Board

Seed round slides from Coinbase at YCombinator's demo day 2012.

This is the pitchdeck we used to raise half a million dollars from Angel investors. More here: http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/98034/The-Pitch-Deck-We-Use…

AppNexus opens the vault and shares its very first seed funding pitch deck with First Round.

AppNexus opens the vault and shares its very first seed funding pitch deck with First Round.

I’ve said a bunch of times on this blog that the perfect pitch is a very short intro to provide context followed immediately by a demo. Last night at the NY Tech Meetup, John Britton of our portfolio company Twilio showed how it is done. If you do a lot of pitches, spend the six […]

The full-length online course on UI design: color, typography, layout, design process, and more. Includes downloadable resources, homework, and a student community.

Economic models and the perfect role

Any creation, be it a piece of art, physical object, or software, can be separated into what I’ll call a “core competency” and “extras”. The core competency is essentially the reason that people want that creation. The extras are things that can make it

Welcome from Hacker News! I have 10+ years experience in software engineering at a variety of companies from “Big N" to startups. I write a weekly blog post discussing various topics about working as a software engineer, running a company, and ideas on tech. It’s completely free to subscribe, so please do so if you find this content interesting.

Don’t worry, Y Combinator fans, you’ll be able to write off this entire opinion piece as the disgruntled musings of “a failed startup founder who was never able to get into Y Combinator,” because seen through one lens, that’s exactly what I am. But, damn it, for a while there, being a Y Combinator company […]

Reading self help is but a form of taking advice. Most of it is bullshit. But here's how to do it.

Six surprising implications from treating self-help as technê.

Amy Hoy's guide to shipping side projects, books, businesses and software — basically, any product you'd like to launch.

WMR App

How to split up your large, complex, frontend codebases into simple, composable, independently deliverable apps.

We've seen significant benefits from introducing microservices, which have allowed teams to scale the delivery of independently deployed and maintained services. Unfortunately, we've also seen [...]

Techniques, strategies and recipes for building a modern web app with multiple teams using different JavaScript frameworks.

Why aligning incentives with your customers is key to capturing the value you create.

When I first joined Tailscale, I was horrified to learn that “the database” was a single JSON file that was rewritten on any change. We migrated to something better.

A prediction that all developer platforms and infrastructure platforms will converge to Kubernetes.

Why what was previously Google's biggest strength might prevent it from innovating in the future.

Platform teams are everywhere it seems – so certainly not dead, but are they a good idea for most companies?

GitHub stars are a 'Like' and 'Follow' button for GitHub repositories. When users star a repository, they get updates in their home feed about project releases. GitHub star growth is surprisingly linear when graphed, even for projects with underlying exponential growth. Why? First, why even care? Many open-source projects track stars because they don't have other great metrics about their top of funnel. Developers will be first to tell you that "stars don't matter." And to some degree, they do

For the last few years, usage-based pricing has been an excellent strategy for SaaS companies. But there's a question of how it will affect companies in a downturn. Everyone was looking toward Snowflake, one of the largest SaaS companies with usage-based pricing. One should note that at high contract values, usage-based pricing looks more like subscription-based pricing. Committed spend and negotiated discounts help companies have more predictable spend at scale. However, sometimes usage-based

The eight fallacies of distributed systems come from different engineers at Sun Microsystems. The first four are from Bill Joy and Tom Lyon (co-founders of Sun). Five, six, and 7 come from L. Peter Deutsch (designer of PostScript). The last is attributed to James Gosling (lead designer of Java). 1. The network is reliable 2. Latency is zero 3. Bandwidth is infinite 4. The network is secure 5. Topology doesn't change 6. There is one administrator 7. Transport cost is zero 8. The network

When competing against a cloud hyperscaler, a database is an excellent place to start. Low churn (data gravity), expensive products (often not fully utilized), and naturally built-in net dollar retention (databases rarely shrink). A look at two separate but converging spaces of database-as-a-service (DBaaS) and backend-as-a-service (BaaS). DBaaS is what it sounds like – e.g., vanilla or specialized managed Postgres or MySQL. BaaS extends the product offering – usually with building blocks like

Product velocity is the number one indicator of a successful platform. One source of product velocity comes from having a differentiated backbone that creates the opportunity to bolt on existing functionality in a new way quickly. You built a differentiated backbone by holding one primitive constant (the network, database, metrics, etc.) and optimizing around that. For example, look at Functions – are they built on the network (Cloudflare Workers), database (Snowflake UDFs), or metrics (Datadog