Subject
17 entries
Startup
Bookmarks
Entire: $60M seed round, Checkpoints product
Entire launched with a $60M seed round and their first product, Checkpoints — a tool for AI-assisted software development. The seed round size signals serious investor conviction in agent-driven development infrastructure.
Cloudflare Startup Program: $250k Credits
Cloudflare's revamped startup program gives eligible startups up to $250k in credits for Workers, KV, WAF, DDoS protection, and enterprise domains. Founded 2019-2024, $50k-$5M funding, with a bootstrapper path for unfunded companies.
Graft: Enterprise AI from Playground to Production
Graft is an enterprise AI company helping businesses move from LLM playground to production — included in Weekend Fund's Enterprise AI Stack. A signal of the 2023 market for companies building the deployment and operations layer on top of frontier models.
What I'm Frustrated by in Crypto
Amir Bolous's honest critique of crypto circa 2022: most on-chain activity is speculation, not genuine problem-solving, and the space has abandoned basic startup discipline around product-market fit. A well-reasoned internal critique from someone who remains cautiously optimistic.
Anthropic (April 2022)
Anthropic's job postings page saved in April 2022 — when the company was roughly one year old, pre-Claude, and actively hiring its founding team. A historical snapshot of Anthropic's early public presence before it became widely known.
Mysten Labs — Sui Blockchain Infrastructure
Mysten Labs is the company building Sui — a new Layer 1 blockchain focused on object-centric state and high-throughput parallel execution. Founded by ex-Meta (Diem/Libra) researchers who spun out after Facebook killed its blockchain project.
The Hacker's Guide to Startup Fundraising
Fletcher Richman's practical guide to startup fundraising from the Galvanize blog — covering seed rounds, angel investors, term sheets, and the psychological dynamics of the fundraising process. A practitioner's account from inside the tech education and startup ecosystem.
Ex-Yahoo CEO Backs Genomics Big Data Startup Bina
FierceBiotechIT covering Bina Technologies, a genomics big data startup backed by ex-Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson, building hardware-accelerated pipelines for processing whole-genome sequencing data. A 2013 marker of when genomics data volumes began requiring big data infrastructure at clinical scale.
The VMware Spinoff Returns: Pivotal
GigaOm's 2012 piece on the VMware/EMC spinoff that became Pivotal — a company formed from Cloud Foundry, Pivotal Labs, Spring, and Gemfire assets to compete in the enterprise cloud platform space. Pivotal IPO'd in 2018 and was acquired by VMware in 2019.
Instacart Aims to Be the Amazon Prime of Grocery Delivery
Instacart launched in 2012 with the ambition to be the Amazon Prime of grocery delivery — same-day delivery from local stores with a membership model. Ryan's note: 'Looks like I'm never going to the store again.' An early bet on on-demand delivery that proved prescient.
Tindie: Etsy for Electronics
Tindie launched as a marketplace for independent hardware makers to sell their electronics projects — an Etsy for electronics. It filled the gap between hobbyist makers who built interesting boards and the audience willing to buy them.
Indoor Navigation Using Disruption of Earth's Geomagnetic Field
IndoorAtlas (2012) used disruptions in Earth's magnetic field caused by building steel to create indoor positioning — no GPS, no beacons, no special hardware required. A clever exploitation of a physical property buildings already have.
A Rough Guide to Keeping Your Website Up Through High Traffic
Rainforest's 2012 guide to keeping a web application running through traffic spikes — covering CDN, caching, database connection pooling, and graceful degradation. Early practical devops writing from the era before managed auto-scaling became trivial.
Bitponics: Automated Gardening for Brown-Thumbed Plant Killers
Bitponics was an Arduino-based automated gardening system that monitored pH, temperature, light, and humidity and sent alerts when plants needed attention. An early consumer IoT product applying sensor networks to home horticulture.
Square's Next Round Could Swipe a $4 Billion Valuation
AllThingsD reporting that Square was raising at a $4 billion valuation in 2012 — an extraordinary price for a company that had been founded just three years earlier. A data point capturing the payments revolution's early momentum.
Entrepreneurship's dirty little secret
Alan Gleeson's contrarian take that entrepreneurship is oversold as a career path — arguing that actively discouraging unfit founders would produce better outcomes than the blanket glorification of starting a company. An uncomfortable but useful corrective to startup culture's hero narrative.
Joe Gebbia: The Airbnb Story
Joe Gebbia's telling of the Airbnb founding story — air mattresses and design thinking, the YC application that got in on the third try, and how they survived by selling novelty cereal boxes. A case study in trusting design intuition and persistence through improbable early days.