favorite part of Silicon Valley is the cultivation of community. Tech founders are a close-knit group, always offering help to each other, but they circulate actively amidst the broader community too

Venture capitalists are chasing younger and younger founders: the median age of the latest Y Combinator cohort is only 24, down from 30 just three years ago.

By insisting the issue with Uber was largely cultural, Swisher ends up affirming the myth that Uber was not only an inevitable but ultimately good innovation, a few bad apples notwithstanding.

The move made sense for Reddit, particularly as the company looked toward its IPO. Reddit isn’t profitable, and the infrastructure to support third-party apps costs Reddit $10 million per year. Charging for the API could wipe out that loss and potentially be a net positive on the balance sheet. (Microsoft declined to comment if it would pay for Reddit’s data; OpenAI and Google didn’t reply to requests for comment.)

Thanks for writing Micheal, I’m also 30-something ex-Google SWE and currently all-in on solo dev bootstrapping, so your blog is one of my (many) big inspirations.As you note, I do think if your primary objective was to catch up to SWE compensation, your project idea filter was probably not optimal. But it’s still great that you have the spark of something with TinyPilot. One thing I see repeatedly in the indie hacker community is hockey stick success where people struggle to get the engine going but often once they find the spark it takes off. The ten year overnight success.Also worth noting many indie hackers add part time stable income such as contracting as their finances require.If people are looking for a straightforward path where they leave their SWE job and quickly get similar stable income as a bootstrapper, they’re in for an unpleasant surprise. But if you can “make it” you control your own destiny , face unique challenges demanding true creativity, and have uncapped upside in a way you’ll never get at BigTech .I do think content businesses are an easier launch point . Adam Wethan of Tailwind and Nathan Barry of Convertkit are both examples of bootstrappers who self-funded by starting with info products. I think one mental trap for solo devs is to over identify as SWE and not as online entrepreneurs with SWE skills as a particularly helpful asset.Wish you and TinyPilot the best of luck and look forward to future updates.

Perhaps the best piece of advice I ever got from Jeff Bezos was this: Invest in things that don't change. His example was that customers won't wake up one day and wish shipping was slower or the selection of goods poorer. So investing in logistics and warehousing was investing in things that don't change, and will continue to pay dividends for decades.

Over the last year, we’ve met with dozens of startup founders and operators in large companies who deal directly with generative AI. We’ve observed that infrastructure vendors are likely the biggest winners in this market so far, capturing the majority of dollars flowing through the stack. Application companies are growing topline revenues very quickly but often struggle with retention, product differentiation, and gross margins. And most model providers, though responsible for the very existence of this market, haven’t yet achieved large commercial scale.

So, is this the type of company you’d look to fund? Does my company meet the criteria you’re looking for in a new investment?

when an investor sees a Magic Quadrant, they'll think:Can your company actually only differentiate its product on two axes? Does your product beat the competition on just two key benefits or strategies?If that's the case, and your product isn't much different from your competitors, why will people buy it or use it?

this slide actually tells us more about the startup itself, rather than the competition

calculate TAM by running a bottom-up analysis of your industry

A post-money SAFE sets a fixed ownership percentage for the investor, but a pre-money SAFE does not

you are focussing all of your efforts in a very defined range of products or services, and this helps you to be 100% committed to this and dominate that part because your competition is too busy focussing on the main niche

for emerging businesses, how can they stand out from their competitors in a way that people learn to know and trust them? The answer is distinction

If you want to understand how Tesla can become the most valuable car company in the world without needing to spend a dime on advertising, while its competitors futilely buy Superbowl ads, or why 170,000 people pilgrimage annually to Dreamforce for the opportunity to be sold Salesforce products, the answer is that the founders of these companies have created a movement. Obviously, it couldn’t happen if they didn’t also make great products, but marketing is the amplifier of all their other efforts. If sales is like hand-to-hand combat, great marketing is like having an air force.There is a playbook for this. I call it Movement Marketing. It is also known as “earned marketing” because you can’t just buy it, you have to earn it. Unlike paid campaigns, there is no formula for ROI. Earned marketing is about brand, messaging, press, influencers, content — all the things that define who you are. This is undeniably crucial, but since the metrics are hard to quantify, founders often have trouble with it.

