Beating the Averages
Original excerpt
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2001, rev. April 2003 _(This article is derived from a talk given at the 2001 Franz Developer Symposium.)_ In the summer of 1995, my friend Robert Morris and I started a startup called Viaweb. Our plan was to write software that would let end users build online stores. What was novel about this software, at the time, was that it ran on our server, using ordinary Web pages as the interface. A lot of people could have been having this idea at the same time, of course, but as far as I know, Viaweb was the first Web-based application. It seemed such a novel idea to us that we named the company after it: Viaweb, because our software…
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