July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they…
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There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path.
September 2013 Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y Combinator or individual angels, then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company, and then (3) once the company is clearly…
Paul Graham YC partner (and lawyer) Carolynn Levy has created a new alternative to convertible notes, called a safe, that has the advantages of convertible debt without some of the disadvantages. We’re publishing a standard safe document for all startups to use, and we expect most future YC startups will use this when…
August 2013 When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be…
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…
Groove is now Helply!
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…
Kaikki nettikasinot and other similar projects can be exhausting, due to their demanding schedules. How do I organize myself? Learn now!
When I invest (outside of YC) I make offers with the following term sheet. I’ve tried to make the terms reflect what I wanted when I was a founder. A few people have asked me if I’d share it, so...
Alternate Title: How NOT to Do Social Media for Your Startup This morning, I happily tweeted about the service UserTesting.com, which I’ve been using to ge...
Note: I was holding off on posting this because I wanted to wait for our redesign to be finished…but alas, it is taking much longer than we thought it would…so as promised a while back, here is our story. Our Story: 10 Years of Bootstrapping In 2002, after several years of running a small but […]
In honor of the new YC batch starting tomorrow, here is some of the best startup advice I’ve heard or given (mostly heard): 1. Make something people want. 2. A great team and a great...
Recently, I wrote a post called “Entrepreneurs Deserve Full Transparency” for my WSJ series. Several entrepreneurs wrote me, but this story really stands out as a warning to do your diligence and demand full transparency. Not all accelerators are created equal. I’ve posted the following email by permission of the…
So after my 2011 and 2012 reports. Here's my 2013 report about my sales and experience as an indie educational iOS app developer. I hope yo...
I should have thought of it first. I walked into Starbucks one afternoon. Ok. Ok. I do this every afternoon, but something was different this time. Something really neat was going on.
