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New Y Combinator Website
Our website got a facelift [http://www.ycombinator.com]. [http://www.ycombinator.com] The content is pretty much the same. Since the old site was mostly text, I did my best to just make that text easier to digest and hopefully entice people to get through more of it. A lot of the best content on the site like What…
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Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)
How a quick weekend app for sharing book quotes, Snaplight, got featured by Apple—and the lessons that matter more than star ratings.
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Training LLMs from ground zero as a startup
Chronicles of training strong LLMs from scratch in the wild
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How Not to Die (2007)
August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk…
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I almost sold Baremetrics for $5M
tl;dr In the past 6 months I turned down multiple $3-5m offers and failed to close a $5m sale. In the past six years of Baremetrics' existence, I've
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Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)
While I was at a family wedding a few weeks ago, one of my aunts asked me, “So, what’s the hardest part about designing a game? It must be coming up with the ideas, right?” I laug…
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Repl.it raises $4.5M from A16Z, Paul Graham, and others
We're thrilled to announce that we have raised a Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Marc Andreessen and Andrew Chen championing the deal. We're also sharing that a million users are now using Repl.it. Moreover, our developers have shipped 250,000 websites/apps since our hosting platform launch in March…
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Nobody's Going to Steal Your Idea
Should you tell everyone your business ideas, or keep them as your closely guarded secrets?
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Practical UX for startups surviving without a designer
How to figure out what the user experience should be when you don’t have time, budget, or a design team.
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Why Entrepreneurs Start Companies Rather Than Join Them
If you asked me why I gravitated to startups rather than work in a large company I would have answered at various times: “I want to be my own boss.” “I love risk.” “I want flexible work hours.” “I …
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How to get hired at a startup when you don't know anyone
A few years ago I saw an early stage startup that I knew I had to be a part of. The only problem was that it was 900 miles away and I had no connection to them. The startup was Formlabs . At the time they had 10 employees, and like most startups reduced risk by hiring people they knew. They were also situated…
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Startup School – YC’s Online Class
[https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSYC_Logo.png] We’re excited to announce our new online Startup School, with classes beginning on April 5. Anyone can sign up at StartupSchool.org [http://startupschool.org/] for the 10-week massively open online course (MOOC), starting today. We want to…
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YC Annual Letter 2017
Dear YC Community: In response to a comment on Hacker News, I’m going to try writing an annual letter to the YC community with an update on our progress. Our mission is to enable the most...
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YC Top Companies List
We’re excited to share a list of Y Combinator’s top companies [http://www.ycombinator.com/topcompanies]. The top 100 YC companies are listed by valuation1 (including the top 12 exits), as of October 16, 2018. We put this list together to help people get to know some of the fastest growing alumni in the YC community…
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Everything I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Demoing SaaS
Everything you want to know about Medellin and Colombia
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Autodesk to Acquire PlanGrid (YC W12) to Accelerate Construction Productivity
Companies Aim to Improve Information Exchange Across All Construction Project Teams SAN RAFAEL, CA, Nov 20, 2018 — Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) has signed a definitive agreement to acquire PlanGrid, a leading provider of construction productivity software, for $875 million net of cash. This acquisition will enable…
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Before You Grow
Startups are defined by growth [http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html], but growth isn’t step one in building a great company. If you focus on trying to grow before you make a product people love, you are unlikely to succeed. We’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating–many founders hurt their companies by…
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Airbnb to Acquire HotelTonight
To advance our mission, we are reimagining travel by building an end-to-end travel platform. Today, we are building on this work by signing an agreement to acquire HotelTonight.
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Lessons from my first exit
My takeaways from selling TinyPilot