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
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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
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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…
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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)
CTO as a Service / Fractional CTO by Sergey Khaladzinski2025155 points114 commentsCareer & Management details
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...