Three Swedish students once stood on a stage in front of the King of Sweden and finished dead last. Their pitch was a concept called Kreditor. The judges weren’t interested.…
Two guys in their twenties walked out of HBO’s Los Angeles office with $3,000 left in the bank. They’d just turned down $750,000 a year. I’ve sat in rooms where…
Twenty percent of transactional emails never reached an inbox. That was the bug Isaac Saldana found in 2009. Most engineers would have patched it and moved on. Saldana built a…
Most founders hide their doubts. Josh Miller put his on YouTube. That decision, more than any single feature Arc ever shipped, is why The Browser Company is worth studying. Not…
Most founders don’t kill a profitable company to build a harder one. Nicolas Sharp and Alex Christie did exactly that. They had a working CRM for venture capitalists. Customers were…
Two founders once pitched a Hollywood actor on a “Lego kit” for software. He wrote a check before the meeting ended. That actor was Ashton Kutcher. The founders were Howie…
Every marketplace founder hits the same wall. No users means no content. No content means no users. I’ve watched teams burn entire budgets trying to blast through that wall with…
Most founders chase users. Otis Chandler built a place readers wanted to visit anyway, and the users followed on their own. That distinction sits at the heart of one of…
Most founders panic when their product goes quiet. Ben Silbermann didn’t rewrite a line of code. He picked up the phone. In 2009, his new platform had a few thousand…