OK, fine — I can handle these errors once in a while, but lately I can’t seem to consistently get an Inbox or search for emails with any results. Especially when I need them, and the nature of what I use email for causes me to need it now. After some problems earlier this month w/ my main Yahoo! Mail account, I’ve decided to take my “hobby” mail account and try Gmail w/ it. This is a big step for me, because:

• I don’t like way Gmail looks, it’s information overload with all the message previews and such.
• I can’t find anything. I’ve been using Yahoo! mail for 10 years (it seems like 10 years anyway) and GMail isn’t that intuitive for me.
• I’m a loyalist and have always had such a good experience with Yahoo! Mail.

For whatever the reasons, here I go off into Gmail land for a 1-week trial. I’ll be back in 7 days to write about how it went.

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

1. Passion above all else!
2. Partnerships are amazing but very hard
3. 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

I guess I was an accidental-hipster on Sunday morning and found myself listening to NPR as I made my way to Barefoot Coffee to kick-off my first meal of the day. Normally I’d have my iPOD w/ me, but I think I left it in my messenger bag (another hipster accessory, or so I’ve heard). Though not my usual assortment of music for 15 year-olds, NPR would have to do.

The program I came upon was called Anti-Drug Program Tackles Open-Air Markets it explained how one community in Long Island is dealing with drug dealers using uncommon practices and achieving fantastic results. It explained how only 1 in 15,000 cocaine transactions ever ends up resulting in jail time. Communities overrun with open air drug markets needed to change the odds. It turns out you don’t have to throw a guy in jail to get him to stop dealing, you just have to show him video proof that you know what he’s up to and let him know if he doesn’t stop there his chance of getting jailed is 100%. 12 out of 13 “caught” chose career services and more to get them going the right direction.

That’s when I remembered something I read on Friday. A new study of US prisons has found that numbers of people in jail are at an all-time high, with more than 1% of the adult population behind bars. “While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine…The total of 2.3 million adults held in prison - or one in every 99.1 adults - puts the US far head of other countries.” All this incarceration costs US states $49 Billion last year. Over half of those incarcerated aren’t being jailed for violent crime, either.

It makes me ill to think that this is supposed to be one of the greatest countries in the world and yet our jails are bulging at the seams w/ purse snatchers and money embezzlers. What a waste of time, money, opportunity — and human life. Isn’t there a better way for those who choose the wrong path to pay their debts to society? Better yet, can’t we turn these people around?

How do our presidential candidates stand on prison policy? and the War on Drugs? This seems like it should be clear-cut, but I’m having a hard time finding a clear answer. Prison policy is widely ignored besides the occasional slew of statistics thrown about in the media. All the while our prison system has swallowed more than it’s share of the undeserving while innocent taxpayers float the tab. I for one am hopeful to see Obama and others step up and start paying attention to this as their campaigns evolve in ‘08.

PS:

When I saw that picture of the crack deal caught live on Google Maps it came together for me. Google is so busy saving us from the FCC and our energy problems while they fly us to the moon, I thought to myself this is a chance for them to do something good with all that money, PR and Political influence. With enough volunteer neighborhoods, cameras and vans pointed at the right people we’ll all be model citizens in no time. I’m sure the chance to improve society and save taxpayers $50B/year must be enticing enough for someones “20% time.”

How about it, guys?

Ingredients

• 1 roasted lemon, ends removed, cut into 4 thick slices
• 1 ounce simple syrup
• 2 ounces vodka (Tito’s Handmade Vodka is my favorite, available at Trader Joe’s and much to my delight all over Austin / SXSW)

To roast lemons

• First wash and dry the rinds, then slice each lemon into 4 thick slices. Bake them on a cookie sheet in a 325 degree oven for an hour, turning once.
  Let cool before using.

To make the Roasted Meyer Lemon Drop

• Combine lemon slices, syrup and vodka over crushed ice in a shaker.

• Shake vigorously and strain into chilled martini glass.

Ideas for next time

• Since Meyer Lemons are smaller and have more sugar in them, next time I’ll try halves instead of 4 slices. This should help the Meyers hang onto a little more juice.
• To bring even more floral notes in from the garden I might try adding some fresh rosemary or basil.