I traveled to San Francisco last week to attend the Y Combinator’s Startup School. The blockbuster lineup of startup superstars was too hard to resist and on balance, the whole thing was well worth a 16hr30min non-stop flight from Dubai . I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts and point you to resources for a condensed dose SUS 2009.
I had wondered about the format of a conference meant exclusively for hackers (Y-Combinator restricts attendance through an application process which has questions like “What tools do you use?”. If your answer goes anywhere near Excel or SalesForce, then you can count yourself out).
‘Winging-it’ was the presentation style du-jour and and Paul Buchheit made that clear before he started. I believe him, here’s a picture of him working on his presentation right before he went on stage.
Buchheit was pithy, brutally honest and generally a lot of fun as he went over his experiences at Google and then at Friendfeed. Buchheit was given good fight for the best speaker stakes by Paul Graham, Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Tony Hsieh and Greg McAdoo. Jason Fried was angry, passionate and awesome in equal measure. Mark Anderson was his scholarly self, Mitch Kapor played the sage to the hilt.
What distinguishes SUS from most other conference is its focus on ‘doers’, it is meant almost exclusively for folks who wish to ‘make something people want’, make being the key word. I came away impressed, Startup School is far from being an esoteric ‘hacker-conf’, it’s really ‘build-a-kickass-startup-conf’.
Here are my big three takeaways from the sessions-
There is more than one way to fund your startup.
The subtle sparring between Jason Fried and Greg McAdoo from Sequoia Capital reinforced that thought! As a preference, I like the idea of bootstrapping better(always!). If you truly believe in your idea then it’s always a good option to tighten your belt and last as long as possible without having to take in money from the outside. Getting funded early might make life comfortable but there are potential downsides that one be aware of (Jason did his best to remind the audience of what those risks/disadvantages are!!). The bottom line is that if its a real business, it will make money so control your burn rates and look to last till the day you can get revenue positive. Get an alpha version of your product out, get real users and you would be in a great negotiating position should you then need funds to scale/deploy etc.
There is more than one way to look at employees.
Option 1 is to work towards keeping your best people forever. Tony Hsieh and Zappos try to achieve this through relentless focus on building a ‘happy’ workplace. Happy employees make for happy customers so employees are encouraged to bring their personalities to office. ‘Creating fun and a little weirdness’ is an explicitly stated core value at Zappos, pets are welcome(normal these days?!), and agents can send out flowers to customers if it makes them happy. Signature move is the ‘money test’- Zappos goes out and offers its fresh recruits a $1,000 bribe to turn-down their offer! Hsieh only wants people who love being at Zappos, and he wants them happy.
And there’s the Facebook model. Zuckerberg’s wants Facebook to be known as a place where engineers come to learn the skills needed to build a successful internet venture, sort of a Crotonville for for web startups. It might seem like an audacious value-aspiration but it makes a lot of sense; there is proven positive correlation between such a culture and the productivity of teams working in a decentralized/independent environment. So, if you keep your part of the deal, and work your socks off for Facebook, Mark will not make a face when you leave to pursue an idea that you’re passionate about. In fact, he proposes to promote such a move, and that is a fantastic attitude for a company.
The Bay Area is a great place to base a web startup, Anywhere is great too.
Mitch Kapor built Lotus in Boston, we built ours in New Delhi(!!!) and my favorite ‘other-company’, 37Signals, is all over the place! Conventional wisdom is to be as close to your market as possible, but if you’re a web startup then you can pretty much be anywhere. And, we should really talk about the rents in Delhi?
My Favorite SUS Quotes (attributions are missing on some of these)
- Overgeneralization + Limited Life Experience = Advice
- Persistence is more important than intelligence.
- Venture money is like crack – Jason Fried
- Software has no edges, software is easy… and it tends to expand in time, it starts becoming less good. Founders have to be the edges for their software.
- Founders need to build teams they would never trade in a game of ‘Fantasy Startup’.
- Failure is not a rite of passage, failure is failure. The idea that failure is acceptable is a lie. Failure is definitely not the holy grail of entrepreneurship. (responding to the theory that founders who have failed are somehow more bankable?)
- Is your product useful, or is it just handy?
- Keep learning doing whatever you’re doing.
- Have a hard dollar ROI, your client’s evaluator must fear losing his job for passing on your offer (be that good!).
- Price forces you to be really good, really soon. And price is the best feedback system. If people are buying your product with real money, then you are for real. – Jason Fried
- ‘Feigning certitude impressed investors’.
- It surprises me how being a startup founder fails to impress women – from PG’s presentation
SUS Resources
- Here’s Mark Bao’s wonderful dispatch from SUS’09. He’s done a great job of reducing the presentations to scholarly(and readable) notes: find it here. Mark, by the way, is a high school student who is already running a kickass startup!
- Justin.tv has all the talks in a a consumption friendly format.
- Check out my pictures from Startup School 2009
So, attend startup school for great advice, do-it-yourself inspiration and stellar networking. And if you’ve been looking for someone to lead your Bigtable migration, he’ll be there too! Applications open July’10.
I’d tell you about the after-parties, if I remembered!!
Concluding over-generalization: Startup School was epic!
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