Tag: startups

The Uncomfortable Truth About Why Your Side Project Isn't Taking Off

10 January 2026

You shipped it. It works. The code is clean. The architecture is solid. And nobody cares. You're refreshing your analytics. Posting on Hacker News. Wondering if you should add that one feature. Maybe the landing page needs work. Maybe you should try Product Hunt again. Here's what's actually happening: you've moved your biggest risk into […]

YCombinator? I'll do it

21 July 2014

One day last November, I was sitting in the student cafeteria, at Stanford University in California with Josh catching up with Paul, an old friend of mine who was studying there. We'd had just ordered a coffee from Starbucks, naively answering telling the barista, "yes, we would like cream", so now we were eyeing up […]

Notes on a book: Founders at Work

14 April 2014

Yesterday, I finally completed Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. The book is a collection of interviews conducted by Jessica Livingston of YCombinator with cofounders and key people of a great deal of well known (and in some cases, less well known, but notable) companies. Because each chapter is a different interview with a different person, […]

Alexis Onhanian, co-founder of Reddit: some questions, some answers.

23 September 2013

I asked Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the reddit, several (hopefully interesting) questions during one of his relatively frequent AMA's (Q&A sessions). Alexis was the largely nontechnical guy who built redddit over a summer during the first Y Combinator (YC) programme, with his technical colleague Steve Huffman, and later sold it to Conde Nast (though he […]

Does CBS "get" digital? CNET is dead. Last.fm is killing itself. Is it too late to turn the tide?

15 January 2013

CBS, the media conglomerate, are verging on irritating me. They've effectively just killed CNET through a disastrous corporate decision, effectively killing the impartiality of the organisation. When high profile journalists quit, citing that their impartiality has been called into question, and the Editor-in-chief explains the incident in an statement using the line: I could have […]