I went to the
Startup School in Boston on the weekend of October 15th, 2005. Here are the notes I took:
- 9:00 Langley Steinert (lsteinert at-sign yahoo dot com)
- TripAdvisor
- Follow passion
- Don't do it for money
- Know your partners — background/reference checks
- The first 10 hires make or break a company
- LESS IS MORE — raise as little money as possible
- More careful with your money (less sloppy)
- You own more of the company if investors put in less
- The more you raise, the higher the valuation, the higher you have to sell at
- (Meaning the less you raise, the happier you'll be with a "low" price)
- Don't be afraid of change
- In the course of 3-5 years you will trip up
- Redefine your business model, product definition as needed
- Look for exit signs
- Who would want to buy your company? Keep an eye out.
- Build a map/keep a list
- Don't bypass a reasonable offer
- Search
- Just begun to tap it
- Search and Shopping TOGETHER
- Vertical Search
- Getting interest
- 18.5 mil unique visitors
- Represented percentage of sales
- Travel search — interesting areas
- 3 ways to get people
- PR — good marketing
- Have a good product, acknowledge need
- Be aggressive in SE marketing
- Keep your burn rate low
- 9:30 Marc Hedlund (marc@precipice.org)
- Success Stories
- Adaptive Path
- Started out as a consultancy
- Bad example: Colossal Pictures — went from consulting to make their own movies, caused company to fail
- When you start out consulting, your goal is to do as many hours as possible to do the work
- NOT GOOD FOR PRODUCT WORK
- Eased into product work
- Bloglines
- RSS Aggregator
- One of the first web-based aggregators
- Acquired by AskJeeves for $2X million dollars
- ONLY ONE PERSON
- "Don't take any money from anyone until you have something that works"
- del.icio.us
- Took venture capital — no revenue, so had to get acquired for a large percentage of money
- read: http://www.pacificavc.com/blog/2003/05/13.html#a203
- Feedburner
- On their 4th startup together — 4 guys
- Hard to escape — Your RSS feed is on their server
- flickr
- Worked on an online game for girls, it didn't work
- Flash-based chat, didn't really work
- The photo thing in chat was cool
- Made a nice photo sharing thing based on that
- In the course of a year and a half, 3 product ideas + acquisition
- indico
- Working on it for 2 years
- Believes in it
- No buyers yet
- Résumé sharing model
- You have to exert so much heat in this model that you can boil the ocean (figuratively speaking) in the market
- Don't know how to get started?
- Start any way you can: conferences, blind emails, etc.
- Jotspot
- Cofounders of excite
- Commercialization of wikis
- Investors love veterans
- koders
- Search engine for source code
- 2 revenue models
- Public for OSS source
- Enterprise sale to search your own
- Odeo
- "podcasting" "company"
- Evan Williams from Blogger
- THAT'S WHY THEY GAVE HIM MONEY EVEN THOUGH IT SEEMS STUPID
- So seriously, just because stupid ideas go up it's not like yours will
- Project PlaceSite
- Allow you to connect people in WiFi — social networking for people sitting closely
- Engineering mistake
- Selling to individual cafés
- Don't be afraid to MBAs, the silliness of this is not lost on them
- Spike Source
- Open Source is their business
- "One throat choke" — fix broke-ass OSS for you (tech support)
- Huge company
- Get out of their way
- Seriously
- They are bigger than you
- Their CEO is huge
- Go to the bottom of the market, not the top.
- Splunk
- Search engine for logfiles
- Doing quite well
- "We are going to be the Google for...um...log...files?"
- Do not start an Ajax Web 2.0 company
- You idiot
- It was a hot term when you started, NO LONGER
- Don't chase the trend: will it get you funding?
- SQUID Labs
- Lots of crazy stuff
- Smart rope?
- Web sites?
- Cheap lenses?
