Credit where it’s definitely due: this post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie.
Don’t look now, but something remarkable is happening.
Instagram had twelve employees when it was purchased for $700 million; all of its actual computing power was outsourced to Amazon Web Services. Mighty ARM has only 2300 employees, but there are more than 35 billion ARM-based chips… → Read More
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham is a father figure to countless startups he’s helped accelerate, but had never taken a board of directors seat until now. Today he announced he’s accepted board seat with Watsi, a site that lets people donate money to pay the medical bills of needy people. Watsi came out of this season’s Winter 2013 Y Combinator class and is the first non-profit… → Read More
Long before the era of iPads and Snapchats and holographic Tupacs, some of the greatest minds in tech and science spent their life trying to understand weather patterns. Since, we’ve evolved to have an almost overwhelming amount of data on what today’s weather will be like, and it’s entirely possible that we’ve gone overboard with the notion of being ready for a little… → Read More
Before the pitches kicked off at today’s Y Combinator Demo Day, partner Paul Graham said the incubator was stricter than ever when selecting the current batch — there are 47 companies demonstrating today, compared to 75 in the last session.
“There are hardly any startups in this batch that are bad,” Graham said.
For that reason, he claimed that it will be just as hard for investors at this… → Read More
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham just published a blog post suggesting a new way to handle handshake deals, i.e. verbal commitments for investments and other transactions.
That kind of commitment can be a necessary prelude to a more formal agreement. Graham writes: “Things can happen fast in the startup world … so both investors and founders need a way to reserve space in a transaction.”… → Read More
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham tweeted today that the accelerator’s 464 startup graduates (prior to its current batch) have raised an average of $3.18 million in funding each, which means YC’s companies have landed a total of just under $1.5 billion. → Read More
I wrote this post with my voice. I made no changes, save for a few typo corrections, and used no keyboard. That’s probably why it’s so bad.
It’s an experiment of mine. The hypothesis is whether or not a keyboardless world will change writing. And make no mistake, at some point we will live in a keyboardless world. → Read More
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham tweeted today that YC’s 380 companies (prior to the current batch) have raised $1,048,274,000. Y Combinator, which launched in 2005, takes on two classes of startups per year into their three month program, during which they mentor and connect the founders and invest in the companies. → Read More
As a founding partner at Y Combinator, Paul Graham has seen more startup pitches than the average Joe. In a new essay, called “Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas”, Graham makes the case that the ideas with the most disruptive potential also happen to be frightening due to the sheer ambition they would require from entrepreneurs to turn them into reality.
Yes, there is an amazing amount of… → Read More
In episode II of Erick Schonfeld’s Founder Stories interview with Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston, Houston describes how releasing a demo video to Hacker News during Dropbox’s early days catapulted his company into elite company. → Read More
Y Combinator has just unveiled the dates and times of its 7th Annual Startup School; 2011′s event will take place on October 29th at Stanford University, where hundreds will gather to listen to talks about entrepreneurship and innovation by some of the Valley’s most influential founders and investors. → Read More
During Paul Graham’s office hours at Disrupt NYC, one of the startups chosen to pitch to the Y Combinator co-founder was Emotely, a company that converts your smartphone into a wireless controller of web apps and games. Emotely Founder and CEO Francois Laberge was nowhere to be found, at which point TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington said that he remembered liking Emotely and that it was too bad, because… → Read More
Paul Graham and Y Combinator just got the Wired treatment. Steven Levy writes a long and loving article which evokes what it’s like to go through the program (or at least what it’s like to be a fly on the wall watching startups who go through the program). A big part of the Y Combinator experience is learning from Paul Graham, who is like a Jedi master for startups. Graham is famous for his… → Read More
With more than 200 deals since 2005, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham knows how to size up a young team of entrepreneurs. However, he didn’t get it right from day one.
On Friday, we got a chance to talk to Graham after his morning panel with SV Angel’s Ron Conway. He discussed how his strategy has evolved over the past five years and why the balance of power is shifting in Silicon Valley. See videos… → Read More
Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, Michael Arrington sat down with investors Ron Conway and Paul Graham. Obviously, these are two of the biggest names in early-stage investing (with SV Angel and Y Combinator, respectively).
Both Conway and Graham had some interesting data to share. Conway, in particular, was able to give some great numbers because he’s recently done an audit… → Read More
Every so often, venture capitalist Larry Cheng puts out a list of the top VC blogs. Previously, he ranked the blogs by how many subscribers they have on Google Reader. But now he’s changed his methodology and is ranking them by average monthly unique visitors, based on Compete data. He just came out with his new global ranking for the fourth quarter of 2009. Below are the top ten blogs from… → Read More
Last week, something turned. We found out that not only are we in a recession, but it started a year ago. Tech layoffs went into overdrive (12,000 at AT&T, 600 at Adobe, 130 at Real Networks), bringing the total unemployed tech workforce to at least 90,000, by our count. Even Facebook decided to indefinitely postpone an earlier plan to allow employees to sell some stock privately.
Capital… → Read More
Bureaucracy kills innovation. We all know that. But why? Partly, it’s because bureaucracy grows out of prudence, a desire not to repeat the mistakes of the past. With the current economic crisis, for example, you can be sure that a lot more checks will be put into place—both in Washington and in corporate boardrooms—to prevent the excesses that got us into this situation from happening… → Read More
A financial nuclear winter may be upon us, but many startups will still survive and even thrive in this environment. Y Combinator’s Paul Graham argues that, in fact, now may be the best time to launch a startup. In an essay titled “Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy,” he notes that “what matters is who you are, not when you do it.”
The economy might be going down the tubes and investors… → Read More
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