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 …
Hello? is this thing on? I’m not sure if I even know how to operate this “blog” device any more. It’s been a year since my last post. I’m retired from blogging, remember? Want to hear something fun…
In 2018, Pew Research Center reported [https://www.pewglobal.org/2019/03/04/u-s-german-relations-methodology-spring-2018-global-attitudes-survey/] that 57% of Americans believe that children in America today will be worse off financially than their parents. Since 2013, this number has been as high as 65% — even though…
October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
Friendly and helpful customer support that goes above and beyond. We help you get the perfect domain name.
20M software developers in the world— if you can convince this set of people in the world to use your software, you've got a very very valuable startup. Today I wanted to sit down with the folks...
The most underrated Open Core Company out there
Reflecting on selling Smart Bear in 2007, offering insights for entrepreneurs facing similar decisions.
Most people take “Build something people want” to mean “Pick a problem to solve and solve it well.” This is not sufficient to build a world changing company. “Why now?…
Seedlauncher is a smart entity in the VentureOS network — built to create real value in its vertical, connected to specialized agents and a shared economy.
Y Combinator now has 5 major groups—YC Fellowship, YC Core, YC Continuity, YC Research, and Hacker News—and we’re putting one person in charge of each group. Paul Buchheit is taking over for me as managing partner of the core YC program. We’re going to continue doing YC Fellowship (!), and Kevin Hale is going to be…
This is not a list of things you should not do; it's simply a collection of things we did not.
The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are already available for around a…
A practical guide to building a SaaS product on a 100% European stack: hosting, payments, CDN, analytics, and transactional email.
A textbook database problem
I’ve been building Derw alone since sometime last year.
Message from a Jedi to a Young Padawan When I graduated and was considering pursuing startups, an alum from my fraternity gave me some advi...
The story of acquiring and migrating from supertokens.io to supertokens.com
