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…

Sixty employees sat in a Prague office in October 2020, and nobody clapped. Their company had just sold for more than $100 million. The room went quiet instead. That silence…

Vlad Magdalin didn’t set out to build a marketing case study. He set out to fix a broken invoice. Translating Photoshop files into HTML by hand, earning near minimum wage…

A brother’s text message about Hillary Clinton recording a podcast doesn’t usually turn into a case study. But that’s exactly what happened with Riverside. I’ve watched a lot of companies…

Most founders bury their worst day. Sahil Lavingia put his on TechCrunch’s homepage and then, four years later, wrote three thousand more words about it. That decision is the whole…

Two guys getting fired from their own company usually isn’t the origin story of a multi-billion-dollar business. But that’s exactly what happened to Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle…

Nobody at Y Combinator in 2019 thought international payroll was a hot idea. Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang pitched it anyway. Seven years later, that “boring” idea is worth $17.3…

Eighteen years old, $800 in sales, and a business he’d been talking up for months. That was Christian Owens two months into Paddle. Most founders would have called that a…

Most marketing teams chase traffic. Ahrefs chased something harder: traffic that converts itself. That single distinction explains how a bootstrapped software company with no sales team and no venture funding…