raising a round of financing. Quite the…
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Unkown Unknowns: Why you should release early
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. - Mark Twain
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Pitch decks we used to raise $1.1M
Buffer famously raised $500,000 investment with their pitch deck. At Twine we have raised more than $1,000,000 so far, see why our pitch was so effective..
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Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com
Subscriptions and limits to private CI minutes on shared runners are coming to GitLab.com
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How I stopped procrastinating, learned to code, and launched my first product
I discuss the six major barriers that I had to break through in order to go from lurker to launcher.