Top all-time · #1337
Justin Kan
Personal blog · justinkan.comstartupsbusiness
Justin Kan's personal blog at justinkan.com covers startups and business. Since 2012, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 61 times, most often “What I learned about online-to-offline”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Justin Kan's startup essays, mainly on selling a company and acquisition talks, plus 'three stories' on company operations and posts on Snapchat and hiring.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- What I learned about online-to-offline5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-03-11
- Three Stories5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-12-01
- The Founder’s Guide To Selling Your Company (2014)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-06-28
- Why I love Snapchat3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-01-07
- The 99% (of startups)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-12-02
- The Founder’s Guide to Selling Your Company3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-10
- What good is experience?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-04-20
- Feeling Good: Justin’s Program2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-27
- How to do anything2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-03-28
- Job Post: Media Relations and Snap God2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-03
What Hacker News says?
Out of a link from the essay[0]: >Do not enter acquisition talks unless you are ready to sell your company. Negotiating an acquisition is the most distracting thing you can do in a startup: going through M&A is an order of magnitude more distracting than raising money. All of your ability to run the day-to-day operations of your company will grind to a halt. You should only enter an acquisition process if 1) you are…
Comment linking /the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company
on “Don't Talk to Corp Dev”Submitted The 99% (of startups) as a story · 532 points
HN discussionYou have Kyle and Brody, just send them a pizza and they get the servers back up! Radical, brahhh, pizza ninja turtle programming! Make sure to send brody extra pepperoni for his sacrifices. [EDIT] In case anyone doesn't get the reference: http://justinkan.com/three-stories
Comment linking /three-stories
on “The 99% (of startups)”Submitted The Founder’s Guide to Selling Your Company as a story · 442 points
HN discussionNew Startup | San Francisco | Onsite, Visa | Full-time | http://justinkan.com/hiring-ios-programmer-for-stealth-video... I'm starting a new video startup that has yet to be launched. Small team of 5 people. Looking for talented, self motivated iOS dev to join our team. You will learn a lot about startups! I'm one of the cofounders of Justin.tv, Twitch and a couple other startups, and also a partner at YC. email: job…
Comment linking /hiring-ios-programmer-for-stealth-video-app
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2016)”Submitted Three Stories as a story · 392 points
HN discussionAnother 30something here: Just spent the past month forcing myself to understand Snapchat and I finally get it now. Took a bit, especially since the whole experience is heavily gamified. I swear the developers are huge video game junkies! The big takeaway is that Snapchat is just much more personal and real than the text based social networks. For those interested in trying it out I recommend. Mark Suster => https:/…
Comment linking /why-i-love-snapchat
on “Snapchat Passes Twitter in Daily Usage”Submitted The First Time I Used Programming At Work as a story · 222 points
HN discussionThis is the same thought I had after reading Justin Kan's post ( http://justinkan.com/what-good-is-experience ). I was surprised by how much emphasis Justin placed on the importance of experience. I feel one of the best traits of an entrepreneur is the ability to learn quickly and figure things out on the fly.
Comment linking /what-good-is-experience
on “I have no idea what I'm doing”Submitted My entire entrepreneurship story in 10 minutes as a story · 216 points
HN discussionAre these really commonly held beliefs? --You only take a job in business operations if you aren’t smart enough to be an engineer (or designer, or product manager, or…) --If your role isn’t technical, you don’t actually understand the product. I don't think many people actually say or believe this. Maybe these were common thoughts in 1999, but as an SF-based ops guy, I've never heard this. In fact, I would argue tha…
Comment linking /exec-errands-post-mortem
on “The Myth of the Non-Technical Startup Employee”Submitted Why I love Snapchat as a story · 212 points
HN discussionFirstly congrats, that's great that your business has driven so much ARR with 1 person and no funding! Based on your question I assume that you haven't sold a business before so here's some things to think about, ultimately before even deciding whether a sale makes sense for you. This is a timely post, my company had an acquisition offer that we ultimately rejected so I have some insights FWIW. A brain dump: 1. Only…
Comment linking /the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company-a1b2025c9481
on “Ask HN: How to pursue acquisition?”Submitted The Founder’s Guide To Selling Your Company (2014) as a story · 170 points
HN discussionHere's the correct URL: https://justinkan.com/why-i-love-snapchat-23d31ea87d3c
Comment linking /why-i-love-snapchat-23d31ea87d3c
on “Snapchat has reportedly filed confidentially for its massive IPO”Submitted What good is experience? as a story · 135 points
HN discussionA good reminder that an "acquisition proposal" without any indication of price is not an acquisition proposal. Asking so much information without any such indication is just crazy. I strongly recommend this excellent post from Justin Kan: http://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-comp...
Comment linking /the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company
on “The Email I Received from Google in 2007 When They Wanted to Buy Zilo (2012)”Submitted How to do anything as a story · 128 points
HN discussionagain pre-dating the strategy. YC has been actively seeking to grow as fast as it could since 2009-2010, and was funding over 70 companies in a batch as early as 2012, then they scaled back in 2013 after experiencing growing pains. Plenty of well-known companies have come through in that time eg, Pebble, Stripe, Firebase, Parse, Crowdtilt, Coinbase, Instacart. Cruise went through YC in 2014, after the time you (inac…
Comment linking /the-99-percent
on “All 60 startups that launched at Y Combinator Winter 2016 Demo Day 1”Submitted What I learned about online-to-offline as a story · 118 points
HN discussionI think Justin Kan is a bit of a special case here: http://justinkan.com/why-i-love-snapchat
Comment linking /why-i-love-snapchat
on “Justin Time”Submitted Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter as a story · 89 points
HN discussionYou are definitely onto something huge here [1]: you could be improving the livelihood of millions with an app to allow people to fill in on temp jobs at competitive wages with the click of a button. Talk of a massive impact... The road ahead is steep, though. At first I thought Leah's TaskRabbit would eventually head that way, but to me it strikes me as if she's still massively underestimating the potential of her…
Comment linking /exec-errands-post-mortem
on “New RFS: One Million Jobs”Submitted Snapchat Pitch Competition as a story · 88 points
HN discussionSee also: Justin Kan's attempt at launching a startup competition on Snapchat: https://justinkan.com/snapchat-pitch-competition-359bf25a44a... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11678286 ) And the aftermath by the winner of the competion: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-make-20-000-on-snapchat-and-ge...
Comment linking /snapchat-pitch-competition-359bf25a44a5
on “Justin Kan: I'm starting a new startup incubator, Zero-F”Submitted The Startup Resume as a story · 83 points
HN discussionThe classic scaling problem! Justin.tv faced the same one. [0] > "a sign behind Emmett’s desk read “HAVE YOU CHECKED THE FILE DESCRIPTOR LIMITS?” Side note... does anyone know why the default FD limit is so low at 1024 on most machines? It seems like there's very little cost to changing it to a high value (e.g. 65535). [0] http://justinkan.com/three-stories
Comment linking /three-stories
on “Show HN: Live streaming SVG plot microservice that just works”Submitted Socialcam #1 as a story · 74 points
HN discussionIt's exceedingly rare for founders to be allowed to take money off the table during these large rounds. According to leaked emails from Sony, investors balked when Evan Spiegel of Snapchat tried to unload $40M in personal shares - just after he had turned down a $3B offer from Facebook. The founder of Twitch wanted to take some money off the table at a ~$200M valuation nine months before it was sold to Amazon for $9…
Comment linking /the-99-percent
on “Unicorns Seemingly Reach a Tipping Point”Submitted Set good defaults as a story · 69 points
HN discussion
