December 2010 Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. Ten years ago that was true. In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A…
Update: StackVM is now called Browserling. Hey everyone, I have awesome news! I am doing a startup together with James Halliday! I met James on FreeNode several years ago and it turned out that we had very similar ideas about doing great hacking. So we teamed up as equal co-founders to do a startup. We're on…
Over the last year, I’ve become a heavy user of Scribd. I have posted over 100 documents to Scribd that have generated over 100,000 reads. Posting to Scribd is fast and easy–much easier than using my extremely cumbersome web hosting...
A month ago I received a sales inquiry via email for my invoicing software package. The prospect asked if we could complete the questions he had attached in a spreadsheet: I will need the attached questions answered in order to proceed as I can’t get them all answered off your website.
I first became acquainted with Pat Conroy's work when, as a freshman in college, I watched The Great Santini as a requirement for one of my honors courses. This film struck me as both sad and hopeful. Since then, I have seen a couple of other movies adapted from his novels.
Firstly, the Apple vs. Adobe vendetta gets even nastier, with a public letter from Steve Jobs explaining why Adobe's Flash multimedia format will not ever be allowed into the garden of pure ideology that is the iPhone/iPad fork of OSX.
I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried
Originally when launching Mahalo, Jason Calacanis claimed that it would be spam free and that SEOs would have hell to pay.
"The conversation I'm going to have with my parents now that I've turned down this job is more of a concern to me than turning down the job," he said.
Jul 30, 2010 • Paul Singh If you spend just a few minutes on Hacker News, you’ll come across Patrick McKenzie in one way or another (I’m convinced that he must comment on every single HN post). He lives in Japan and recently left his cushy full-time job to focus on Bingo Card Creator — … Continue reading Back Office…
April 2010 The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you? There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than…
By now, everyone is tired of hearing about the iPad, but the negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it would be wrong to waste t...
I debated with myself for a long time over whether to write this post (which is one of the reasons some of the subject matter is a little ol...
I got an iPad for our home when the wifi version first came out. I used it for a day and then wrote a post about the iPad on the iPad. I was not very enthusiastic about the device. At the end of the review I said: Over time it may turn into a mainstream […]
Just a couple of weeks after Research in Motion turned in a good earnings report, the death watch over the company has resumed, with Busines...
Take your class action suits filed four days after we released the goddamn thing and stick them up your fucking asses.
October 2010 After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations. The trends we've been seeing are…
