EFF Outlines Plan to Fix the Broken Patent System
San Francisco - The U.S. patent system is in crisis, but there are clear steps Congress and the White House can take to mitigate the impact of vague patents, patent trolls, and a weak legal process to protect competition and creativity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains in a new...
How I killed app sales by going freemium
Why going freemium may not be the best idea for your app
The Social Radar: What I Did at Y Combinator
Culture matters for startups. For a startup to succeed, it must have a culture that reflects what it wants to achieve. This is one of my areas of expertise. I've spent the past decade focusing on Y...
Coursera is phasing out free certificates
Coursera’s free Statements of Accomplisments die a quiet death.
Create your own MailChimp clone for $5 a month with Sendy
Possibly the one you're Googling about.
Demoralize Your Teams Quickly and Efficiently with Micromanagement (2010)
Apparently I’ve earned the dubious distinction of having become an expert in project failure. I’ve always had an interest in project failure—Jenny and I have been doing our “Why Projects Fa…
Thunderbird Usage Continues to Grow
We’re happy to report that Thunderbird usage continues to expand. Mozilla measures program usage by Active Daily Installations (ADI), which is the number of pings that Mozilla servers receive as installations do their daily plugin block-list update. This is not the same as the number of active users, since some users…
A Decade at Google
One of the key challenges you face in an industrial research lab is how to choose your projects. You want your projects to be interesting research but also contribute to your company. As a junior researcher, you’re typically in the situation of choosing a project to join, while later in your career you are expected to…
The Electric Car
The electric car is going to take over the world. Soon. Let me explain. 75% of US consumers and over 85% of US millennials own smartphones. Perhaps more amazing is that 1/4 of people in the...
Joining a Different YC
I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining Y Combinator full-time. My job is to help our companies make hardware people want faster and better than ever before. Fortunately, our alumni are the best resource in the world for this: they’ve built some of the most innovative startups of the last decade. Coupled with our…
YC Open Office Hours
Earlier this fall, we announced our first Open Office Hours [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-open-office-hours-for-black-and-hispanic-founders] where founders got to meet one-on-one with YC partners. We piloted the program with Black and Latino founders, over 650 founders applied in under a week, and we were able…
Forging an Alliance for Royalty-Free Video
Things are moving fast for royalty-free video codecs. A month ago, the IETF NETVC Working Group had its first meeting and two weeks ago Cisco announced Tho
Demystifying SEO with experiments
Building the platform where people around the world come to search, save and shop
Docker Acquires Tutum
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
Hey startup parasites: We don't have time for you
I am a good bullshit detector. Apparently, not good enough to have sensed that Keiretsu Forum and Collision Conference are parasites. Co...
The Day Google Decided HttpWatch Was ‘Unwanted Software’
This blog post isn’t about HTTP performance or HttpWatch itself but you may find it useful if you advertise a software product with Google Adwords. Hopefully, you’ll also find our conversation with Google amusing! What Happened ? We received an email like this: Subject: Your AdWords account: Ads...
Why Red Hat Acquired Ansible
Today, we announced a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, a popular IT automation tool launched in early 2013. Like in any acquisition, customers and partners will likely have a number of questions, so let me get straight to the point and cover the top three questions I anticipate: Why an IT automation solution?…
How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)
Academic systems rely on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. Drawing on data from the US, Germany and the UK, Alexandre Afonso looks at how…
Inspiration vs. Imitation
An indie design engineer based in Brooklyn.
A YouTube built for gamers
As a kid, I spent hours on the living room couch playing video games with friends, taking turns trying to beat Ganon in "Ocarina of Time" and trading Pokémon until I had…