Tag: startups
Making Claude Cowork actually useful
Every article I read about "AI agents for work" tells me the same things. Clean up my inbox. Summarize my meetings. Draft my emails. Turn rough notes into polished decks. Keep my calendar tidy. These are all lovely ideas. They are also, almost…
Oregon AI Accelerator reveals inaugural cohort
I’ve been nudging folks to see if anyone had any details about who was selected for the new Oregon AI Accelerator. And all of that nudging finally paid off. Curious — like I was — about who they selected…? Here’s the list of the 20 companies they picked.
Three ways to immediately engage with folks from the Portland startup community
If you're looking to get connected quickly, here are a few tips to get you started.
How we built user behavior analysis with multi-modal LLMs (in 5 not-so-easy steps)
PostHog captures a lot of user behavior data — the pages people visit, the buttons they click, and everything in between, all captured as events and session recordings . By “a lot,” I mean billions of events and terabytes of S3 snapshots. Watching…
Lame Duck Teams
At big software companies, you end up with a lot of teams who exist far longer than they need to.
8 learnings from 1 year of agents – PostHog AI
Today we launch PostHog AI, the AI agent built into PostHog . A year in the making, we've gone a long way from our first chat prototype made over a hackathon . It all started with just one tool: "create trends chart" - and no real agentic…
Customer support is not thriving
Some thoughts about what makes good customer support and how I was failed by one company.
Implementing an unlimited PTO policy
Useful tips on creating an unlimited PTO policy. I used to think these were more accounting hacks than real benefits - but I've changed my mind over time.
Beyond ✨Shiny✨ Degrees: World-changing innovations from unexpected places
Public investments in education and research are a no-brainer, and these examples of game-changing innovations that came from "low value" fields of study tell you why.
Beyond ✨Shiny✨ Degrees: World-changing innovations from unexpected places
Public investments in education and research are a no-brainer, and these examples of game-changing innovations that came from "low value" fields of study tell you why.
Summary: How to Pitch Your Startup
A handout based on the "How to Pitch Your Startup" talk of YC Startup School that I found very useful
Great Startups Run on Feedback
[Jen Dennard at Startup Soup] A culture of open, direct feedback is important for any organization to foster. Jen Dennard has some great tips here: "Like most things, the key to getting the value is to make it a habit. Set aside time during 1:1s or make a recurring team meeting (like a monthly retro) to create space for feedback and learnings. Make sure to include critical and positive feedback to help build confidence while driving progress. Ask for feedback on new processes and team goals."
Being recruited as a staff+ engineer
Thoughts around what makes recruiting messages effective.
Minimum Viable Startup Operations
[Jean Hsu and Jen Dennard] This is a good inaugural post from two people who really have lived the startup operations life many times over: "We think of the operations part of a startup like getting dinner on the table. Sure, some days, you might try a new and involved recipe, but most days, you just need to get something good enough on the table FAST, so that you can devote more time to other family and life priorities. This is where the concept of minimum viable operations comes in. It’s ab
Founder Mode
[Paul Graham] "In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it." Please forgive the Paul Graham link: this is a genuinely good point about running companies. And I don't think it's limited t
Why your favorite apps and creators all pivot in January
The new year is a time for change. But why do so many apps and creators pivot in January? We explore the psychology behind the new year's pivot.
Why your favorite apps and creators all pivot in January
The new year is a time for change. But why do so many apps and creators pivot in January? We explore the psychology behind the new year's pivot.
Shipposting
Cringeposting about Shipping for the new year
Braden Sidoti - Clerk
Braden Sidoti, CTO of Clerk, breaks down authentication complexity, session management challenges, and how Clerk evolved beyond just auth.
Isaac Schlueter - npm, Tier
Isaac Schlueter shares the creation story of npm, early Node.js days, and his new pricing platform Tier that's changing how products handle monetization.
Field of Bankruptcies
It’s hard out there trying to do something new, which is why we want to look back on some of the notable failed sports leagues.
Learn from me: a Dunning-Kruger expert
Drawing on the Dunning-Kruger Effect to propel tech progress is like using a slingshot to travel into space: Leaving our comfort zone to learn from experts gives us the momentum to break through boundaries and break records.
Learn from me: a Dunning-Kruger expert
Drawing on the Dunning-Kruger Effect to propel tech progress is like using a slingshot to travel into space: Leaving our comfort zone to learn from experts gives us the momentum to break through boundaries and break records.
Tools for building a new company
I spent the last week spinning up a new company for the first time since 2017. Here are the tools I used.
Tools for building a new company
I spent the last week spinning up a new company for the first time since 2017. Here are the tools I used.
Let’s Go To The Tape
Why Memorex, Silicon Valley’s first true startup, evolved into something of a ghost kitchen of computing.
How we monetized our open source devtool
So, you’ve decided to build an open-source product. While your choice is highly commendable, the resounding applause from devs on GitHub and Hacker News won’t pay the bills. At some point, you’ll need to monetize your product to sustain its…
Funding independence
When IndieVC arrived six years ago, it represented an exciting alternative to traditional venture investments. While revenue-based investing wasn't new, Indie made it mainstream, and started an important conversation: VC isn't appropriate for every business, so what's available for revenue-first, independent businesses that want to shoot for profitability instead of unicorn growth? I was gutted today to read about its demise: We’ve not been shy in sharing the challenges of departing from the w
Dr. Koop’s Digital Korner
How famed U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, at the age of 82, became an internet entrepreneur, and why his namesake website burned out, fast.
