Dylan Vassallo

After recovering from an unpleasant case of pneumonia, last Saturday I was lucky enough to attend Startup School 2011. Produced by Y Combinator and Stanford University's BASES and held this year at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Startup School is a one-day series of talks by well-known entrepreneurs and investors. I found the event to be incredibly inspiring and packed with great speakers giving great advice to the audience of young hackers. All of the talks were live-streamed, and I think recordings will be available sometime soon as well; I highly recommend checking them out.

I believe it was Max Levchin who wondered aloud what happens to those compulsive note-takers after they graduate high school; I never thought I was one of them but it turns out I have a few pages' worth of notes from the event–so without further ado, here they are.

• Marc Andreessen, Andreessen Horowitz

  • Invented the img tag (!), started Netscape at 22
  • No Startup School-alike back then; entrepreneurs didn't really know each other
  • If he could go back in time, he would instrument the browser to learn how people were using it. Also would have done something like RockMelt (built-in social) as well as built-in payments.
  • Building a company is like baking a cake. There are a lot of ingredients and if you're not careful you'll end up with egg on the ceiling.
  • He believes in engineering at the heart of the company because ultimately it comes down to the product. And in the long run, your product is innovation.
  • If the cake comes out of the oven and you forgot to add sugar, it's too late. You can't just put some sugar on top and say it's fixed.
  • Hiring fast is hard.
  • The “magic formula” is an engineer who can become an entrepreneur and CEO.
  • Surprisingly, being CEO is a learnable skill. It's easier than learning technical skills or entrepreneurship. A motivated engineer can learn to be CEO on the fly. Zuck and Jobs are two of the best CEOs and that's their background.

• James Lindenbaum, Heroku

  • Building a product for developers is hard but rewarding.
  • The process of making software is getting increasingly awesome-er, but deployment isn't keeping up with that.
  • Wanted to abstract away deployment. Platform instead of servers.
  • For Heroku, developer UX is key.
  • Japanese poka-yoke: something that prevents you from making mistakes.
  • After launching, they realized they'd need venture backing.
  • YC is a bridge between the tech world (they're approachable as hackers) and the investing world.
  • PG: “You should kill Oracle.” James: “Um, okay.”
  • Web-based editor was seen as a toy; devs loved the new git-based deployment
  • It is important to Heroku that they have code on their homepage; they want customers who get that.
  • Patterns
    • App decomposition into services: EC2 allows for extremely low ping times between disparate services.
    • Polyglot platform: devs are comfortable learning new languages and using multiple languages in a project.
  • Salesforce acquisition (2010): why? how?
  • They get to work how they've always worked, but now they enjoy Salesforce's leverage
  • “Being made fun of by Larry Ellison…is the highest honor there is.”
  • It's about taking your specialty and offering it as a cloud service.
  • Building tools for people who are building things gives you a lot of leverage and is lucrative
  • Scaling the team has been harder than scaling the platform.

• Jim Goetz, Sequoia Capital

  • Spectacular companies start with ambitious but unknown founders, no pedigree required.
  • Search environment was crowded when Google started.
  • Sequoia's 40 years of experience tell them that now is an excellent time to start a company.
  • It's an order of magnitude easier to start a company now than it was a decade ago.
  • 10 billion mobile connected smartphones by 2020.
  • In the war between Apple and Google, devs win.
  • Business model as a weapon
  • “Unfair advantage” if starting a startup in Silicon Valley
  • In general, VC due diligence takes a few weeks.

• Ashton Kutcher

  • To change the world you have to change yourself.
  • Red flag in entrepreneurship: “What will I get / who will I be by solving the problem?”
  • Don't jump to the effect. You have to be the cause of a new reality.
  • “If you want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, you will always be second best, because Mark Zuckerberg will always be a better Mark Zuckerberg than you.”
  • The story of Carl Fisher
  • It's about leaving behind disruption for everyone to share, and how you can eliminate the space between people.
  • agrade@gmail.com
  • The biggest reason that SV/NY is attractive is that you have a certain culture of people surrounding you
  • Success is really imitation plus innovation
  • Startup “attitude” in LA: companies that spearhead content delivery are resistant to innovation.

• Matt Mullenweg, Automattic

  • There's a stage in every startup when you have more devs than users. Enlist your friends.
  • Be your own most passionate user.
  • “To be creative you need to be, or be sleeping with, someone who uses your software every day.”
  • Details matter. “There's nothing like the crucible of real usage.”
  • Famous 5-minute install
  • “There's nothing quite as permanent as a temporary business model.”
  • You need a better tagline.
  • Do your own support. Have support@example.com be an alias for everyone@example.com for as long as you can keep it up.
  • “If you are in school, please appreciate it before you drop out.”
  • “I don't mind being on the Titanic, but I want to be steering it” (re: CNET)
  • PG's Bayesian work influenced Akismet (blog comment anti-spam)
  • Time is short.
  • Never rely on a single partner for > 30% of your revenue.

