Buy Don't Build
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Startup Financial Modeling: What is a Financial Model? (2016)
This series is the result of a friendly debate I had recently with Troy Henikoff (former Techstars Chicago Accelerator Managing Director) regarding the best...
Research Says Solo Founders Perform Better
A recent study suggests that: "Solo founders are more than twice as likely to own an ongoing, for-profit venture than two or more founders
SaaS Financial Model
How to build a SaaS financial model you'll actually use: operating model, revenue forecast, hiring plan, scenarios, and forecast vs actuals.
How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. It’s been updated with new information about the U.S. Paycheck Protection program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan progra…
Pricing Low-Touch SaaS
How to approach pricing and packaging a new SaaS app, by example
Fast-Growing Remote Startups
Note: Enter your email to get notified when we launch our job board for hot remote companies! “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, get on, don’t ask what seat.” -Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook One of the greatest myths about remote work is that there aren’t phenomenal companies that are hiring remotely. […]
Two Years to Make $10 in Software Revenue
No Idea What We're Doing Do What Makes Money People Using Our Free Tool We Made $10 I know what you’re thinking. “That title has to be a typo. No one
Is Y Combinator worth it?
Back in late 2016, I started Armory [Http://www.armory.io]in my garage (pictured above) with my two co-founders. We also applied to Y Combinator. I often…
YC S20 Remote Batch
We have decided to run the S20 batch remotely, because amid the COVID-19 crises, the safety of founders and YC staff is our top priority. Interviews for the batch will be remote, and office hours, evening talks, and meetups throughout the batch will all take place over video conferencing, as well as on our online…
Real-Life Angel Investing Returns 2012–2016
I have been doing angel investing since 2012 after the Facebook IPO. Since then I have invested in more than 150+ startups. 50+ of them…
Reid Hoffman's $30M bet: Send partners, not cash, to startups
Search through thousands of startup jobs, across any location or remote, hiring for software engineers, product managers, designers, marketing, sales, and more.
Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)
October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
How to sell to 20M software devs with amazing onboarding
20M software developers in the world— if you can convince this set of people in the world to use your software, you've got a very very valuable startup. Today I wanted to sit down with the folks...
What I Learned About SaaS at Buildium
Buildium sold for over half a billion dollars. Here's what I learned leading the marketing team over the course of 5 years.
The Cadence: How to Operate a SaaS Startup
You think you need a COO. What you really need is an operating philosophy.
YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
This article contains a list of the top 50 YC software startups (sourced from the October 2019 YC Top Companies page). It also contains aggregated statistics for valuations and back-end programming languages used. Values in this article are sourced, but I cannot guarantee their accuracy. Find me on Twitter…
YC Startup School: Build Sprint and Equity-Free Grants
We’re excited to announce our first-ever YC Build Sprint. This is a 4-week period to work intensively towards a defined goal alongside a community of thousands of other founders. The sprint will kick off on August 24 and be administered through our free Startup School platform. Also, we’ll be awarding 20 grants of…
Simple Math to Set Up a Sales Team
How to structure quotas, compensation, and territories for a new sales team.
Why There Aren't More Googles (2008)
April 2008 Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.
Lessons from building and growing an open source SaaS
Here are some lessons learned from building and growing an open source SaaS startup in the highly competitive web analytics market.
Sequoia Capital memo to their portfolio founders on Coronavirus
Here is a note that we sent to Sequoia founders and CEOs today to provide guidance on how to ensure the health of their business while…
SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
The unassailable advantage that big cloud providers like AWS and Azure have over the rest of the SaaS industry isn’t their quality or pace of innovation; it’s that they’re a single point of purchase for a variety of services. If there was a single vendor that large corporations could contract with and pay for SaaS…
The Truth About Starting a Startup
(I wrote this for YC’s Future Founders Conference for Women. I’ll add the recording when it becomes available. The actual talk I gave on November 18th should include bonus streams of unconscious...
Lies, Damned Lies, and Stock-Based Compensation
Why many "profitable" public technology companies actually aren't