DC went to YC to talk OS.
Author: Laura Bennett
For as long as technology startups have been spectacularly on the rise, many more have been spectacularly in decline. Failure is a near certainty when starting a company. Even founders with the right credentials, cash, and customer interest regularly see their businesses crash and burn; the luckier ones manage to pivot their way out of sudden death. The startups that we consider successes are, in many cases, born out of defeat: Slack, for example, started as a gaming company, making a multiplayer game that few people wanted to play.
As if launching Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox weren’t enough, the famous accelerator has had an outsize—and mixed—impact on all of us.This month a successful entertainment-business newsletter written by an influential reporter joined forces with publishing legend Janice Min to form a news startup. Buried in the story was a fascinating detail: The cofounders had signed up to go through the three-month Y Combinator accelerator program.
In the Midwest, Christian entrepreneurs are searching for relief from the corrosive grind of company-building—while some faith leaders preach the gospel of crushing it.
Ten years ago, the entrepreneur-savants running Silicon Valley were treated like royalty. Now we know just how badly their bright ideas can backfire.When Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced they were giving up their “day to day” duties at Alphabet early this month—leaving the heavy lifting to Google CEO Sundar Pichai—an era ended in more ways than one. As much as the news made history for the Mountain View search giant, it was also a fitting end to a cult of founderhood that peaked and crashed during the past 10 years.
In early interviews, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger knew they were being acquired by Facebook at the right moment. Another well timed move: their exit from Instagram.In June 2014, two years after Facebook bought Instagram, I visited Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger to see how things were going. They were exceedingly, outrageously happy. “When acquisitions are on the docket, I think entrepreneurs look to Instagram to say, ‘How’s it gone for them?’” Systrom told me at the time. “We’re just kind of a storybook example.”
You return home to your penthouse apartment after a long day at work auctioning Cryptokitties and other cryptogoods on a peer-to-peer marketplace. You grab a bottle of tangerine-flavored weed soda from the fridge and sink into your couch. With a flick of your hand, the overhead light switches on. A wooden side table, custom-built by a robot in India, holds a box containing your antidepressant patches. You peel off the back and slap one on your arm.
Sometimes, “adult supervision” is where vision and ambition go to die.
You thought founding a company was all about disrupting incumbents, or scaling up, or getting rich? Eric Ries’s 2011 book, The Lean Startup, said no—a startup is a lab. Its purpose is to conduct experiments in a business environment where the only certainty is extreme uncertainty. Actually, there is one other certainty: That popular business books will introduce rafts of new acronyms. According to The Lean Startup, a startup’s purpose is to launch MVPs—“minimum viable products”—into the world to discover whether the founders’ LOFAs—“leap-of-faith assumptions”—pass the reality test. If so, your startup might have a shot at achieving PMF—“product-market fit”—and unleashing exponential growth. If…
Declaring it a “Liberation Day” for American workers, President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced sweeping new tariffs that could impact home prices and mortgage rates. “Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years, but it is not going to happen anymore,” Trump said in remarks at the White House’s Rose Garden. “With today’s action, we are finally going to be able to make America great again, greater than ever before.” The new “reciprocal” tariffs, effective at midnight, include a minimum 10% baseline tax on most trading partners, with proportionally higher levies on goods from countries that impose additional tariffs on U.S. goods. All imported…