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March 2021
I try to write using ordinary words and simple sentences.
That kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read,
the more deeply readers will engage with it. The less energy they expend on
your prose, the more they'll have left for your ideas.
And the further they'll read... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
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... |
December 2008
A few months ago I read a _New York Times_ article on South Korean cram
schools that said
> Admission to the right university can make or break an ambitious young South
> Korean.
A parent added:
> "In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a
> person's future."
It was s... |
October 2005
The first Summer Founders Program has just finished. We were surprised how
well it went. Overall only about 10% of startups succeed, but if I had to
guess now, I'd predict three or four of the eight startups we funded will make
it.
Of the startups that needed further funding, I believe all have e... |
May 2002
"The quantity of meaning compressed into a small space by algebraic signs, is
another circumstance that facilitates the reasonings we are accustomed to
carry on by their aid."
\- Charles Babbage, quoted in Iverson's Turing Award Lecture
In the discussion about issues raised by [Revenge of the... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
August 2007
_(This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer.
Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But
it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could ... |
January 2016
One advantage of being old is that you can see change happen in your lifetime.
A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more
polarized than it used to be. Culturally we have ever less common ground. The
creative class flocks to a handful of happy cities, abandoning the rest.... |
September 2004
_(This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.)_
I had a front row seat for the Internet Bubble, because I worked at Yahoo
during 1998 and 1999. One day, when the stock was trading around $200, I sat
down and calculated what I thought the price should be. The answer I got was
$12. ... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
March 2009
A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two
words: relentlessly resourceful.
Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one:
hapless. Most d... |
July 2023
If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of
different fields, what would the intersection look like? I decided to find out
by making it.
Partly my goal was to create a guide that could be used by someone working in
any field. But I was also curious about the shape of the in... |
March 2008, rev May 2013
_(This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out what we
do. Even though Y Combinator is now 3 years old, we're still trying to
understand its implications.)_
I was annoyed recently to read a description of Y Combinator that said "Y
Combinator does seed funding for... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
April 2005
This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving [seed
funding](http://ycombinator.com) to a bunch of new startups. It's an
experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than mo... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
September 2012
I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as
counterintuitive as startup investing.
The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a
busin... |
November 2004
_(This is a new essay for the Japanese edition of[Hackers &
Painters](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596006624). It tries
to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.)_
A few years ago an Italian friend of mine travelled by train from Boston to
Providence. Sh... |
October 2007
After the last [talk](webstartups.html) I gave, one of the organizers got up
on the stage to deliver an impromptu rebuttal. That never happened before. I
only heard the first few sentences, but that was enough to tell what I said
that upset him: that startups would do better if they moved to Silicon V... |
July 2007
I have too much stuff. Most people in America do. In fact, the poorer people
are, the more stuff they seem to have. Hardly anyone is so poor that they
can't afford a front yard full of old cars.
It wasn't always this way. Stuff used to be rare and valuable. You can still
see evidence of that if you ... |
September 2001
_(This article explains why much of the next generation of software may be
server-based, what that will mean for programmers, and why this new kind of
software is a great opportunity for startups. It's derived from a talk at BBN
Labs.)_
In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I deci... |
March 2005
_(In the process of answering an email, I accidentally wrote a tiny essay
about writing. I usually spend weeks on an essay. This one took 67 minutes—23
of writing, and 44 of rewriting.)_
I think it's far more important to write well than most people realize.
Writing doesn't just communicate ideas;... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
November 2012
The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to
look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in c... |
April 2009
_Inc_ recently asked me who I thought were the 5 most interesting startup
founders of the last 30 years. How do you decide who's the most interesting?
The best test seemed to be influence: who are the 5 who've influenced me most?
Who do I use as examples when I'm talking to companies we fund? Who do I ... |
May 2008
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around
one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do
more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells
you, above all: you should make more money. T... |
August 2015
I recently got an email from a founder that helped me understand something
important: why it's safe for startup founders to be nice people.
I grew up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman (in the cartoon
it was always a man): a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his
fif... |
September 2004
Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence,
introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion
being, say, that Ahab in _Moby Dick_ was a Christ-like figure.
Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay
really is, and... |
March 2009
_(This essay is derived from a talk at[AngelConf](http://angelconf.org).)_
When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel
investing. Seven years later I still hadn't started. I put it off because it
seemed mysterious and complicated. It turns out to be easier than I expected,... |
April 2021
When intellectuals talk about the death penalty, they talk about things like
whether it's permissible for the state to take someone's life, whether the
death penalty acts as a deterrent, and whether more death sentences are given
to some groups than others. But in practice the debate about the death pen... |
September 2009
Publishers of all types, from news to music, are unhappy that consumers won't
pay for content anymore. At least, that's how they see it.
