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I’m very excited to share that I’m investing in reddit (personally, not via Y Combinator). I have been a daily reddit user for 9 years—longer than pretty much any other service I still use...
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Before the Startup
October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…
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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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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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Super successful companies
I spent some time recently thinking about what companies that grow up to be extremely successful do when they are very young. I came up with the following list. It’s from personal experience and...
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A new team at Reddit
Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...
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New RFS – Breakthrough Technologies
We’d like for Y Combinator to fund more breakthrough technology companies—companies that solve an important problem, have a very long time horizon, and are based on an underlying technological or...
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Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
(Background: Dinnr was an ad-hoc, same day ingredient delivery service. Select a recipe on our website, and we deliver everything you need…
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The Worst Part of YC
We are going to send out YC summer 2014 interview decisions (both yes and no) before 10 pm PDT tonight. The worst part of our job at YC is rejecting companies. It leaves me feeling down for many...
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Open Sourcing a Failed Startup
Technical articles by Kevin Menard. Topics include Ruby, Java, machine learning, and general computing.
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We Got Accepted into Techstars and Turned Them Down
Yes, we were accepted into one of the nation’s most prestigious accelerator programs and turned them down. So are we crazy? Let us know in the comments.
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Thoughts on Startup School
Perhaps my expectations were misaligned, but I was astonished at how geek-unfriendly the event was. At conferences like BSDCan , one of the major considerations is the availability of power sockets; at Startup School, not only were the power sockets very limited — we were in a theatre with perhaps a dozen outlets…
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If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else
When you look online for advice about entrepreneurship, you will see a lot of "just do it": The best way to get experience... is to start ...
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Quora in the next YC batch
This month, YC will be participating in Quora’s most recent investment round and Quora will be joining this summer’s YC batch. This is a new experiment for us; we’ve funded later-stage companies before, but none close to Quora’s stage. Our hope is that both the company and the YC community will get a lot of value out…
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Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea (2012)
At CMU yesterday, I heard a story about how Yahoo Trip Planner has pretty much zero adoption. It has never taken off, though it remains online even today. Yahoo keeps it around because it's...
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Why Silicon Valley Works
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
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Oculus Joins Facebook
We started Oculus with a vision of delivering incredible, affordable, and ubiquitous consumer virtual reality to the world. We’ve come a long...
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