Today, I went to startup school. I feel it is only appropriate that I contribute my thoughts to the ether.

Most obvious observations:
1. I’ve never seen so many geeks in one room.
2. I’ve never seen so many apple laptops in one room.
3. I’ve never seen so many geeks with apple laptops scrambling to recharge their laptops so they could stay connect for the duration of the day.

Seriously, Startup school was a phenomenal experience. I wasn’t really sure what to expect… sure I’ve been reading Paul Graham for quite a while now, but it has been quite a while since I’ve attended any lectures. I was pleasently surprised by the quality of the speakers, and the value of the information.

Talk #1 - Joe Kraus (Jotspot, Excite)
Pretty decent way to start the morning. This guy is “addicted to startups” as he says. I am particularly interested in the stories behind startups, so I found his pretty good. Seriously, the biggest impression I have (this was many hours ago) is the style of his presentation. If I could get his powerpoint technique down I would be very impressed with myself. They did not contain a lot of information, but the timing (comedic timing really) was really superb. Very well rehearsed, or maybe he is just a natural. Having one of those handy remotes for changing slides and not needing to hide behind a laptop was also key.

Talk #2 - Page Mailliard (Attorney)
I got some really great information here. Or really, I got a much better idea about how the legal stuff behind starting a company works. It turns out, the firm she works for basically specializes in forming a company, and being the law firm behind the company for much of their life. At least that is their hope. So they do nice things like defer legals costs until (or if) you get funding. I guess the idea is, doing all the legal paperwork to “properly” form a company really takes much more experience and work then anyone should attempt to take on, or try to do on the cheap from some sketchy online “form a corporation” company. I was pretty convinced. If I ever decide to go all the way with starting a company, this is probably the way to go.

Talk #3 - Mark Fletcher (Bloglines)
This guy was very “real”. Definetly a geek, has been fairly successfuly just writing web applications that solved the problems he experienced. Pretty inspirational really. This guy even got into some technical details about how he runs his site. Focusing on the cheap. He was also big on reminding us that relational databases are not ALWAYS the best solution to every problem. When you are trying to scale a web site, you need to pick the right tools.

Talk #4 - Ann Winblad - (VC)
At something like 5′2″, Ann really dominated the stage. Oh and she loved to make jokes about her hight versus her partner of 6′10″. They are like some circus freak show.
I had mixed feelings about this presentation. I still get the feeling that VC firms are always out for the really big score, they want to create the huge company. I’m just not that sure I’m into it. She did provide some pretty valuable advice (or perhaps perspective) on what a VC firm is looking for when you pitch an idea. Doesn’t seem all that hard really. I left this talk thinking, “Wow, VCs are that scary, I don’t need them more than they need me.”

Talk #5 - George Willman - (Patent Attorney)
I thought the room was going to eat this guy alive.
I almost felt bad for him, but had to keep reminding myself that he is a lawyer.
So the point of this guy’s talk was just the basic overview of the patent, IP protection process. The problem is, he is such a lawyer and has such a limited view of the world, he couldn’t really provide the “why” to make it relevent to us practical engineer types. Plus, it was right before lunch and so those of us not used to being up for more than 2 hours before lunch it was getting pretty painful.

Talk #6 - Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media)
This is the guy who is really responsible for all those great O’Reilly books that have made technology so much easier to learn. Certainly a staple on my bookshelf. This guy is also a great speaker, and a pretty good visionary. The focus of his talk was about identifying the trends of technology and trying to predict where things where going. He is pretty proud of the accurate predictions he has made. Unclear how much was correctly identifying, and how much was actually shaping through media influence. Pretty slick guy, but I think I’d probably have a good time talking to this guy.

Talk #7 - Paul Graham (Y Combinator)
So of course, everyone here knows Paul Graham. I actually saw him speak once before at Berkeley, and I think he actually did a much better job this time. In general, he is a much better writer than speaker, but he did an ok job of keeping my interest.

