How to Fund a Startup

How to Write a Killer Resume, for Software Engineers by Niniane Wang, May 2005 Update March 2013: My company Minted is hiring software engineers! We are a consumer web startup in San Francisco, and welcome you to apply. Please see the job description and then email your resume to me! In the past few years working as a software engineer for Google (and previously a dev lead at Microsoft), I've screened hundreds of resumes, to make the decision on whether to proceed with the interview process. Increasingly, friends and relatives ask me for suggestions on improving their resumes, so I've created a a list of the most common pitfalls I've seen, and how to avoid them: 1. * Worked with a team of 3 on an e-mail plugin. The screener is reading your resume with the mindset of judging 1. how challenging this work was, 2. how relevant it is to their own company, so you need to be specific. * Implemented in C++ an Outlook e-mail plugin which performs automatic backups. 2. Sometimes I will see a list of bullet points: 3. 4. 5. Back to my home page.

The Next Net 25: 25 startups that are reinventing the web - Mar. 3, 2006 A new Web revolution is picking up steam, and the next Google or Microsoft could emerge from the companies that are in the vanguard. SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Things are really crackling in Silicon Valley these days. There's the frenzied startup action, the rising rivers of VC cash, even the occasional bubble-icious long-term stock prediction (Google $2,000, anyone?). There's so much happening that the buzzword recently employed to try to encapsulate the era -- "Web 2.0" -- now seems hopelessly inadequate, defined and redefined into near meaninglessness by squadrons of aspiring entrepreneurs, marketers, and other fortune hunters. So it seems a particularly useful moment to wave away the smoke and home in on what's really core. Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. We are in the early stages of what might be better thought of as the Next Net.

The Cost of Bootstrapping Your App: The Figures Behind DropSend (part one) What does it actually cost? When we built DropSend, it was our first enterprise level web app and I had no way to predict how much it would cost to build. Frustratingly, no one would share their figures with me either. So we had to learn the hard way. Yuck. In order to help you avoid this pain, I’m going to walk you through, step-by-step, the costs involved in building an enterprise web app, on a budget. What’s the big deal? Why is it only recently that small companies (Carson Systems is only two full time employees and a set of 3 part-time freelancers) are able to build large scale web apps? Broadband is widespread so your potential audience is larger Average people are comfortable with web apps (Gmail, Online banking, etc) Hardware is dirt cheap Open source platforms are virtually free Definition of the terms As I’m talking about "Building enterprise web apps on a budget", I need to define two things: I’ve heard some comments about my £30K figure not being "on a budget". Use common sense.

Cardsharp on Software Posted by cardsharp under Entrepreneurial Development [13] Comments Ask 10 developers what they think about startups. You'll get a mix of responses involving risk, finanancial deprivation, and stress. But the one thing everybody will mention without fail is overtime. The XP crowd is vehemently opposed to overtime. No Overtime. There is also strong evidence that the whole concept of overtime is a myth. Overtime for salaried workers is a figment of the naive manager's imagination. Startups typically attempt to compensate for this effect by hyper-motivating employees using stock options. Does this mean that overtime is not useful? Rules for Startup Overtime Remember that it's not free.

Y Combinator The Word "Hacker" April 2004 To the popular press, "hacker" means someone who breaks into computers. Among programmers it means a good programmer. But the two meanings are connected. To programmers, "hacker" connotes mastery in the most literal sense: someone who can make a computer do what he wants—whether the computer wants to or not. To add to the confusion, the noun "hack" also has two senses. Believe it or not, the two senses of "hack" are also connected. Hacking predates computers. It is sometimes hard to explain to authorities why one would want to do such things. Those in authority tend to be annoyed by hackers' general attitude of disobedience. This attitude is sometimes affected. But even factoring in their annoying eccentricities, the disobedient attitude of hackers is a net win. For example, I suspect people in Hollywood are simply mystified by hackers' attitudes toward copyrights. Partly because some companies use mechanisms to prevent copying. Data is by definition easy to copy.

randomnoise » Blog Archive » The Five Buck Idea Face it, startups are cool. Anyone that made it through the 90s remembers that startups were cool back then. Well guess what? They are even cooler now. So, how do you get in on the game? Let’s set the stage by thinking back to the atmosphere of the late 90s… Maybe you were in graduate school making $1000/mo with no health insurance, working on some project that you thought was cool about two years ago. But you also remember all your other friends that graduated with a BS in whatever from your school. Ah, the good old days. That’s right. Like Paul Graham says, it’s really all in the idea. You aren’t looking to build a service that solves world hunger, or manages the schedules of entire companies, or does anything really that complicated sounding. You don’t want an idea that your mom would be proud to tell her friends about (my son works with lasers ). Once you have this idea, the only trick is getting it out there and doing a good implementation. Don’t have a business plan. And why?

Ideas for Startups October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School.) How do you get good ideas for startups? That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask. Well, maybe not. I think this is often the case. I also have a theory about why people think this. If coming up with an idea for a startup equals coming up with a million dollar idea, then of course it's going to seem hard. Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Questions The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. The initial idea is just a starting point-- not a blueprint, but a question. There's a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections in a way a question doesn't. A question doesn't seem so challenging. Upwind Doodling What happens in that shower? Notes

Sergey Brin ( 7-Jan-1996) Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 (415)723-9273sergey@cs.stanford.edu Education September 1993 - Present: Stanford University, Computer Science Department Ph.D.: expected June 1997. September 1990 - May 1993: University of Maryland B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science. Publications "Near Neighbor Search in Large Metric Spaces", S.Brin, Proceeding of Very Large Data Bases (VLDB) 1995. "Copy Detection Mechanisms for Digital Documents", S. Research Projects GNAT's This project involved indexing multidimensional data for near-neighbor searches. I worked on a project with Hector Garcia-Molina involving automated detection of copyright violations. Current Research Directions and Hacks Movie Ratings A new project I have just started is going to generate personalized movie ratings for users. LaTeX to HTML Converter I've been hacking on a LaTeX to HTML converter which was used to generate the HTML versions of the papers above. Work Experience Dr.

Tips for Startup Companies The author of this article has started about six companies over the years with collective and cumulative revenues approaching $100 million. He has been a board member and advisor to young companies in software, materials science, and electronic hardware. Here are some tips for young people starting companies. Three Good Reasons to Start Your Own Company Don't start your own company because you want to be your own boss. Having rich parents is great. The most reliable source of supranormal profits is superior knowledge of one kind of customer (Way #3). If you don't understand customers, consider taking a customer-facing job (think "sales engineer" or "product manager" rather than "cubicle-dwelling system internals programmer") at a company that already has the kind of customers you think constitute an attractive market. Don't Get Too Good at Raising Money Suppose that you can raise $50 million in capital in four stages. Venture Capital and the Successful Company = High Risk

Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund Paul Graham July 2008 When we read Y Combinator applications there are always ideas we're hoping to see. In the past we've never said publicly what they are. If we say we're looking for x, we'll get applications proposing x, certainly. But then it actually becomes harder to judge them: is this group proposing x because they were already thinking about it, or because they know that's what we want to hear? We don't like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. Please don't feel that if you want to apply to Y Combinator, you have to work on one of these types of ideas. 1. The answer may be far afield. 2. 3. News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the web. 4. 5. One way to start is to make things for smaller companies, because they can't afford the overpriced stuff made for big ones. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. 13. 14.

How to Do What You Love January 2006 To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love." The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. And it did not seem to be an accident. The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. Jobs By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? What a recipe for alienation. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. Bounds How much are you supposed to like what you do? Sirens This is easy advice to give.