I've had a setup like this since the start of covid and it's what inspired me to seed https://opalcamera.com/ (because they built a pro-sumer webcam for $300)
I want more stories from Loopt. It was ahead of its time and I know he learned a lot from his time as a startup CEO (before joining YC) that we rarely hear about.
I would love to know this, but also how often VC firms build their own tech to improve their daily processes and workflow, as well as develop their community of founders.
And we ship. It's hard to unlearn solving problems via software when you've done it, especially at scale successfully, and it makes everyone at the org (and soon in the founder network) more effective and frankly happier doing their jobs.
I wrote about this Guilded update for the Initialized blog, because I'm so enamored with this product that probably would have saved me from needing to learn a lot of HTML two decades ago. It did serve me well, though... but I'd have rather been playing Q2CTF
I'd argue the reason we thrived was because we knew we had to be a platform for communities (subreddits) from the beginning. No single frontpage can be home for everyone, but tens of thousands of communities on a common platform, can scale forever.
Slashdot was definitely the OG, though. Got to meet CmdrTaco at a talk I gave a little while ago and tell him thanks for everything he did to inspire us at Reddit.
I'm donating my 31st birthday to this great org. Donating $150 will get you a signed copy of Without Their Permission and I'll take the highest donor out to lunch in Queens.
I'm very proudly the non-technical founder of reddit, which I've always been very frank about. I've got citations galore. Drafting the blog post right now.