Brad Feld

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How to Start a Company and Why VCs Suck

Mar 22, 2005

Paul Graham – founder of Viaweb (bought by Yahoo! in the late 1990s) and author of Hackers & Painters – has two new excellent essays up.  While I don’t know Paul, I do know of him, and I think his writing is great.

  • How To Start A Startup.  Paul thinks you need three things: (1) good people, (2) make stuff people want, and (3) spend as little money as possible.  All the right stuff with fun examples, lots of Paul’s trademark bluntness, and plenty of provocative questions.
  • A Unified Theory of VC Suckage.  I won’t even try to defend my VC brethern since Paul’s theory is sound in many ways.  He admits that he’s met a few VC’s that he likes, so there must be something messed up in the universe somewhere.

He’s finally put an RSS feed up on his site so you can have his thoughts delivered directly to your computer.