- Yeah, okay, but they're from MIT and have genius grants and do neat stuff
- 37signals
- No investment, no debt, 5 people, successful
- Started as a consultancy
- Now make products FOR web consultancies
- Making it simple
- Upcoming.org
- Three guys, all working part-time on it
- Zimbra
- Web 2.0 demo
- Trying to replace enterprise mail server
- Advice: "do you want to sell sugar water..." and "COME CHANGE THE WORLD!!!!" convinced Sculley to join Apple
- Make people happier
- Make a flashy demo for investors, they're all going to boner and mail you a billion dollars
- 10:00 Qi Lu
- Big companies want to be your friend
- You do the innovation, they give you cash $$$
- Acquired a bunch of companies
- AJAX is kind of cool for Yahoo Mail
- My Web 2.0
- Yahoo 360º
- Yahoo Developer Network
- New Yahoo Mapping API soon
- Investing in strategic benefit
- Bought upcoming.org
- Use Yahoo! as your service backbone, Yahoo! will buy you
- Innovate
- We will buy you
- That's right
- We want to get everyone involved rich off your good ideas
- Yahoo! is basically a bunch of small companies which are now a large infrastructure
- Yahoo can do big systems
- So yeah seriously join us at Yahoo!.
- 10:30 Break
- The women's restroom was empty but the men's had a line to the stairwell
- 10:45 Hutch Fishman
- About
- CFO for Sonus, Viaweb, Winphoria, VideoServer, Family Education Network
- Formerly Senior Manager at Deloitte and Touche
- Founder of Boston office high technology and emerging business group
- Massachusetts Society of CPAs and American Inst. of CPAs
- BS Bryant
- Financing Stages
- Seed
- Strategy and Mkt research
- Develop Business Plan
- First Round
- Initial Product
- Initial Team
- Second Round
- Bring product to market
- Initial customer deployment
- Complete team
- Third Round
- Expand sales and marketing
- Significant risk taken out of the business
- Fourth Round/Mezzanine
- Working capitol needed for liquidity event
- Different investors like different types in here.
- Types of investments
- Common Stock
- Preferred
- Investors
- Preferences over common
- Board representation
- Liquidity
- Participating-preferred
- Goal- burn off after specified return (3x, 4x)
- Dividends
- Redemptions
- Anti-dilution
- Goal: Get Current Market Terms
- Get a really, really good lawyer to do this
- Dilution impact
- $5m pre-money valuation
- $5m series a preferred financing
- $10m post-money valuation
- $1 per share
- Ownership after Series A
- Founders 20%
- Seed Investors 5%
- Employee Pool 25%
- Series A Investors 50%
- Goal: Founder/CEO to own between 5-10% at time of liquidity
- Liquidity Events
- Acquisition
- Top choice today
- Frequently strategic partnership in place with Aquiror prior to event
- Deal structure
- Stock for Stock
- Large potential upside with stock (Viaweb increased 15x increase in 18 mo)
- Stock for cash
- IPO
- Current weak market
- Sarbanes-Oxley impact
- Senior executives
- High risk with today's environment
- Difficult to get liquid
- Pricing of Stock
- Investors pay FMV
- VC - Preferred
- Angels - Preferred/Common
- Founders
- Purchase stock before investor money is recieved
- Cheap stock (penny a share)
- Employees
- Discount from FMV in early stage
- Example — Price 10% of last round of preferred stock
- Over time pricing must move closer to FMV
- Tax Advantages in purchasing stock rather than granting options
- Options - The right to purchase shares at a specified price for a period of time
- Restricted - passes to holder, company has right to repurchase unvested shares
- Vesting for Founders/Employees
- Vesting - provides for holder to retain shares or the right to purchase shares
- Typically 4-5 years with one year cliff, monthly or quarterly thereafter
- Banks/Venture Leasing Companies
- Available Financing
- Fixed Assets - hardware, software (capped)
- Security deposits for facilities - letters of credit
- Accts receivable - factoring
- Working capital - usually available once profitable
- Other Considerations
- Early stage companies must have VC/Angel backing
- Missed it!
- Budgets
- Operating
- Head count, fringe (20% of salaries), facilities, PR, etc.
