As I prepare my pitch for YC Demo Day I’ve found myself experiencing something that I haven’t felt in a couple years - a lack of clarity around telling the story. I spent the first couple of days frustrated with myself.

“Why is this so hard?”

“I thought I was good at presenting my company.”

But actually, I’m not good at presenting my company yet. I’m good at presenting Twilio. Getting to the point where that was a natural “look Mom no...

TL;DR1: I believe you can raise a $200M hedge fun, why not a seed round?

TL;DR2: You have the rest of your life to be a “fat and happy” finance guy on the fringes of the financial industry (or run any lifestyle business, like our family consultancy) – but GO FOR IT while you’re young and healthy, with tons of energy and little fear! You can come swim in our pool later.

A couple years ago I called my Dad and asked him what it would take to start a hedge fund. I was 25...

Over the past week or so YC companies in my batch have begun launching in anticipation of Demo Day. Congratulations, your startup is in the news! Now what?

I’ve done 3 company launches and more than a dozen product launches, and contributed to many more. Through those experiences one of the most important things I’ve discovered is that what you do in the hours after launch is crucially important to maximizing the impact and total reach of your news coverage.

Not only did you...

It might not have been obvious before, but this morning’s announcement of the Referly API and corresponding launch of our “customer acquisition as a service” shopping marketplace should leave no doubt. Referly was built for distribution hackers. To be more precise, it was built to help people become distribution hackers.

The mission: you put in money, we output customers. ‘Nuff said.

The reality is that its a little more complicated than that, but the promise of CAaaS...

Getting the Most Out of This Post: print out every single page of your website and tape it all up on a huge wall in your office or lay it out on the floor. Bring together key stakeholders from every department in your company and give them post-it notes. Ask them to place a post it on every page that drives a business outcome they feel/are responsible for.

In most startups, he who writes code makes the rules.

Historically, engineers have owned the company’s website and everything on...

More than any particular skill, like how to run an Adwords campaign or write a blog post, software developers struggle to accept distribution hacking as part of their professional repertoire because they find a simple fact, and its corollary, intellectually abhorrent:

Markets are not efficient or “fair” because people participating in the market are not rational actors.

Accepting and internalizing these two facts is particularly challenging for developers because they are used to...

“Dude, are you feeding the trolls with your Feed the Trolls post? This is so meta.”

Common Internet knowledge tells us “don’t feed the trolls”. This post is about when it is okay to give them some tasty snacks, while luring them into your trap to do your bidding. See this Hacker News comments thread as instructional material for this post.

Often when I put something up on Hacker News, or when I see a news story that I am invested in getting to the front page or...

I’ve been asked a lot lately about being a growth hacker. People want to know how to become one, what one does, what one is. It seems to be the new startup job title du jour - possibly replacing the trendy “community manager” of 2007.

At first I wasn’t super excited about being labelled, but I’ve had “distribution hacker” in my Twitter bio for quite awhile, and I like it. It feels like decent shorthand for describing what I do. I just never thought...