I usually recommend that SaaS companies go with the Free Trial approach because it’s easier to implement in the product and coordinate with sales and marketing efforts

“It’s really hard to help Emmett understand anything qualitative,” one former employee says. “It has to be quantitative.”

“We went down the Silicon Valley route—hiring from Facebook, from Twitter,” he says, adding that many recruits had little understanding of gaming or livestreaming and were “unwilling to learn what this community was, why it was special.”

I have already put 6+ hours into researching this idea

four part process to experimentation: hypothesis generation, design, execution and analysis

Why I chose to step down as CEO of CircleUpOver the past year, when I began telling team members, investors, LPs and other stakeholders about my transition, their first question was, inevitably, “Why?” I typically explained that the average founder/CEO of a startup is in the seat for less than five years; I had been with CircleUp for nine, and I was exhausted. But there was so much more to it than that.I don’t remember the first time I told our board that I was exhausted and needed to step down as CEO. I imagine it was around 2016 or 2017, a period defined by stressful business decisions and physical and mental health issues. I later realized that the board interpreted my complaints as “typical founder/CEO exhaustion”. I blame myself for that lack of clarity. For years I did a poor job of communicating the depth of my stress and exhaustion, a problem only compounded by the fact that, at times, I wasn’t even sure of my own feelings. There were stretches of time where I felt horrible — lonely; terrified; depressed. Depression exacerbates exhaustion. But I tried to put on a brave face to make sure the board felt comfortable.

Jobs are multifaceted. They’re never simply about function; they have powerful social and emotional dimensions

We wore many hats and customized our services to suit whoever gave us business

For most software businesses in the US, the problem isn’t technical knowledge anymore. The problem is getting a wedge into distribution — also known as marketing.

This has led to a flurry of many applications being built online – often with multiple teams building the same thing. It is not uncommon to run into 50 different founding teams all trying to build a marketplace for gym trainers. Or 300 founding teams trying re-invent marketing automation.

How to Tell Your Story: A Simple Framework for Startups

Contrast that with an idea that came to me about five years ago. A young man by the name of Brian Chesky came up to me and had this idea that he was going to have an air mattress in his apartment that he rented to people. It would be an air bed and breakfast and I immediately thought: wow, that’s a horrible, horrible idea. Who would want to rent an air mattress out to somebody’s apartment like probably a serial killer?

Amazon integrated customer data and payment information with e-book distribution and its Amazon publishing initiative

shift resources from capturing knowledge — which we've been doing almost exclusively for the past five years — toward packaging and distributing knowledge

Zebra companies are often started by women and other underrepresented founders.

To state the obvious: unlike unicorns, zebras are real.

We believe that developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time.

When VC firms prize time on site over truth, a lucky few may profit, but civil society suffers.

I could have easily chosen a different prepositional phrase. "Convivial Tools in an Age of Big Data.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of DRM.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Venture-Funded Education Technology Startups.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Doxxing and Trolls."

Pero un emprendedor en España o en Latinoamérica que se plantea crear algo desde su casa porque está en paro o porque tiene un empleo que quiere dejar, que a la vez que emprende tiene que pagar las facturas y ocuparse de los niños, y que tiene que enfrentarse a una burocracia mucho más feroz que la estadounidense tiene mucho más complicado aplicar felizmente las recetas de Lean Startup

Sigo convencido de que Lean Startup y las ideas, herramientas y metodologías que le rodean como Customer Development, Business Model Design, Lean UX o Effectuation son la mejor vía para crear una empresa. Pero la interacción con mis lectores y con los alumnos de mis cursos me ha hecho ver que hay problemas para llevar a la práctica estas ideas.

The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing

centralized systems was a less-solved problem (even at far smaller numbers). More importantly, though it was easier due to this setup, we weren’t creating network effects. Though (I believe) we had more people publishing with Blogger than anything else, that didn’t make Blogger better. In fact, it made it worse, because it got slow and harder to add features to.