- Capital
- Equity
- Establish table based on employee posn
- Based on new hires of the year
- All budgets should be done in advance of the fiscal year
- Professional Firms
- Legal - fees going up ($100,000 to do $10m deal)
- Corporate
- IP (larger firms)
- Employment
- Licensing/Customer (part-time in-house counsel)
- Accounting
- Big 4 firm
- Other International Firms
- BDO Seidman, Grant Thornton
- 11:15 Paul Graham
- How do you get ideas for startups?
- They say they don't have any
- Maybe they didn't try to generate them
- They think it's very hard?
- It MUST be very hard because it's a matter of implementing a fabulous initial idea
- Startups for new ideas means there is no market
- Find out what's broken about the existing market
- Could you make a collaborative web-based spreadsheet?
- Let's try to see what we can get
- Maybe it will just be spreadsheet-LIKE
- Treating as a question, it can be wrong
- One good way is to be only a partial solution
- Bite off a chunk, work on up.
- Academia — only novelty works
- Corporate World — novelty is disliked
- MIDDLE GROUND: find student peers! They're smart and elastic!
- Market price is higher because it gives you fewer possibilities for the future
- Meet new people, new technology
- Startups — starts as friends
- Few women — minority, so statistically improbable for two to meet
- Alone time/together time/alone time.
- Time like in the shower to get new ideas
- Letting your mind wander is like doodling
- Metaphor — function applied to the wrong type
- Harder fields are better sources of new ideas
- Connected fields in novel ways — computer science and electrical engineering is now boring.
- Harder to see problems than to see solutions
- People want wealth, a tautology
- Wealth is defined democratically
- Valuable ideas are very close to good ideas
- Kill Windows - redefine the problem
- Make something cheaper, better
- Make something DRAMATICALLY cheaper, change how people use it
- May need to redefine the problem
- Best way to solve the problem sometimes!
- Good heuristic for fighting competitors, rigidmindeds will miss it.
- Simplicity is hard to do
- Paul's mom's stove is hard to use
- May be a way to overthrow a larger company, make existing things easier to use
- Don't fix windows because there's only one who can buy you
- A free market sees a monopoly as damage and routes around it
- Accident is a good way
- Do what you like
- 11:45 David Cavanaugh
- IP for startups
- The Idea
- What kind of IP is relevant?
- Things that you should think about when starting
- What are the options?
- Patents
- "Protects" products, systems, materials, methods
- Almost anything can be the subject of a patent
- Including new combination of old elements
- Does it provide advantages over prior art (faster, cheaper, easier to use/build, etc...?)
- Must be novel, non-obvious and useful
- Protection defined by "claims" as allowed by US Patent Office
- Can take 2-3 years, $25k+ to obtain
- Gives the holder a right to exclude others from making, using, selling or offering for sale anything that the claims cover
- Trade Secrets
- Formula, algorithm, business plan or other business information, etc.
- Remains valid as long as it remains secret
- Must take steps to keep it secret
- No filing or registration innvolved
- Non-disclosure prevents unauthorized use of the secret
- Copyright
- Original work or authorship
- Can cover software, manuals, text, graphics, arrangements or collections of materials, etc.
- Protects "expression," not functionality
- Obtain rights once the work is "fixed"
- Trademark
- Word, phrase, picture, symbol, sound, logo, etc.
- Distinguishes goods or services from those of others
- Selecting
- Descriptive, suggestive, arbitrary, cleared prior to use
- What IP important?
