👾 Reddit

I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. I occasionally meet founders who seem to believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with sufficient initial velocity. They want to launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, ... See more

The story of Discord is a story of platform shifts. Jason Citron started his career in game development studios creating some a few titles for Xbox and PlayStation 2 (that's how old he is 😂) that you probably never heard of. In 2008, the "app store" was just announced and Jason thought this would be the perfect time to take the entrepreneurial plu

... See more

It was March 26, 2012. Brian Armstrong posted a self-described “hail mary” on the tech discussion forum Hacker News. YCombinator was interested in his startup, which Armstrong wrote “brings an emerging tech to the masses…and has a good shot at changing the world.” But he had a big problem - he didn’t want to go at it alone, and kept striking out on... See more

For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that worked well.

So here's the story of how we missed Airbnb, one of the best startups to come our way in the past few years.

The Airbnb founders came out of the winter 2009 Y Combinator class. They came to see us during their time at YC. They told us about a great stunt they pulled at the Democratic Convention in Denver (in which Obama was nominated). They bought a... See more