Startup School was a great experience so I’m trying to get these notes typed up before I lose the pad I wrote them on. These notes are mostly for me and my friends, but I will definitely be updating these with more thoughts and references as I find them. I also found that in the beginning I was taking a lot more notes before I realized there were video cameras all over the place, so eventually I just kicked back and paid attention.
In short I left informed and inspired, but on Monday I went back to my day job since that’s close enough to a startup for me right now.
Arrive 8:15 AM to lots of coffee and bagels. Grabbed my name badge and happened to meet a guy from Google who has been in IT there for 4 years and is leaving this week.
9:00 David Lawee, VP of Corporate Development, Google
- Noted that the timing was great to be doing a startup
- Had personally started 4 companies
- Passion above all else!
- Partnerships are amazing but very hard
- Speed is Everything! Hurry Up!!!
People: You don’t need a bazooka to kill an ant.
- Product Management can often be handled my the founder
- Engineering needs to be small teams releasing frequently
- Marketing/PR can come later
- Finance/HR do it yourself to keep costs low
Hurry Up! The ability to move quickly matters most. It is your biggest competitive advantage. Every day, hour & minute counts.
9:30 Sam Altman Founder, Loopt
Sam talked about how to raise money. It was very clear that he wasn’t in love with the process of raising money.
- Technical founders are the limiting factor in the startup ecosystem
- Self-fund or wait if you can.
- Good reasons to fund include “need money to execute”
- But wait longer and get a better valuation.
- Bad reason: legitimacy, getting funded doesn’t make you “real”
Sam outlines the process for raising money, which I wrote down but won’t go into here ’cause you can go it here.
- Look for big, growing markets so you can surf someone else’s wave.
- Find customers w/ their hair on fire.
- Have an unfair advantage
- A great team and a great product can get things done, and a great team can compensate to get around most product problems.
- “Demand by Proxy” can be a great way to show VC’s that your idea serves a need. In the case of Loopt “where are you?” was the most common text message sent everyday.
10:00 Jack Sheridan Partner, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati just the key points:
- Confidentiality and Assignment Agreements are key
- Look out for “Participating Preferred” ’cause it can screw you in a “double-dip” kinda way
- Don’t pay dividends
- Accelerate vesting under change control, single trigger, double-trigger, etc. Just like YHOO did to fend off MSFT.
10:30 Paul Graham Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb (Paul did a nice job summarizing his talk here), I enjoyed it, key points:
- “Make something people want”
- Don’t worry too much about money (at least not at first)
- He mentioned Octopart, a search engine for electronic parts. (a really cool idea if you ask me, especially since Digikey asked them to stop linking to them!)
- “If you’re benevolent, people will rally around you: investors, customers, other companies, and potential employees. In the long term the most important may be the potential employees. I think everyone knows now that good hackers are much better than mediocre ones. If you can attract the best hackers to work for you, as Google has, you have a big advantage. And the very best hackers tend to be idealistic. They’re not desperate for a job. They can work wherever they want. So most want to work on things that will make the world better.”
- “A solid plan executed now is better than a perfect plan next week”
- “Be good”
11:00 Break
11:30 Greg McAdoo Partner, Sequoia Capital (Greg’s talk was good, I’m just not that interested in VC right now so I didn’t take copious notes)
- There are no great surfers without great waves
- TAM, SAM, SOM = Total Addressable, Servable Addressable and Share of Market.
- Tie your solution or idea back to $$ already being spent and use that to model how much money you could make.
12:00 David Heinemeier Hansson, Creator of Rails; Partner, 37Signals A+ talk (just watch the video, my words won’t do his talk justice and I thought he did a pretty good Christoper Walken impression, too)
The A secret to making money online.
- David and 37signals has found that having a price for your product is helpful to making money.
- Great Application
- Price
- Profit
- He showed a couple sites that charge for their product, that I think I would use, FaxitNice and Campaign Monitor
- Do you need to build the next Facebook? Do you need to make $1 billion dollars?
- How about $1Million instead?
- 2000 subs x $40/month/sub = $1 Million Year
- Focus on the Fortune 5 Million, instead of trying to get 5 million people to watch a funny video.
- Working 5 hours or 3 hours a day you can’t get a ton done, if you just focus. 37signals is moving to 4-day work weeks!
- If you can find a good cause doing something you like and make a million bucks a year, why would you give that up?
12:30 Paul Buchheit Founder, FriendFeed; Creator of GMail
- Listen to your users
- Listen != Obey
- “I need a faster horse” — you know, Henry Ford said: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse.”
- What people needed was a way to get around faster, not a faster horse per say.
- “That’s impossible” really means, “according to my limited understanding, that’s very hard to do”
- Notice problems around you and then you can come up with solutions.
12:55 Lunch
I think the Pizza Chicago guys botched the pizza , our pepperoni pizza was missing the cheese. I did meet Joe and crew from airbedandbreakfast.com, so it was cool to talk to some guys in an early stage startup who are pumped up and ready to go.
2:30 Jeff Bezos Founder, Amazon.com (skipped, but looks like I missed some really cool graphs, watch it)
3:30 Mike Arrington Founder, TechCrunch (skipped, heard it was funny, will watch it)
3:55 Break
4:15 Marc Andreessen Founder, Ning, Opsware, Netscape; Creator of Mosaic
- Raise money now! get ready for a recession for the next 1-2 years.
- Build a business model that doesn’t need an economic boom to win
- “be so good they can’t ignore you” – quoting Steve Martin from his new book. also emphasizing discipline, rigor and practice. Hmmmm … where have we heard about discipline before?
- “everyone wants to join a winner” that’s how you attract good people
- being able to build the product and get it out matters most
- the best case scenario is a pre-assembled team (is it time to get the band back together already?)
- Get the product to the prototype stage without hiring too many people or anyone at all
- How to prevent mediocrity, the law of crappy people, etc. (need to revisit the video and fill in what my notes are missing here)
- Is luck a factor? it’s critical.
- He mentioned the book Fooled by Randomness
- cause, effect, correlation & randomness — must understand all of these independently
- One mistake first time tech entrepreneurs often make? (missed it, I need to check the video for the answer)
- Long-term real estate leases put companies into bankruptcy in 2000, watch out for long term commitments like these.
- Company building is the most fun thing and the best reason to do a startup.
4:45 Peter Norvig Director of Research, Google
- “The semantic web is the future of the web and always will be”
- It’s more agile to work with all of the existing data out there rather than spending all day coding up every rule and scenario you can think of.
- He had a funny little bit on getting domain names right