- All of it
- Patents
- Increase the value of your company
- Exclude others from using the invention
- Obtain an injunction and damages against infringer
- License patent for a royalty
- Can provide marketing advantages
- May discourage lawsuits or close copies of your products
- Planning
- do not disclose or attempt to commercialize ideas before filing for a patent
- Make sure you own what employees and consulatants create for you
- Document inventions as they occur
- Develop a patent strategy
- Protect critical commercial products, major technical innovations
- Study competitors' products and patents
- What to do
- You will have legal agreements that will involve intellectual property rights
- Sample agreement types
- Invention Assignment Agreements
- Require employees to execute written invention assignment agreements when they start employment
- Absence of written invention assignment agreements and Employee/Employer ownership
- Patents — Shop Rights
- Copyright — Works Made for Hire
- Trade Secrets — No Uniform Rule
- Trademarks Avoid joint ownership
- NDAs
- Typically used at the outset of the relnsp to aid in protecting a company's confidential information
- Import Terms
- Purpose of Agreement
- Terms of confidentiality
- Customer lists and current financial data v. technology, including trade secrets
- Research Collaboration Agreements
- Sample agreements
- Material Transfer
- Contract Research Org. Agreements
- Clinical Study Site Agreements
- Issues to Keep in Mind
- Ownership of meterials/results/improvements
- Issues with academia and not-for-profit organizations
- Ownership and Publication
- Talk to a foreign patent attorney
- 12:15 Lunch
- Pizza restaurant. I had the soup.
- 1:30 Michael Mandel
- Talk about larger economic context of startups
- Very few mentions of technology in economics text
- Tech people invisible to the economics academics
- Other countries have higher savings rates
- Ability to finance and reward high-risk startups in US
- People taking risks to innovate doing God's work
- Another advantage we have are people willing to work long and longer hours to get shit done
- People in the US willing to work more to get things working
- The US edge is not technology
- It is the people and the support behind that
- Sarbanes-Oxley is a bigger threat than foreign labor to US drive to innovation.
- Claim (from audience): "half the workforce is irrelevant"
- We don't know who is, who all are actively driving the thing forward.
- Venture Capital as a part of the economy
- Not their job to give out money
- Real role is to throw you out if you have a good idea you are not executing well
- Your job: not give them that chance
- Money — plenty of it, plenty of funds existed to start new businesses
- Problem with many system is they can't take it away, not that they can't give it (after awarding)
- Innovative economies more likely to have booms and busts
- Rational thing to do — invest ridiculous amounts of money in a boom
- Bottom can drop out unexpectedly
- We are probably at the beginning of a new boom phase
- Pessimism dissipating
- Remember the boom ends and a bust will appear
- China (for example)
- In a boom period
- Everything is easy
- Massive debts covered by the government building up
- No competitive reason for a lot of this
- How competitive is it? We'll see when we see how they deal with the bust.
- 1st world economy
- 3rd world financial system
- Still communist
- How well can it deal with a capitalist bust?
- What will this do to the companies investing in it?
- Tech is hard to predict
- What innovations will work? What innovations won't?
- Look at Cisco, they had an IPO, look at BusinessWeek's coverage.
- What do we need to improve innovation speed by an order of magnitude?
- R&D dollars?
- A political system where politicians spoke in favor of innovation and MEANT it.
- Curbs on who comes in — what will this do to economic growth?
- Lifestyle problem — our working hours have gone up.
- 2:00 Steve Wozniak
- Woz has a joke:
- As long as you have enough gadgets, your health doesn't matter
- People take it seriously!
- Isn't that SILLY?
- He was in the paratroopers
- He refused to jump
- The commander threatened him with a baseball bat
- He jumped
- (merriment)
- We judge creativity not just by that it's different, but that it's useful
- The seeds of us wanting to do things
- Starting a company:
- Gotta take a couple risks
- He sold calculators for $500 knowing he could get ones for $350 (worked at HP)
- You have to have the skills to build it
- Smaller pieces, smaller parts
- Have a goal
- Stumbled by accident on computers — started programming in high school, figured out on paper how to make a computer using smaller chips
- Woz can design the PDP-8 with fewer chips using new better ones
- Kept redesigning it over and over
- Competing with himself
- "If I can make it smaller, I can make it better" — like a game
- No extrinsic awards, just internal motivation and a notebook
- Take a risk
- You don't know if it will work
- Different people have different levels of creativity
- Even from time to time in short/long-term
- When he was half-sleep, came up with ideas that showed up in later Apple designs
- On Apple:
- If you make the shift speed fast enough, you could make what looked like a TV signal
- Would it work on a real TV set?
