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The Reddits
"I met the Reddits before we even started Y Combinator. In fact they were one of the reasons we started it," writes PG.
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How and why I built Japan Dev
Japan Dev started as a list of companies I wanted to work for back in 2014. Here's the story of how that idea morphed into a job board showcasing hundreds...
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We ran a phone check at a Y Combinator event in SF
*the full story is now on the official clearspace blog
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Building apps in minutes, not months
In order to build the many experiments for my research on the future of personal computing, and the subsequent demos for these Lab Notes, I needed a way to build much faster than was presently possible...
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The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers. We Hired the CFO Last week as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board me…
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Starting a real business
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
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Lessons Learned Going from Zero to $30k/Month in a Year
Groove is now Helply!
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Startups I Want to Fund
I hear a lot of startup pitches. I’ve been angel investing now for ~4 years, and I’m an LP and advisor to a number of VC funds. I also heard a lot of pitches through my work at Firebase (the company I co-founded), as many of its customers are startups. I like being pitched – partly because I enjoy meeting smart…
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Someone should probably start a bright home lighting company (2019)
Elevator pitch: Bring enough light to simulate daylight into your home and office.
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6 months in and $1k MRR: my biggest mistakes so far
It's been 6 months since the official launch of Lunch Money and I've been sharing milestones, both big and small. But that's hardly the full picture.
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Hard Tech is Back
First of all, congrats to Kyle, Dan, and the rest of the Cruise team. You all have made amazing progress and we look forward to seeing more in the future. A popular criticism of Silicon Valley,...
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I built an AI company to save my open source project
The story of Timefold: how we turned a doomed open source project into a fast-growing PlanningAI company.
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Sequoia backs Zed
From the Zed Blog: This investment lets us pursue our vision for bringing a new kind of collaboration directly into the IDE.
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I wanted to build vertical SaaS for pest control, so I took a technician job
Not a shadowing day or research interview - a real job. What I learned working as a pest control technician.
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Bitbucket passes one million users
Automating releases, semantic version bumps, and API calls often involves configuring branch permissions and storing long-lived credentials in pipeline variables. Managing credential rotation adds an ongoing maintenance burden. Today, we’re introducing granular step-level permissions and container tokens in Bitbucket…
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How to Invest in Startups
There is a lot of advice about how to be a good startup founder. But there isn’t very much about how to be a good startup investor. Before going any further, I should point out that this is a...
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How to Test Drive Your Business Idea Before Quitting Your Job
This post on validating a new business idea (or business venture) was inspired by lean methodology books like Lean Startup, Running Lean, 4 Steps to the Epiphany, and Lean Analytics.
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FarmLogs
I recently got to be a guest at a FarmLogs board meeting. I was struck by how much of an impact the company was having on the world, and how just a couple of years ago it seemed like they were...
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Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy
If you’re working on a startup or non-profit that addresses any of the challenges discussed below, we’d love to see you apply. News: We’re facing two major issues with news. The first is fake news. The business model for online media rewards the people who get the greatest number of page views, clicks and likes. That…
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We Spent $3.3M Buying Out Investors: Why and How We Did It
Last month, Buffer spent $3.3 million – about half of all the cash we had in the bank – to buy out our main venture capital (VC) investors. Here is the full journey of how we decided on this path for the company, including all the details and numbers involved in carrying out a stock buyback.
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Use Pixar's story formula to win over investors
A framework to make your pitch 10x more compelling in a few minutes
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Storemapper: Bootstrapped to $50k/year in 2 years
Two years ago I launched Storemapper an embedded store locator service that runs on any website or ecommerce platform. Today around 500 brands use Storemapper to help their customers find the closest place to buy their stuff. The service has grown from bootstrapped to over $50,000 per year. It’s not cool like a…
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Is the Lean Startup Dead?
A version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review Reading the NY Times article “Jeffrey Katzenberg Raises $1 Billion for Short-Form Video Venture,” I realized it was time for …
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