Tag: Founder Story

When Germany natives Fridtjof Detzner and Christian Springub were teenagers, they began building websites for individuals and businesses. From there, it dawned on them: Why not figure out a way for clients to update and create sites themselves, minus the next-to-impossible coding part? In 2007, Jimdo was born.

In 2011, American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer Marc Andreessen famously wrote: “Software is eating the world.” But today, according to Vishal Rai, the founder and CEO of Acellere, “Software has already eaten the world. Now bugs are eating software, and we’ve got to do something about it.”

When developing a startup, it’s important to think about your company in the simplest terms possible. For Ryan Born, the CEO and co-founder of HAAWK, a company that helps to monetize and enforce copyrights on user-generated video and audio platforms (think YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify), his mission is simple: to create the TurboTax of music licensing.

On International Women’s Day 2014, Sarah Moran sat down with the women who would become her fellow Girl Geek Academy co-founders to lament the state of hackathons—events, which can go on for days, focused on bringing tech minds together to build products, launch apps, and engage in collaborative computer programming.

Steve Huffman knows a thing or two about rebuilding. In 2015, the co-founder of reddit returned to the online community as its CEO 10 years after co-founding the site with his college roommate Alexis Ohanian—and following a series of interim leaders and unsavory episodes involving hate speech.

And there’s more help available from experts to get your application to the YC Spring/Summer? 2018 Class dialed-in.
Dreaming of a Spot in Y Combinator? The 8 Things This YC Alum Says Your Application Must Deliver

Before helming services and infrastructure at Caffeine, Peter Sankauskas was the CEO at CloudNative, founder of Answers for AWS, and a 2013 winner of a NetflixOSS Cloud Prize. Now an AWS Community Hero, Sankauskas recently spoke to a full house at the AWS Loft space in San Francisco.

“I’m actually an unusual tech co-founder,” Polina Montano says. And it’s true: while Montano’s isn’t exactly a rags-to-riches story, it is a gas-stations-to-striking-tech-gold story. Coming from a retail background, Montano was a small business owner for most of her life—starting with a fashion store and moving up to a chain of gas stations—before the inspiration for Job Today struck. In fact, Montano says, she started pondering the concept of Job Today in earnest thanks her hands-on gas station experience

Readaar co-founder Matthijs van Til explains how his startup, which buys imagery and sells data, learned how to sell their product to local governments.

You know the story. Plucky band of adventurers make off with the dragon’s loot, only to suffer some tragic ending because they neglected to take seriously some key bit of information. Usually it falls along the lines of said-dragon treasure being cursed, or so heavy it sinks the boat, or originally belonged to a foul-tempered Orc king now out for blood. The point is, things end badly. There was no way Pouch cofounder Vikram Simha was letting any of that happen.