In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't
really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has
th... |
December 2019
Before I had kids, I was afraid of having kids. Up to that point I felt about
kids the way the young Augustine felt about living virtuously. I'd have been
sad to think I'd never have children. But did I want them now? No.
If I had kids, I'd become a parent, and parents, as I'd known since I was ... |
February 2008
The fiery reaction to the release of [Arc](arc.html) had an unexpected
consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy. The main complaint
of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. After years of
working on it, all I had to show for myself were a few thousand lines of
ma... |
August 2020
Some politicians are proposing to introduce wealth taxes in addition to income
and capital gains taxes. Let's try modeling the effects of various levels of
wealth tax to see what they would mean in practice for a startup founder.
Suppose you start a successful startup in your twenties, and then li... |
June 2021
A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son told me he
couldn't wait to get home to write more of the story he was working on. This
made me as happy as anything I've heard him say — not just because he was
excited about his story, but because he'd discovered this way of working.
Wor... |
March 2006, rev August 2009
Yesterday one of the founders we funded asked me why we started [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com). Or more precisely, he asked if we'd
started YC mainly for fun.
Kind of, but not quite. It is enormously fun to be able to work with Rtm and
Trevor again. I missed that after we s... |
April 2007
A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a
young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that
Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why
they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology
c... |
December 2019
I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of
people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of
possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things.
Even the smartest, most imaginative people are surprisingly conserva... |
December 2020
As I was deciding what to write about next, I was surprised to find that two
separate essays I'd been planning to write were actually the same.
The first is about how to ace your Y Combinator interview. There has been so
much nonsense written about this topic that I've been meaning for years to
... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
October 2005
_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005[Startup
School.](http://startupschool.org))_
How do you get good ideas for [startups](start.html)? That's probably the
number one question people ... |
October 2021
If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he
was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-
sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would
have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special abou... |
March 2011
Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable
[post](http://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb) about missing
[Airbnb](http://airbnb.com). VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's
extraordinarily rare for one to talk about it publicly till long afterward. So
that post is further evidence what a rare bird Fred i... |
July 2020
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ
from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even
incapable of forming such opinions."
� Einstein
There has been a lot of talk about privilege lately. Although the concept is
overused, there is so... |
October 2020
One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the
fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many
great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very
impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to
reach ... |
_Note: The strategy described at the end of this essay didn't work. It would
work for a while, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet on my
work computer. I'm trying other strategies now, but I think this time I'll
wait till I'm sure they work before writing about them._
May 2008
Procrastinatio... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
September 2013
Most startups that raise money do it more than once. A typical trajectory
might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands from something like Y
Combinator or individual angels, then (2) rai... |
August 2005
Thirty years ago, one was supposed to work one's way up the corporate ladder.
That's less the rule now. Our generation wants to get paid up front. Instead
of developing a product for some big company in the expectation of getting job
security in return, we develop the product ourselves, in a startup, a... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
October 2007
_(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)_
There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the
same transformation that technology does when it ... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
May 2005
_(This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.)_
The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft.
Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well establi... |
September 2007
A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It
may not matter all that much where you go to college.
For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college was
more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up. What was I? A student.
To do that... |
March 2005
All the best [hackers](gba.html) I know are gradually switching to Macs. My
friend Robert said his whole research group at MIT recently bought themselves
Powerbooks. These guys are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were
buying Macs at Apple's low point in the mid 1990s. They're about as hardcor... |
December 2019
The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn't something you learned in
any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.
When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student once
told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only what he learned
in it. T... |
August 2011
I realized recently that we may be able to solve part of the patent problem
without waiting for the government.
I've never been 100% sure whether patents help or hinder technological
progress. When I was a kid I thought they helped. I thought they protected
inventors from having their ideas stolen... |
April 2003
_(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at PyCon 2003.)_
It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only
a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive
flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of
stories ... |
1993
_(This essay is from the introduction to_[On Lisp](onlisp.html) _.)_
It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional
elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program
grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of
complexity ... |
April 2008
_(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.)_
About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that
became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then,
but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick.
Another thing w... |
January 2015
My father is a mathematician. For most of my childhood he worked for
Westinghouse, modelling nuclear reactors.
He was one of those lucky people who know early on what they want to do. When
you talk to him about his childhood, there's a clear watershed at about age
12, when he "got interested in m... |
December 2010
I was thinking recently how inconvenient it was not to have a general term for
iPhones, iPads, and the corresponding things running Android. The closest to a
general term seems to be "mobile devices," but that (a) applies to any mobile
phone, and (b) doesn't really capture what's distinctive about th... |
April 2006, rev August 2009
Plato quotes Socrates as saying "the unexamined life is not worth living."
Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, just as
the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills.
A lot of ancient philosophy had the quality — and I don't mean... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
July 2009
Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I ought to explain
precisely what the idea entails.
Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living
expense... |
April 2020
I recently saw a [_video_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o) of TV
journalists and politicians confidently saying that the coronavirus would be
no worse than the flu. What struck me about it was not just how mistaken they
seemed, but how daring. How could they feel safe saying such things?
... |
January 2007
_(Foreword to Jessica Livingston's[Founders at
Work](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590597141).)_
Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and
spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's
that way with most startups too. The ear... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
May 2004
_(This essay was originally published in[Hackers &
Painters](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596006624/104-0572701-7443937).) _
If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best be... |
December 2006
I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. Each
person has things they like, but no one's preferences are any better than
anyone else's. There is no such thing as _good_ taste.
Like a lot of things I grew up believing, this turns out to be false, and I'm
going to try... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
May 2002
"We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about
halfway to Lisp."
\- Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec
In the software business there is an ongoing struggle be... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
September 2010
The reason startups have been using [more convertible
notes](http://twitter.com/paulg/status/22319113993) in angel rounds is that
they make deals close faster. By making it easier for startups to gi... |
November 2004, corrected June 2006
Occam's razor says we should prefer the simpler of two explanations. I begin
by reminding readers of this principle because I'm about to propose a theory
that will offend both liberals and conservatives. But Occam's razor means, in
effect, that if you want to disagree with it, yo... |
February 2002
"...Copernicus' aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one essential
motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...."
\- Thomas Kuhn, _The Copernican Revolution_
"All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his
insistence that an airplane that looked bea... |
December 2020
To celebrate Airbnb's IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be
useful to explain what was special about Airbnb.
What was special about the Airbnbs was how earnest they were. They did nothing
half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview. Sometimes after we
interviewed a s... |
July 2020
One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and
aggressiveness of their conformism. Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system
whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to
independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at
the bottom to a... |
January 2017
Because biographies of famous scientists tend to edit out their mistakes, we
underestimate the degree of risk they were willing to take. And because
anything a famous scientist did that wasn't a mistake has probably now become
the conventional wisdom, those choices don't seem risky either.
Biogra... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
October 2010
Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't
seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous
monuments. But if you look, there are subtle s... |
March 2008
The web is turning writing into a conversation. Twenty years ago, writers
wrote and readers read. The web lets readers respond, and increasingly they
do—in comment threads, on forums, and in their own blog posts.
Many who respond to something disagree with it. That's to be expected.
Agreeing tends ... |
March 2012
Y Combinator's 7th birthday was March 11. As usual we were so busy we didn't
notice till a few days after. I don't think we've ever managed to remember our
birthday on our birthday.
On March 11 2005, Jessica and I were walking home from dinner in Harvard
Square. Jessica was working at an investment ban... |
January 2023
_([_Someone_](https://twitter.com/stef/status/1617222428727586816) fed my
essays into GPT to make something that could answer questions based on them,
then asked it where good ideas come from. The answer was ok, but not what I
would have said. This is what I would have said.)_
The way to get new... |
April 2022
One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth
of the concept of heresy.
In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment
when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:
> Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly... |
December 2020
Jessica and I have certain words that have special significance when we're
talking about startups. The highest compliment we can pay to founders is to
describe them as "earnest." This is not by itself a guarantee of success. You
could be earnest but incapable. But when founders are both formidable (a... |
September 2009
When meeting people you don't know very well, the convention is to seem extra
friendly. You smile and say "pleased to meet you," whether you are or not.
There's nothing dishonest about this. Everyone knows that these little social
lies aren't meant to be taken literally, just as everyone knows that ... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
August 2010
Two years ago I [wrote](http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html#next) about
what I called "a huge, unexploited opportunity in startup funding:" the
growing disconnect between VCs, whose current business... |
March 2006, rev August 2009
A couple days ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a
[patent](http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,631,372.PN.&OS=PN/6,631,372&RS=PN/6,631,372).
It issued in 2003, but no one told me... |
**Like to build things?** Try [Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com).
August 2002
_(This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof
web-based mail reader we built to exercise[Arc](arc.html). An improved
algorithm is described in [Better Bayesian Filtering](better.html).)_
... |
August 2005
_(This essay is derived from a talk at Defcon 2005.)_
Suppose you wanted to get rid of economic inequality. There are two ways to do
it: give money to the poor, or take it away from the rich. But they amount to
the same thing, because if you want to give money to the poor, you have to get
it from... |
February 2003
When we were in junior high school, my friend Rich and I made a map of the
school lunch tables according to popularity. This was easy to do, because kids
only ate lunch with others of about the same popularity. We graded them from A
to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so... |
July 2007
An investor wants to give you money for a certain percentage of your startup.
