标签：#startup

I started my career as a software developer, Initially a front end developer and then became a full stack developer where success often meant solving difficult technical problems, building reliable systems, and delivering good software. Becoming a co-founder changed that perspective. Suddenly, building a product wasn't just about writing code. It was about understanding the problem deeply, making decisions with incomplete information, taking responsibility for outcomes, building a team, and constantly deciding what not to build. Now, as an Engineering Director at an AI company, I'm learning to balance both sides staying close to technology while thinking about people, product, strategy, and long-term engineering decisions. Honestly, The transition from developer to founder hasn't been a straight line. It's been a continuous process of learning, unlearning, and becoming comfortable with uncertainty. I'm starting this blog to document some of those lessons from building AI products and engineering teams to the technical decisions and challenges that come with growing a technology company. I know I'm just beginning my journey and that I thought I could perhaps share it with my tech community.

The funding, Gatik's largest so far, was led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies.

Now exiting stealth mode with a $26 million seed round, Keenable has been building a vast web search index for AI agents.

The social app founded by Bonobos co-founder Andy Dunn is expanding beyond events with new digital homes for groups to connect, organize, and make plans.

Airbound's ultra-lightweight approach to drone delivery has attracted backing from Greenoaks, DoorDash, and Silicon Valley investor Lachy Groom.

Make the most of Disrupt's crowds of potential investors and partners by exhibiting your startup from October 13-15.

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, Replit CEO Amjad Masad will share his perspective on the future of programming and Replit's role in developing it.

Apply before September 4 to be a part of the TechCrunch Disrupt community by hosting your own Side Event.

Berry Street founder Noah Kotlove and Healthify founder Tushar Vashisht will act as co-CEOs of the new entity.

🚀 From FlipaClip to SitePoint: The Full Story of Kehinde Owolabi How a Nigerian teenager built a professional game engine with borrowed laptops, offline W3Schools, and pure determination. 🎮 Play the Game Try Limn Engine Live — Space Shooter Demo See what 4 years of determination built. This space shooter runs at 60 FPS on a Tecno Pop 4 with 1GB RAM. 📖 Introduction Every developer has an origin story. Some start with a fancy computer and a computer science degree. Others start with a flipbook app and a sister who trusted them with her phone. My name is Kehinde Owolabi . I'm 18 years old (born December 4, 2007), and I live in Lagos, Nigeria. I'm currently in PC103 at BYU Pathway, and I'm a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I built a 94/100 professional game engine called Limn Engine. It runs at 60 FPS on a Toshiba with 4GB RAM. It was published on SitePoint and ranked #3 among 2D JavaScript game engines. Nobody knew it was developed on a Chromebook, a borrowed Thinkpad (behind my sister's back), and a Toshiba that "hung like hell." That was the secret I kept for months. But that's only one part of this story. This is the full story of how I went from a button phone to a 94/100 game engine, from FlipaClip to SitePoint, from a boy who failed physics to a developer who built something that runs on a Tecno Pop 4. The one-line summary: "I'm Kehinde Owolabi, an 18-year-old developer from Lagos, Nigeria who went from FlipaClip to building a 94/100 game engine on borrowed laptops — and got published on SitePoint." 🎮🚀 🎨 The Beginning: FlipaClip and the Spark of Creativity Before I was a developer, I was an animator. I used FlipaClip — a simple animation app on mobile — to create flipbook-style animations. I loved bringing characters to life, frame by frame. I would spend hours drawing, tweaking, and watching my creations move. That creative spark stayed with me. I wanted to create interactive experiences. I wanted to build games. But I didn't know how.

Engineers who only understand the technology, and never the business it serves, hit a ceiling early. The best ones develop commercial awareness — a real sense of how value is created, funded, and sold. Two days at 21BY72 Season 4, one of Bharat's leading startup summits — eighty-five ventures on the floor and live pitches in front of six hundred investors — was a concentrated lesson in exactly that, and I wrote about it in this reflection . Technology is a means; the business is the point It's easy, as an engineer, to treat the product as the whole world and the commercial side as someone else's problem. Sitting in a room where eighty-five ventures pitched to investors makes the truth obvious: the technology is a means to a business end, and understanding that end makes you a better engineer, not a distracted one. Watching founders pitch — being judged not on how clever the build was but on whether it solved a real problem people would pay for — reframes how you think about your own work. It pushes you to ask "who is this for and why does it matter" before "how do I build it." What the summit floor teaches an engineer Investors buy problems solved, not features built. The pitches that landed were about a real need and a credible path to meeting it — a discipline that improves engineering priorities directly. Commercial context sharpens technical decisions. When you understand the business constraints — cost, speed to market, who the customer actually is — you make better trade-offs in the architecture, not worse ones. Exposure recalibrates ambition. Being around people building real ventures at scale resets your sense of what's possible and what "serious" looks like. The takeaway The most rounded engineers I've come to admire pair technical depth with genuine commercial awareness. Spending two days inside a major startup summit, watching how businesses are pitched, funded, and built, was a deliberate investment in the half of the picture that a pure engineering educ