- In the Apple, color, graphics, hi-res at low chips and low cost (which is why it came out)
- The best innovations are based on low resources and not having done it
- What if we do it in BASIC? Is it fast enough?
- Added pixel commands in Basic
- Changed colors, etc.
- Did what would have taken 100 years in hardware in a few lines of BASIC software
- Humor is an important part of it
- If you're not enjoying it, why do it?
- Tell a joke, a story, more than one meaning to your words
- Writing a floppy drive driver and stuff — 5 chips and a driver!
- "Goodness is very few parts"
- The real talented designer will do it perfect regardless of if anyone sees it or not — part of them
- The engineer with the know-how and motivation and curiosity is worth 10 normal ones
- Being multidisciplinary is important — one person doing a lot of things rather than discrete roles means more innovation, craftsmanship
- Perfection, motivation
- Autonomy is important
- Ability to be the director, ordering and designing
- Praise is important
- You will work harder to make it better, show off for the praise
- Define a complete project
- Who cares if feature X in Y is faster, does it make Y faster?
- Woz wanted a minicomputer in high school
- Joined the homebrew computer club
- The microprocessor did everything all the chips did in his previous design
- People built Altairs
- Processor with some buffer chips, not a real computer
- He skipped all the stuff from the past, threw out the bleep-bloop front panel
- Built a subset of the computer that would play games, used BASIC
- The only display he could use was his free/cheap TV
- Gave out the designs to Apple 1 as it came along to HBCC
- Steve Jobs realized people wouldn't want to put it together themselves
- Proposed they make the boards, just had to solder in the chips
- First company!
- Set out to sell PC boards for $40
- HP turned down the Apple 1
- Got a $10000 order from the local computer store
- Third partner sold his share in Apple, afraid of risk
- With the Apple II and Visicalc, hit huge success
- 90% of sales went to small businesses
- "Wow, our market is business?"
- Made an Apple II with extra memory, Visicalc built in, monitor port (Apple III)
- By being more expandable from day one, won the war
- Discuss your values with the founder, write them down, use them to make decisions down the road.
- 2:30 (more like 2:40, Woz ran long) Mark Macenka (schedule change!)
- Importance of market analysis — don't underestimate your competition!
- Unless you think you can auction off the company to multiple buyers, you need to get cash flow positive sometime soon
- Very important to have a model that factors this in
- There is an incredible continuing requirement to stay focused
- Halitosis is better than no breath at all/cash v. dilution
- It is fundamentally better to build an expense plan where you need fundamentally less money
- So many entrepreneurs obsessed with control — keeping that 51% — that the market will pass you buy
- A small slice of a big pie is still something
- Realize the importance of cash flow
- Forget friends and relatives/Value of a functioning Board of Directors
- The requirement (or failure) to solicit strategic legal issues
- Capital Structure
- KISS Principle
- Choice of entity - partnership v. LLC v. corporation (Sub S v. Sub C)
- Importance of proper documentation
- IP Problem Areas - do you own it?
- Rights of former employers
- IP ownership rights
- Nondisclosure agreements
- Noncompetition agreements
- Nonsolicitation agreements
- If your former employer had you sign this, it'll drive away investors
- Rights of consultants in developed technology
- Rights of sponsors of non-commercial research, such as universities
- Some universities have very well-defined policies for it
- Joint ownership
- Risk setting up a competitor immediately
- Owning abroad is very complex
- Third-party claims of infringement
- Proprietary code
- You need to license code you wrote at your old work
- Open source
- Everyone is using it
- Companies are crazy/lying if they say they don't
- THERE ARE OPEN SOURCE CODE SCANNING ENGINES THAT LOOK AT YOUR CODEBASE TO MAKSE SURE YOU'RE USING IT RIGHTLY
- A valuation was reduced by 40% because of an OSS issue in some instance
- Defective licensing transactions
- "You can't use this module on platform X, you only had licensing for Y"
- Lack of adequate trade secret protection, absence of confidentiality agreements, NDAs, etc with licensees, employees, etc...anyone touching your proprietary information
- Other problem areas in IP
- Can you use it?
