article thumbnail

Scaling is Hard, Case Study: TripAdvisor

Seeing Both Sides

Chatting with CEO and cofounder Kaufer this week, I was reminded of the fact that the company started with a very different business model in mind. I first met Steve when he was VP of Engineering at Centerline software, a software development tools startup, and I was a junior in college. Comparing TripAdvisor with Akamai.

article thumbnail

The Future of Web Startups

www.paulgraham.com

We could hire employees, but we want to be forced to figure out how to scale investing. This is a problem for founders, because it makes raising money take longer and cost more in legal fees. Larry and Sergey only started Google after making the rounds of the search engines trying to sell their idea and finding no takers.

Web 54