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Apryse Bought a Game Studio That Learned to Print Paperwork
In April 2021 the document-tech firm then called PDFTron bought Windward Studios, a Colorado company that started making a strategy game in 1996 and ended up generating 10 million business documents a month. Here is how a pivot became an acquisition.
HappyFox Bought Thena, and Now Your Support Lives in Slack
The bootstrapped, $20M-ARR help desk run by Shalin Jain has folded in Thena, the Slack-native B2B support startup backed by Lightspeed and First Round. Thena's standalone app is sunsetting - its bet on support-in-the-channel is not.
How My Company Built an AI App So Good We Sold It for $650 Million
In this Y Combinator Startup School talk, Jake Heller, co-founder and CEO of Casetext, explains how his team stopped everything at $20M in revenue to build CoCounsel, the first AI assistant for lawyers, on early access to GPT-4 — a bet that led to a $650 million acquisition by Thomson Reuters. He lays out a practical playbook across three areas: how to pick an idea (target jobs people already pay for, in categories of assist, replace, or do the previously unthinkable), how to actually build reliable AI (map exactly what a professional does, turn each step into prompts or plain code, and grind on evaluations until you pass 97-99% of tests), and how to market and sell it (build a genuinely great product first, price to value, build trust with head-to-head comparisons, and watch out for pilots that never convert to real revenue).