The focus of his talk today was (re)iterating the common lessons that he has determined must be counter-intuitive because of the number of times he sees it done wrong. The biggest one that sticks in my mind is the whole “Release early, release often” philosophy. Heard it before, but it is always a good thing to keep in mind. I was totally with Paul on most of his speech, with a few minor hangups:
1. Stated goal for doing a startup: Compress your working years into a small painful time, so you can enjoy the rest of your life without really NEEDING to work. I for one think you can’t put too much emphasis on the fact that we should always be striving to do what we want to do. I don’t see why we should plan to do something we don’t want to do and get it out of the way quick.
2. Some sort of lofty conclusion about creating wealth and doing what we do, blah blah. I’ve already pretty much forgotten, but I remember thinking he went a bit too far, which probably isn’t too uncharacteristic.

Talk #8 - Caterina Fake - (Flickr)
Definetly a star of this show. Hopefully I’m not just hormonally scewed (yes she was female and pretty cute) but I was really quite entertained with the stories of the rather inadvertant success of flickr. As I said, I particular enjoy the stories of how these companies and products came to be. Though I heard part of it before (forget where), it was nice to hear from such a fun speaker.

Talk #9 - Om Malik (Writer, Business 2.0)
I had not heard of this guy before, but when he started to speak with a rather think indian accent I was sort of dreading the next 30 minutes. However he quickly brought it together and proved to be a very entertaining speaker. I espcially liked the point he made about using index cards to help him keep on track in his talk rather than a power point presentation. Props for that old school charm. This guy is not really coming from and engineering or buisiness perspective, but tried to give us a perspective on what we need to be providing for consumer products. It is pretty easy to get caught up in the whole ’silicon valley’ tech elite bullshit and forget that most of us are trying to build products that can be successful with the rest of the world. Or at least we probably should be building these products because there is a whole lot of opportunity.

Talk #10 - Chris Sacca (Google, Director of Special Initiatives)
Interesting story about this guy’s title. When his slides with the title came up on the screen after lunch, the guy I was sitting next to made some crack about how the Nazis probably had this position for some of their “special initiatives”. However offcolor, I had to laugh since I’m a twisted bastard. It turns out this guy is from Yahoo, so naturally had a fairly mean streak towards Google.

Chris was pretty interesting. It certainly turned into a ‘come work at Google’ ad, but a pretty convincing one. The argument basically looks like this:
1. Google is all about the geeks.
2. We have lots of ammenities
3. If you start a big project at Google we give you a really fat bonus, basically as if you were a company being aquired.

Fairly convincing actually. And then he went off on a bit of a “make a difference in the world” tangent. Google.org, granola and what not.

Talk #11 - Joshua Schachter (Del.icio.us)
I really enjoyed this guys talk. Very down to earth, very relatable. I’ve been a pretty big fan of both memepool and del.icio.us. I guess you could say I love his work. A couple of the great takeaways from this talk:
1. Keeping a day job and doing side projects is a great way to work on cool stuff.
2. Always be working on your ideas. No excuse to wait.

Talk #12 - 8 Recent Founders
I put this into the inspiration/meet celebrity category. Those of us reddit.com/Paul Graham fans are pretty familiar with most of the websites. These companies have mostly existed for less than a year. They told some stories, asked some questions. Nothing too surprising. I was particularly impressed by the guy working on inkling.com. Though I wasn’t too keen on what I tried on his site (Well, I lost all my “money”, try it out if you want to know what the hell I’m talking about.) This guy was actually over 30, worked at a big company for over 10 years, then just dropped everything and did the Y-Combinator program. Pretty inspirational really.

So thats it, I’m pretty tired of writing now, went a little overboard perhaps. I guess I should have been working on this post during the talks just like everyone else, but I rather like the just listening to the speakers rather than taking notes or screwing around on the internet as I always end up doing. So, it was a good day, I have a lot to think about.

Oh, check out this flickr set (not mine) if you wanna see what startup school looks like.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 30th, 2006 at 4:01 am and is filed under Science & Nature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.