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Paul Graham on fundraising

Startup Lessons Learned

Its to everyones advantage to let the world think the founders thought of everything. I say this as a founder: the contribution of founders is always overestimated. The danger here is that new founders, looking at existing founders, will think that theyre supermen that one couldnt possibly equal oneself.

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Building a new startup hub

Startup Lessons Learned

They take common stock, not preferred, a fact that the entrepreneurs mentioned to me many times. Inspiring ideas: real-time biz metrics; safe continuous deployment; A/B split testing. Thank you @ericries for drastically altering my perception of agile startup Thank you all so much for your kind words. Expo SF (May.

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Why vanity metrics are dangerous

Startup Lessons Learned

Sure I can build a stock chart, like this one , that shows that eBays stock price went into a four-year decline immediately after "eBay Inc Acquires Dutch Company Marktplaats.nl." Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Youve just experienced vanity metrics hell. Youve just experienced vanity metrics hell.

Metrics 167
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What is a startup?

Startup Lessons Learned

Contrast this with other high-risk situations, like buying a high-risk stock. Although the specific payoff of a specific risky stock is not known, investing in many such stocks can be modeled accurately. Thus a decent financial advisor can give you a reasonably accurate long-term expected return for a set of risky stocks.

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What would you want to tell Washington DC about startups?

Startup Lessons Learned

Sarbanes Oxley has made it impossible to go public reducing financial capital for start-ups and the FASB rules on stock options have made it harder to attract human capital to start-ups. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Support the Startup Founders Visa with a tweet Testing the new Disqus comment system Gov 2.0

DC 90
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Assessing fit with the Wisdom of Crowds

Startup Lessons Learned

Similar mechanisms are at work in the stock market, Google PageRank , and guessing an oxs weight at the state fair. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Expo SF (May.

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Three decisions to make on virtual goods

Startup Lessons Learned

Livelys launch was marred by zillions of sex chat rooms, with people spending hours and hours trying to figure out how to use Livelys stock animations to make their avatars do things that looked kinky. Case Study: Continuous deployment makes releases n. Guess what they wanted to talk about. Subscription or a la carte payments?