When the kids in Skyler’s school want to tell a friend something in class, they don’t scrawl a note down on a tiny piece of paper and toss it across the room. They use Google Docs.

“We don’t really pass physical notes anymore,” said Skyler, 15, who, like all the other students in this story, is identified by a pseudonym.

As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers’ backs.

14 months ago, my co-founder Sankalp and I set out to build a business that can sustain our livelihood while allowing us the freedom to live life on our terms.
When we started, we each had roughly 12 months of savings to survive on, assuming we made $0. Hence our minimum goal was to make $1,500/mo and the case where we would be celebrating with champagne was set to $3,000/mo. We launched our app on April 24, 2019. The first paid plan was launched on June 4, 2019. Around the same time, we got featured by Shopify. Here's a link to the app if you want to check it out.
14 months later, we grew past $25,000 in MRR while remaining a 2 person team.
I’m so proud of what we have built here. If life is a video game, and there’s 100 levels to it, I feel like we have finally crossed level 1.

MOSCOW — The man who took on the Kremlin and won is rarely heard from: a tech nomad in self-imposed exile with a reclusive aura and signature all-black attire as a nod to “The Matrix.”

Two years ago, Pavel Durov refused to grant Russian security services access to users’ encrypted messages on his popular Telegram messaging app, then a favorite of Russian opposition groups. The reply from authorities was either submit or become wiped off the country’s digital map.

Neither happened. Using a combination of wily cyber-dodging tactics and the force of Telegram’s growing reach, the 35-year-old Russian-born entrepreneur humiliated and outmaneuvered Russia’s state telecommunications regulator, Roskomnadzor.

Scores of unrelated websites were tangled up as collateral damage in Telegram’s hide-and-seek with Russia’s Internet minders. But, through it all, Telegram continued to work — so well that even state agencies and government officials, including Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, continued using it.

Peloton CEO John Foley was used to hearing “no” by the time he met with investor Lee Fixel in early 2014. Hundreds of venture capitalists and investment firms had passed on his fitness startup; Peloton’s internet-connected stationary bike had even turned to Kickstarter for funds. But as Foley went through his pitch – that Peloton was more than a bike, but an emerging media company, with recurring subscription revenue and a sleepy incumbent ripe to upend – for the first time, a big-firm investor’s eyes were lighting up.
The investor had come across Peloton researching exercise options on vacation, he told Foley, and saw parallels to other disruptive consumer brands like Harry’s Shave Club in razors and Warby Parker in eyeglasses. “I’m in, shut down the round, I’ll wire $5 million next week,” Foley remembers Fixel saying. “There was a lot to like that he saw and nobody else saw.”