Should you take it? You're about to hire your first employee. How much stock
should you give him?
These are some of the hardest questions founders face. And yet both have the
same answer:
1/(1 - n)
Whenever you'r... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
August 2008
Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest
part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they
didn't do that. But the second biggest cause o... |
June 2021
It might not seem there's much to learn about how to work hard. Anyone who's
been to school knows what it entails, even if they chose not to do it. There
are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And yet when I ask if I know more
about working hard now than when I was in school, the answer is definitely
... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
Watch how this essay was [written](https://byronm.com/13sentences.html).
February 2009
One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul
Buchheit: it's better to make a few people re... |
March 2005
A couple months ago I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested
in being a "technologist in residence" at a new venture capital fund. I think
the idea was to play Karl Rove to the VCs' George Bush.
I considered it for about four seconds. Work for a VC fund? Ick.
One of my most v... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
November 2005
Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several
rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to
reach the speed where you can shift into the next g... |
January 2016
Since the 1970s, economic inequality in the US has increased dramatically. And
in particular, the rich have gotten a lot richer. Nearly everyone who writes
about the topic says that economic inequality should be decreased.
I'm interested in this question because I was one of the founders of a com... |
February 2008
A user on Hacker News recently posted a
[comment](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116938) that set me thinking:
> Something about hacker culture that never really set well with me was this �
> the nastiness. ... I just don't understand why people troll like they do.
I've thought a lot over the ... |
April 2007
_(This essay is derived from a keynote talk at the 2007 ASES Summit at
Stanford.)_
The world of investors is a foreign one to most hackers—partly because
investors are so unlike hackers, and partly because they tend to operate in
secret. I've been dealing with this world for many years, both as a ... |
October 2015
Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in
spoken language.
Something comes over most people when they start writing. They write in a
different language than they'd use if they were talking to a friend. The
sentence structure and even the words are different. N... |
August 2009
Kate Courteau is the architect who designed Y Combinator's office. Recently we
managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with
architectural projects. Though she'd heard a lot about YC since the beginning,
the last 9 months have been a total immersion.
I've been around the startu... |
March 2012
I'm not a very good speaker. I say "um" a lot. Sometimes I have to pause when
I lose my train of thought. I wish I were a better speaker. But I don't wish I
were a better speaker like I wish I were a better writer. What I really want
is to have good ideas, and that's a much bigger part of being a good w... |
February 2015
One of the most valuable exercises you can try if you want to understand
startups is to look at the most successful companies and explain why they were
not as lame as they seemed when they first launched. Because they practically
all seemed lame at first. Not just small, lame. Not just the first step... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
October 2008
The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be
in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies.
When Microsoft and Apple were founded.
As those examples suggest, ... |
November 2008
One of the differences between big companies and startups is that big
companies tend to have developed procedures to protect themselves against
mistakes. A startup walks like a toddler, bashing into things and falling over
all the time. A big company is more deliberate.
The gradual accumulation ... |
December 2014
American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier
because they say they can't find enough programmers in the US. Anti-
immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we
should train more Americans to be programmers. Who's right?
The technolo... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
August 2010
When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt
like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was
supposed to be what Google turned out to be. ... |
**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).
August 2006, rev. April 2007, September 2010
In a few days it will be Demo Day, when the startups we funded this summer
present to investors. Y Combinator funds startups twice a year, in January and
June. Ten week... |
August 2015
If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should
probably change your name.
The reason is not just that people can't find you. For companies with mobile
apps, especially, having the right domain name is not as critical as it used
to be for getting users. The problem with not ... |
January 2020
When I was young, I thought old people had everything figured out. Now that
I'm old, I know this isn't true.
I constantly feel like a noob. It seems like I'm always talking to some
startup working in a new field I know nothing about, or reading a book about a
topic I don't understand well enough,... |
April 2016
_(This is a talk I gave at an event called Opt412 in Pittsburgh. Much of it
will apply to other towns. But not all, because as I say in the talk,
Pittsburgh has some important advantages over most would-be startup hubs.)_
What would it take to make Pittsburgh into a startup hub, like Silicon Valle... |
April 2008
There are some topics I save up because they'll be so much fun to write about.
This is one of them: a list of my heroes.
I'm not claiming this is a list of the _n_ most admirable people. Who could
make such a list, even if they wanted to?
Einstein isn't on the list, for example, even though he... |
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