- Can you enforce it?
- Licenses in and freedom to innovate
- Founders issues
- Who owns what?
- Who is on the board? — succession and voting
- If one of many founders needs to leave, determine that early
- Enter noncompetition agreements with yourselves?
- When it takes two or more to tango (breaking up is hard to do)
- Tale of the Proverbial Beer Truck
- Think about vestment schedule (4 years, 25%?)
- Vest 25% up front, then 20%, 20%, 20%...
- VCs might demand a certain vestment schedule
- Founders stock restriction agreement issues
- Vesting
- Transfer restrictions — right of first refusal, drag-along, right of co-sale, IPO lockup
- Other rights of repurchase (fair market value of the time)
- I.R.C. Section 83(b)
- IRS doesn't think you own it if it's vested
- 30 day grace period to fill out a form to avoid getting taxed on stock before vestment
- Do it early, paper it, keep is simple
- Start organized, stay it
- Do it righ the first time
- Someone has to be compulsive
- Give corporate/legal matters the same concerns as code/lab/notebook/engineering
- Noncompetition — products on sale or under development upon time of leaving
- Incorporation — a couple grant + a few other legal fees for other agreements
- 3:00 Stan Reiss (sreiss at-sign matrixpartners.com)
- Matrix Partners since the 70s in early-stage technology companies
- VC or not?
- Not right in all cases
- Changes on the game
- On the clock
- Spending other people's money
- Can't build little companies — lots of money involved = big returns required
- Biggest outcomes tend to be VC-based
- 65% of tech IPOs 1990-2003 were VC-backed
- VC Fundraising - spike in 2000, crash, climbing again
- Lots of new firms, 400-900 firms in late 90s to 00s
- Your venture firms/venture partners could be very inexperienced just going by the volume that have appeared recently
- Most VC firms are losing money
- Why do people keep investing?
- The reporting is an arbitrary valuing of their portfolio — so people keep investing since the numbers look good
- A cyclical business — get people to invest when things are bad
- It's just selling to these guys
- Savings rates are really high — 5% of an endowment into VC investments is STILL A LOT
- Be careful who you do business with
- It is easy to raise money
- Might be from the wrong people
- Or for the wrong idea
- Which is worse for you than them
- Cringley said there's lots of money in these VC funds from back in 2000, now the firms have to do SOMETHING with it, so people are funding things that don't need to be funded.
- Which VC?
- "Unified thereory of VC suckage"
- A very small number of firms(the top 25-30) are associated with the overwhelming bulk of the successful companies
- Make the decision with a lot of care - can't study forever, but think hard!
- Work with honest, upstanding people, especially at your weakest
- From his POV as a VC:
- VC gets to put its money on a number of squares every year
- You get ONE square (your own)
- Do you want to put 5 years of your life into it?
- Get not enough money for an idea?
- Get TOO MUCH money for an undeveloped idea?
- 3:30 Break
- Everyone rushed to the terrible unholy power strip daisy chain for some juice
- 3:45 Stephen Wolfram
- Started in physics
- Was writing program for physics problems
- Wanted better tools
- 1979, in C, at CalTech, got discouraged by CalTech involvement
- Moved to Princeton
- Eventually the software emerged
- Mid-1980s, origins of complexity research
- At the advent of fairly powerful PCs
- Wolfram Research
- Worked with NeXT, Sun, etc. to get Mathematica on their machines
- Hoped for a pure R&D company
- Tried to keep it small
- Computable rules — not just using mathematics but computational complexity
- Everyone actually does something, not just managers
- Not a single person with an MBA has succeeded in his company
- Thinks it's just common sense to run a business
- People skills (understanding) can be crippling
- May have a different self-view and actual set of abilities
- People are optimized for projects of different lengths
- Discipline to writing a business plan
- Can they arrange a logical plan?
- Can they get a degree to show they know stuff?
