1
Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business in four years.
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Our $100M Series B
Raising our Series B round of financing
3
Tailscale has raised $160M
Tailscale has raised $160 million USD ($230 million CAD) in our Series C, led by Accel with participation from CRV, Insight Partners, Heavybit, Uncork Capital — and new investment from Anthony Casalena - CEO of Squarespace.
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A startup doesn't need to be a unicorn
The Missing Middle Path: What VCs Don’t Tell You
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I hacked a dating app (and how not to treat a security researcher)
Update: This post received a large amount of attention on Hacker News — see the discussion thread.
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I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts
A while back I wrote : I've had many, many failures in my life. (Hm, maybe I should write a blog post about that.) This is that post. I'm ...
7
Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
There’s an old startup mantra — probably from the early Airbnb or Y Combinator days — that goes: “Do things that don’t scale.”
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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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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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Goodbye, Slopify
There’s no way I’m going to continue a subscription to a streaming service that suggests AI-generated music with AI-generated album covers. A bloated, Electron-based desktop application with a terrible UI is only going to add up.
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Business co-founders in tech startups are less valuable than they think
This is Verdi's personal website. He writes about interesting ideas or projects.
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10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13
€6.5M in revenue, 65% EBIT margins, a full infrastructure migration, and enough features shipped to make your head spin — all with 13 people. Ten years in, still small, still profitable, still having...
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Things we've learned about building products
To celebrate 50k subscribers to Product for Engineers, here are the 50 most important lessons we’ve learned about building great products.
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Microservices are a tax your startup probably can't afford
Why splitting your codebase too early can quietly destroy your team’s velocity — and what to do instead.
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You’re a little company, now act like one (2009)
You're afraid that looking like being a small company means you'll lose sales. It's actually the opposite -- you're alienating your best customers.
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I spent five years building a webapp and got my first $1 (2022)
This is the story of five years spent wandering around the JavaScript tech stack, wasting time, getting lost, and finally taking off.
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Four years of running a SaaS in a competitive market
Looking back on the last four years, what worked, what didn't.
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Why I stopped angel investing after 15 years, and what I'm doing instead
Plus: My interview with Oscar co-founder Mario Schlosser
20
Circular Financing: Does Nvidia's $110B Bet Echo the Telecom Bubble?
Nvidia's $110B vendor financing strategy mirrors Lucent's telecom bubble playbook. Analyzing customer concentration, GPU-backed debt, depreciation schedules & cash flow patterns to assess AI bubble risks.
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HN Slop: AI startup ideas generated from Hacker News
Fresh AI generated startup ideas from the current Hacker News front page. Powered by Claude.
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The profitable startup
For years, startups have been taught to prioritize growth over everything else. Profitability was seen as unambitious or even wrong – something to worry about when you hit scale. Why focus on profits when money and valuations were easy to come by?
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N8n raises $180M
We just raised $180 million in Series C funding, bringing our total funding to $240 million and our valuation to $2.5 billion. The round is led by Accel, with support from Meritech, Redpoint, Evantic and Visionaries Club. Corporate investors NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm) and T.Capital also
24
SaaS is just vendor lock-in with better branding
The pitch of modern SaaS is "don't reinvent the wheel." But every wheel you bolt on comes with some friction.
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Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
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How to sell if your user is not the buyer
Example: Dev = user; CTO = buyer
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Angel Investors, a Field Guide
I’ve been lucky to work with some of the best angel investors in the business. When I started Akita, my angel investors were my mentor Jason Hong, superangel Elad Gil, #ANGELS co-founder Jana Messerschmidt, Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz, Stanford professor Dan Boneh, and NBA player Kevin Durant. I…
28
Introducing the Llama Startup Program
We’re excited to announce the Llama Startup Program, a new initiative to empower early stage startups to innovate and build generative AI applications with Llama.
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Five years as a startup CTO: How, why, and was it worth it? (2024)
I can't believe it's been five years since my last post… Five years since I decided to join an early stage startup as the CTO / "the tech guy". Five years since I took my last train
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Shipping 100 hardware units in under eight weeks
Someone once told me hardware is hard...