Brooksmarks Feb 14th 2020
Brooksmarks January 2nd 2020
Brooksmarks Aug 18th 2019
Michael Wolff’s Internet Book Empire
The Trump administration tell-all scribe has a history with digital publishing that goes way back. In fact, he edited one of the first guides to the internet.
Google’s Zombie
Why FeedBurner, a service that Google once bought for $100 million, has become the one service it literally can’t kill. Here's why the service lingers.
All Sock Puppets Go To Heaven
If someone were to create an online store like Pets.com today, it probably would've worked. So why did it fail miserably back in 2000? A few reasons.
Doing user research, paper prototyping, financial modeling, ...
Doing user research, paper prototyping, financial modeling, application design and development, sales, marketing, PR, lunch runs. #startups
Software factories vs software universities
I've worked in startups for almost my entire career - sometimes my own, sometimes companies started by other people. I'm good at what I do, and I love it: I get to create tools that empower people to do things they previously couldn't, or that were substantial obstacles. Usually that involves some kind of democratization; a righting of an inequality of access. I love creating these platforms, I love watching people use them, and I love evolving them in partnership with the people who use them.
Punching above your weight
I wrote about doing great work at a small startup like latakoo over on Quora: whatever needs to be done You can read the whole post over here. I really like the Quora blog system. So much so that I've restarted my old blog, The Internet is People, over there (although this will remain my primary blog).
Recipes for startup failure
Paul Graham's essay, How to Get Startup Ideas, is long but very much worth reading. Normally I'd pull a quote, but it's a valuable piece from start to finish, and it's hard to know what to choose. Go read it, then come back. He makes clear that, more than anything else, if you want to be a tech entrepreneur you need to live in the future and build what's missing. That's an important idea, which we can break into parts: * Have a great idea * Build it. Sounds simple, right? But that second bu
Startups and growth
Y Combinator founder Paul Graham's essays are invaluable if you want to be a part of the startup ecosystem. His latest, Startup = Growth, is required reading, and defines, once and for all, the difference between a "startup" and a "new business": [...] Starting a startup is thus very much like deciding to be research scientist: you're not committing to solve any specific problem; you don't know for sure which problems are soluble; but you're committing to try to discover something no one knew b
10 rules for startups
1. The user isn't the product being sold. The user is the customer. 2. Startups become big by empowering their customers with great products and services that allow them to do things that were previously difficult or impossible. 3. A company is a group of people with a shared goal. 4. Everyone deserves a chance to make progress on meaningful work. 5. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. 6. You aren't Steve Jobs, so don't be a jerk. 7. Meetings are toxic, but necessary. Manage them in a const
Bootstraps
In the comments to this 37signals blog post (which is excellent), dhh and commenter Dave Christiansen collaboratively coined a term for startup companies that aim to go into the black as soon as possible and grow under their own steam: bootstraps. I'm in love with this. Bootstraps give entrepreneurs full control over their businesses, without interference from venture capitalists or other interests, and put the onus on finding an actual business model that works on day one. To me, it seems like
Some lessons from the startups at TechCrunch Disrupt
Be clear. Know what you're selling. Our backdrop set it out plainly: "Send video fast. Make video easy." More than a few journalists said we had the best poster of the day. Build value. If your company allows other companies to build value more efficiently, you're onto a winner. Mostly this has meant creating advertising of one kind or another - display ads, branded video pages, and so on. (The best way to get rich in a gold rush is to sell shovels. Just saying.) Be gorgeous. A slick user inte
Confessions of an entrepreneur's wife
This article is long, but worth reading to the end: He came home and lay on the couch for a week, confused and a little lost. With the long overdue luxury of time and hindsight (and bed rest dictated by a bad case of bronchitis), he analyzed the past year's activity. He believed that the two board members and the slow-paying investment group were planning to bankrupt the company in order to buy it cheaply out the back end. Following my post yesterday about becoming a tech entrepreneur, Phaedra
Some things to consider if you're deciding whether to be a tech entrepreneur
I was taken by Status.net founder Evan Promodou's post the other day: Hackers make things; entrepreneurs make things that make things. This is a pretty succinct explanation of the difference between an entrepreneur and a hacker, and, I must confess, not one I fully understood when we originally set out to build Elgg. (It was implicitly present in my previous projects, and certainly has been in my projects since.) In short, it's not enough to build something amazing. Being an entrepreneur is a
Build what you know
I wrote a piece for 24 Ways To Start, the entrepreneur’s advent calendar: The web isn’t just a platform; nor is it a market. It’s a movement. Think of the success stories of the past five years: Twitter, Facebook, Google, GroupOn. Twitter and Facebook changed the way people communicate and made social networking mainstream (Mark Zuckerberg was even just named Time’s Person of the Year for 2010). Google makes it its mission to make the world’s information accessible to all. GroupOn, meanwhile, g