- Actually takes hard work to be successful
- Things seem like magic bullets
- World winds out "fair": things in the long run take the same amount of time
- In every area, one can see something new science can do
- Use of cellular automata in MUSIC
- Cell phone ringtones ( tones.wolfram.com )
- 4:30 Chris Sacca ( sacca at-sign google.com )
- Startup from Larry and Sergey's Experience
- Nugget 1: Just start hacking
- Focus on user experience
- If you solve the user problem, money will come
- Search, find, obtain, commerce
- Suggestion 2: Solve user problems
- Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful
- Find stuff you didn't know was there in the first place
- Note 3: Go Big
- Providing our services requires vast computational resources
- Advice 4: Cheap to Demo!
- Talented people
- No computer is a replacement for talent
- We owe our success to our people
- Counsel 5: Geeks Rule!
- Secret sauce:
- World's best engineers
- Largest infrastructure
- Founders awards
- Extraordinary accomplishments deserve extraordinary awards
- For what it's worth: Food
- Tradition of openness and transparency
- Fridaily meeting, announcements, introductions
- Freedom to ask questions AND responsibility to ask questions
- Lesson learned 5: Be Open!
- JOBS?: miner at-sign google.com
- Looking for passionate developers
- 5:00 Olin Shivers
- Computer Science professor at Georgia Tech
- Choosing co-founders
- Think of it like you're getting married
- Bad choices
- When it's not working out, don't hope for the best
- Exponential tail-off
- founders: HUUUGE blocks
- First 10 people: small integer %
- Everyone else: Hardly anything seriously.
- Stock, Options and Money
- There's no shame in talking about money and options. Distrust management that isn't open about allocations.
- You're not doing this for fun. You're doing it for money.
- (Alternately: you are a revolutionary)
- VCs: agents of satan or just clumsy rapists?
- Inferred character traits
- technical depth
- managerial/exec. experience
- Unafraid to be contrarian
- Nerves of steel, can handle risk
- This is empirically wrong on every point.
- Their interests are only partially in your interests. Or not at all. Actually, not at all.
- Failure is part of the process
- There will be pain
- "Thank you for what you have taught me"
- Easy to say; hard to do
- Have a high tolerance for feeling like a moron
- Can you handle permanently residing outside your comfort zone?
- Courage
- "Why shouldn't you do significant things in this one life, however you define significant?" - R. Hamming
- "Science progress advances in units of courage, not intelligence" - P. A. M. Dirac
- Psychic toll: Accept you are occupying an extreme niche
- You're a loser until you're a hero -> You will spend much of your career a huge loser
- "Life in academe means learning to manage uncertainty" - A. Newell
- Stubborn
- You will be told you are stupid, inexperienced, etc. You will have dark days and nights. If it was easy, everyone would do it.
- Flexible
- "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy"
- Work
- You will work 80 hour weeks
- You will be addicted if you are to be a success
- Optimise your context:
- People
- Locale
- Culture
- Ideas
- THIS IS WHY THE BAY AREA IS A GOOD PLACE
- Dream with your eyes open, hack your dreams and make them real
- Be a technical master — important to be smart!
- Deep masters of your area makes you good
- Age plays a part
- At 22, you don't have mortgage payments
- You can move
- Grad school
- Way to immigrate into excellence
- And find a secret weapon / recon
- Learn to write
- ...or work for someone who can
- PG has impact because he can write
- 5:30 Sam Altman, Steve Huffman, Justin Kan, Mikhail Ledvich, Alexis Ohanian, Emmett Shear, Zak Stone, Aaron Swartz
- Got $6000 for the summer
- Spent as they saw fit
- Really busy all the time
- Really rewarding
- Nobody wants to talk to you knowing you are a startup
- Know your competition
- Pick your cofounders wisely
- Don't be too afraid to tell people your idea
- Make a demo
- Failure is not the end
- There is a lot of money out there
- Don't found as an LLC — ignore the business element if you're going to do it half-assed
- Sit down with everyone and get everything well defined — jobs, motivation
- Don't worry too much about anything
- Ideas are valuable, but development takes forever
- If you have a really big problem, keep cutting it into parts until they are trivial-to-solve pieces