so, yesterday i went out and attended startup school. quite the interesting experience. i’ve been working for a startup for awhile now, and have learned a lot just by being there, but it was very educational to hear from other’s experiences, and learn more about the VC process. (there are some general notes here, i’m only going to mention things i thought were salient).
paul graham’s talk was a motivational one to debunk (or support) one’s desires to either start a startup (or not). i’ll admit i haven’t read all of his essay’s, but i’ll guess that you can probably divine much of what he said from them, even though its not all in one single essay.
max levchin was easily the most entertaining speaker. his best advice: organize your work so that user’s motivations align with one of the seven deadly sins
the partovi brothers gave a time-constrained talk about do’s and don’ts…
rahoul seth talked about the financial details of startups. he described the financing stages, what the various types of stock are, and then some tips about various types of capital. founders goals should be to end up with 5-10% of the company at liquidity. the take-away? DO NOT FUND WITH DEBT.
mitch kapor had the “keynote” spot (the only 1-hour talk). spoke about his experience starting lotus. i didn’t take many notes here, but one interesting tidbit was about how startups say they are a great place to work, and then in the offer letter, put in verbiage about how you’re an “employee at will” and can be “fired for any reason”. he said how he’s always remove that language, and put something softer. for under-performing people, put them on a remediation plan, as it’ll be better for the health of the company overall. he also mentioned some research in the late 90’s his wife did about startup cultures, and found that overall, startups have more bullying and public humilation going on amongst employees.
mark zuckerberg came off as dick. he had no slides, and just talked like a pompous ass on the stage. he had two points: the importance of being technical (good!) and of being young (bad!). he tried to categorize innovation as only happening during youth, giving some examples. this contradicts what david galenson has postulated, that there are two types of innovators, and only one type occurs during youth. i’m sure facebook has plenty of public humiliation going on based upon his attitude.
finally, joel lehrer did his best to make a somewhat try topic (patents) interesting. intellectual property law has always been interesting to me, so i enjoyed it. i just would have appreciated a faster-moving pace though the material.
(there was a “recent founders panel” as the last thing, the most enjoyable thing being a hilarious slideshow from the reddit crew about their adventures)
overall, a very educational day. totally worth my time. i’d highly encourage everyone to attend next time it rolls around.
Tags: code, life
March 25th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Nice review, thx.
March 25th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Thanks much for your recap, and thanks especially for your comments about Mark Zuckerberg. The guy’s statements were infuriating, and I very nearly went up to the mike to set things straight, but such behavior takes a lot of nerve, and I was too tired by then.
Mark’s claim was that young people are “smarter” or “more intelligent” than older people. His idea is nonsense, it was contradicted by other speakers, and it doesn’t show up in IQ tests. Furthermore, he insulted a lot of people (attending the Startup School) with his false assertion.
An earlier talk described such bigotry as “Mirrorocracy” instead of “Meritocracy”, where one confuses talent with “people like us.” It denies what the earlier speaker’s research had found: diverse teams are more innovative.
On the other hand, there are differences in memory capability (declines with age), and performance in expert skills (better with age and experience: reported recently in the Wall Street Journal). I did think Mark might be on to something credible when he said that young people often have much simpler lives, so they can stay more focused on just one thing.
Furthermore, what Mark advocated (age discrimination) is illegal, and it is wrong, wrong, wrong. Yes, Mark was just too full of … himself.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:33 pm
I didn’t like Mark Zuckerberg. Paul Graham and Max Levchim made my day with their presentations (frankly speaking, after them I knew only those two were worth coming to Startup School) and friendly talks. They really can motivate you and inspire big time. But after Mark Zuckerberg’s talk I felt smashed. It looked like “be young, do not own anything, do not spend time with friends and girlfriends, forget about family”. Come on, are you crazy??? So, if you have girlfriend, or (especially!) wife - you can go and find a job - startups are not for you? If you own a car — same way? That’s soooo insane. I didn’t like that. Didn’t get anything from his talk.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:34 pm
Paul Graham’s talk was probably the most memorable for me, but then again, I had known about him before coming to the event, and his publicity of it was one of the reasons I came. The founders’ panel was cool, too; I liked the willingness of one of the guys to use “key-value pairs” in colloquial speech. The nerd factor was high throughout the whole event, which was good to see. (Once I heard the entanglement of the nametags being described as a binary search tree problem. I argued that it was actually more topological in nature.)
The Zuckerberg talk was absolutely painful. His work ethic is admirable, and his marketing of facebook has been very effective, but he was the least interesting and impressive of all the speakers, by far. I actually felt sorry for him at points, because there were moments when he realized that he had actually said some things that were extremely offensive, and you could see the discomfort on his face.