The single biggest operational risk for early-stage founders remains hiring traditional hourly dev shops. Before partnering with any external dev team, I've learned to run them through this 5-point evaluation framework: The 5-Point Evaluation (co-founder approved) 1. Quality of Questions If a team asks zero questions, it’s an immediate red flag. It's impossible to deeply understand a project without asking anything. But quality matters. Weak devs ask easily googled questions about basic blockchain mechanics. Strong engineers ask highly specific questions focused entirely on your business logic, edge cases, and tokenomics. 2. Proposing Solutions, Not Problems (obvious one) A weak team will message you saying, "We have a problem, how should we fix it?" A mature team says, "We hit a blocker. Here are three architectural workarounds, the trade-offs for each, and our recommendation." 3. Deep Ecosystem Knowledge Coding isn't enough. If an agency claims they can build a top-tier lending protocol but doesn't understand the role of risk engines and oracles, they are tourists. Your developers need to know top-tier market leaders like Gauntlet, Steakhouse, Chaos Labs, and RedStone, and understand how their risk modeling and data feeds directly dictate market parameters. If they lack this context, their expertise is strictly surface-level. 4. Full Product Lifecycle Understanding Writing code and calling it a day is a massive mistake. A real partner understands what happens outside the IDE. They account for security audit buffers, integration with risk providers and oracles before mainnet, and the proper setup of on-chain governance and admin functions. 5. High Agency & Proactivity Elite teams care about your overall success, not just their Jira tickets. To quote a BD i work closely with: “When a client is about to make a massive mistake, you have two choices: stay silent and watch them fail, or step in with your expertise, even uninvited, and say: 'We hear what you want to do,

Flipkart's quick-commerce venture is delivering 1.1 million to 1.2 million orders a day, nearly triple its November volume.

On August 19 we launched LeadAce on Product Hunt. It was our first launch to an English speaking audience. I am writing down the numbers while they are still uncomfortable, because the posts I found most useful when I was preparing were the ones that did this. We are a small software company in Tokyo. LeadAce is an outbound sales agent that runs as a Claude Code plugin. The backend is open source. It has been in Public Beta since the launch. The numbers Product Hunt, 24 hours: 2 upvotes 1 comment, which was mine Day rank #160, week rank #758 3 followers on the product page Signups from the launch: 0. Site traffic for the four weeks up to launch day: 6 active users, 27 page views. Referrers were direct 4, producthunt.com 1, t.co 1. Our X account over the same four weeks: 48 posts, 576 impressions total, 2 link clicks, 2 new followers. So the launch did not fail at the landing page. It failed before that. Almost nobody arrived. Where we got stopped This is the part I did not plan for. I spent weeks on the product, the demo video, the gallery images and the copy. Every one of those was ready. What I did not have was accounts. Hacker News. I could not post Show HN at all. HN was limiting Show HN submissions from low karma accounts, and my account had karma 1. I created it years ago and never used it. There is no way to buy your way past this, and there should not be. r/ClaudeAI. My first attempt was removed by automod because the account was too new. I tried again from my older Reddit account, which has an age of 5 years but karma 1. A moderator locked it. The subreddit requires 50 total karma to post a Showcase on the feed. They pointed me to a megathread instead, which is the correct call on their side. My comment there got 67 views and 1 upvote in 19 hours. r/SaaS. The post went through, but Reddit's pre-submit check warned me that it might break the rules on vendor spam. I removed every link from the body and changed the ending to a real question. That version poste

Japanese space startup Letara is betting its hybrid rocket technology can move beyond small satellite thrusters into a broader market for space, defense and security, after raising ¥2.6 billion ($16 million).

Rillet CEO Nicolas Kopp shared growth numbers at a board meeting and set off a fundraising frenzy from Iconiq, Sequoia and others. Without even trying.

If you’ve been circling around Disrupt, then now’s the best time to lock in your pass and start getting ready to join the rest of the startup community gathering in San Francisco from October 13-15 at Moscone West!

Andreessen Horowitz has two partners sitting on the boards of companies that now compete with each other: Ben Horowitz at Databricks and Martin Casado at Fivetran. Nothing too scandalous on the surface, except the Department of Justice has reportedly been investigating the arrangement for almost a year, dusting off a 112-year-old antitrust law that’s rarely used against VCs. Board conflicts aren’t exactly new, and these companies weren’t necessarily direct competitors when a16z first invested […]

There's about to be a big fight to secure access to space.

Two numbers off my Search Console this morning, same 28 day window, same site. The free landing page roast tool: 42 impressions, average position 38.0. The blog post I wrote to support that tool: 11 impressions, average position 21.1. Six weeks earlier it was the other way round. On July 4 the tool sat at position 7.5 on 18 impressions and the article was at 17.8 on 38. So the tool has more than doubled its reach since then, and its average position has gotten roughly five times worse over the same stretch. Both of those things are true at once, and working out why changed how I plan the next tool. The tool favors.dev/roast takes a URL and gives back a conversion score out of 100. It screenshots your full public page, then grades the copy and the design together across six categories: clarity, value proposition, trust, CTA, visual design and SEO. You get back the specific issues hurting signups with a fix for each, the things the page already does well, and a one line verdict. No signup, no credit card, no email field. Paste a URL, press "Roast it", read the result. It is deliberately small, and the scoping is most of why it shipped. The cut list was: accounts and password resets, saved history, dashboards, billing and usage limits, settings and themes, support for every edge case, and an admin panel for myself. Every one of those is how a weekend build turns into a month. If a free tool needs a billing system, you have started building a second product by accident. What those numbers actually say Here is the honest read, because "my free tool beat 29 of my 32 blog posts" is technically true and a bit misleading. Reading Tool impressions Tool position Article impressions Article position Jul 4 18 7.5 38 17.8 Jul 11 20 7.1 42 16.9 Jul 19 22 10.4 39 19.1 Aug 15 42 38.0 11 21.1 Impressions climbed because the tool started matching a much wider spread of queries. Average position fell for exactly the same reason. It is not ranking better. It is ranking on more things, m