In our second venture, Carrot 6, we improved the time from our first line of code to our first paying customer from infinity to six months, but realized our growth pace wasn't sufficient for a large, impactful company.

While working at Spradley, we focused on creating a feedback loop to improve distribution for our product, which took us about a month to secure our first paying customer.

Spradley allows customers to receive discounts if they share their purchase with friends on social media, which we launched live on Carrot 6.

Despite having a promising product, we struggled to secure investment, leading us to consider launching on Kickstarter, which was suggested by Paul Graham. We built our Kickstarter page and filmed the video ourselves, starring our friends and interns.

My first startup with a friend was called Carrot Sticks, an online math game for kids that aimed to make learning math fun and social.

We launched Parse quickly during Y Combinator, using a simple landing page to gauge interest, which was crucial for validating our idea before fully developing the product.

After leaving Scribd, I immediately discussed new ideas with Paul Graham, and we decided to apply to Y Combinator again, even though we didn't have a product yet. I co-founded a subscription billing service called PipePay, but we didn't want to compete directly with Stripe, which was doing really well at the time.

We were initially hesitant to apply to Y Combinator, but an advisor encouraged us to go for it, leading to an unexpected interview and acceptance.

After struggling for a year to get the Airbnb marketplace going, we decided to apply to Y Combinator in the fall of 2008 as a last-ditch effort.