• Mark Pincus, Zynga

  • It's hard to say when your startup has actually started.
  • He tried to buy CNET (!)
  • It's shocking how much of our Internet behavior is represented by one company (e.g. Facebook for social, Amazon for shopping)
  • Value a single engineering day building the right product.
  • Test, test, test. Build the house that you want to live in, don't build a spec house you're going to flip ASAP.
  • Don't worry about your resume or exit path. Go all in.
  • He's a serial entrepreneur because he wasn't able to create a sustainable company.
  • You also need a plan for when everything goes right (e.g. scaling the company)
  • It's hard to raise money even when you're profitable.
  • Early-stage entrepreneurs sometimes only want to pursue something if it gets funded. Wrong idea.

• Paul Graham, Y Combinator (office hours)

  • In reading this batch of YC applications: in so many cases, the desire to start a startup precedes actually having an idea. The best startup ideas don't come from people looking for startup ideas. Look for problems, not ideas.
  • It's better to do something hard if you're capable of solving hard problems.

• Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

  • The coolest thing about SV is that there's no reason not to just try.
  • The biggest risk is not taking one.
  • 1st-gen web problems were all about scale. Now, it's hard to cache when the experience is so personalized.
  • It's fundamentally valuable to have the person making product decisions also have technical knowledge about the product.
  • He did hold a programming competition for hiring interns, but there was no alcohol like in The Social Network.
  • A fundamental of engineering: you never want to build the same thing twice.
  • Once you have a product, centralize your competencies (e.g. disparate marketing people becoming a Growth Team)
  • The point of Facebook isn't the features, it's the people.
  • Only sell your company if you'll still get to do what you want to do.
  • Find the VCs that are aligned with you.
  • Surprisingly, you can learn a lot of stuff you don't know along the way if you stay focused on the user.
  • SV culture sometimes favors starting a company before you actually have anything to build.
  • Huge bias: companies that succeed have passionate founders.
  • People will remember what gets built on top of the FB Platform more than they remember FB itself.
  • FB's future: what can you build now that all of these social connections are in place?
  • SV is not the only place to be. Good for beginners though.
  • He would have stayed in Boston if he were to do it all over again.
  • The short-term focus of SV bothers him
  • Average time spent in a job in Seattle is 2x that of SV. Non-committal culture
  • Non-SV startups seem to be more focused on the long term.
  • There's always an advantage to doing things differently than everyone else.

• Stephen Cohen, Palantir

  • “The product advice you get from VCs is worth how much you're paying for it.”
  • The CIA has a VC branch: In-Q-Tel

• Max Levchin, Paypal

  • The job of the cofounder isn't to commiserate with you. It's to provide the platform of support when you need it.
  • Not having a cofounder can be detrimental. No one can hear you scream, “we're fucked.” Your mom telling you that “everything will be okay” doesn't mean much in the practical sense
  • Pick a cofounder that you respect. If you get a bad feeling, break up ASAP. “Whenever there's any doubt, there's no doubt.”
  • Problem: charismatic employee that's a net negative. Get rid of them ASAP.
  • How to fire someone: “I'd like to ask you to resign.”
  • Classic engineering mistake: confusing hard and valuable.
  • South Park underpants gnomes episode
  • Plagues: fear of failure. Fear of judgment. Desire to impress someone. The only emotion you should allow yourself is passion. You can't always be thinking “How will this make me look?”
  • Ignore your mistakes. The number one thing to worry about is “Am I doing what I'm good at?” Don't dwell on what you did wrong, push on with what you're good at.

• Ron Conway, SV Angel

  • Media and the Internet are finally converging
  • Think big, Really big. Not enough people do.
  • A defining entrepreneur is a product visionary who owns the mind of their customer. Decisive.
  • Bootstrapping forever is great.
  • Design/UX are the new intellectual property.
  • He can tell a defining entrepreneur from a mile away.

• Drew Houston, Dropbox

  • Everything big starts small
  • Everyone starts out clueless
  • Get out of your comfort zone
  • As a founder, you start spending more and more of your time on people stuff.
  • It's easier to start out as an engineer and learn the business stuff than vice versa.
  • Learn a little bit about a lot:
    • sales
    • marketing
    • finance/accounting
    • product design
    • psychology, influence, negotiation
    • organizational design
    • management and leadership
    • business strategy
    • blogs, HN, founder stories
  • Take on more than you're ready to, and get used to that feeling
  • The fastest way to learn about startups is to join one, NOT grad school, big companies, business school, banking, consulting, etc.
  • Stack the odds in your favor. Anyone can push themselves; put yourself in a situation where you'll be pulled
  • Surround yourself with kindred spirits. You're the average of your 5 closest friends.
  • Get plugged into the startup world via YC
  • Find the best investors
  • Dropbox is looking to build the Internet filesystem
  • Re: acquisition, independence is important for ubiquity.