Bring out your dead: Startup offers $1M to ‘acqui-hire’ alums of TechStars, Y Combinator and 500 Startups

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The hiring crunch for developers in the tech industry is a pain point we hear about nearly every day. Now, a San Francisco startup called Twice — that specializes in selling secondhand clothes of all things — is taking one of the more unusual approaches we’ve encountered to get developers in the door. Today, the year-old… Read More…

FamilyLeaf’s 19-year-old founders branch out with a social network for the family

Ajay Mehta

The last time I caught up with Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta, the 19-year-old entrepreneurs were working from the home of Mehta’s parents in Bellevue on an online gift card startup called AvantCard. Well, fast forward seven months and things have changed quite a bit for the good friends who’ve known each other since elementary… Read More…

Sequoia Capital, angels invest in Seattle financial advice startup FutureAdvisor

FutureAdvisor co-founder Bo Lu

FutureAdvisor co-founder Bo Lu could have built his startup company in Silicon Valley, and he certainly felt the pressure to do just that after graduating from the prominent startup incubator Y Combinator in the fall of 2010. In fact, Y Combinator’s Paul Graham advised Lu that he’d be much better off in the Valley if… Read More…

Book smarts vs. street smarts: Which makes the best startup entrepreneurs? (Infographic)

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Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to start their respective companies, relying on their enormous intellect and technology experience to change the world. But Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang both received advanced degrees at Stanford, and things turned out pretty well for them. So, what’s an entrepreneur to do? Bypass the educational… Read More…

Morning Radar: Paul Graham’s patent pledge; Super Mario in Seattle; etc.

Graham

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham asks companies to take the patent pledge. The concept? Big companies shouldn’t use patents to bully small startups. “The patent pledge is in effect a narrower but open source ‘Don’t be evil,” writes the venture capitalist. Amazon.com says it will open new distribution facilities and bring 7,000 jobs to California if the state… Read More…

Wired goes inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s hottest tech incubator

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I just finished reading Wired’s in-depth piece on Y Combinator, the 6-year-old Silicon Valley incubator which in the words of author Steven Levy offers an “unmatchable entrée into the otherwise closed world of high-stakes Internet entrepreneurship.” It’s a great piece, partly because it describes how Paul Graham is shaking up the venture capital landscape through… Read More…