Catering towards hackers and programmers, Startup school’s an annual event hosted by Y Combinator, an incubator that invests a small amount of money (average around 18K) in a mass amount of selected startups twice a year. Startup school’s a free event (though, there’s an application process) that provides entrepreneurs and programmers that think about building a startup a platform to network and learn/get inspired from talks given by CEO and founders of some of the major companies out there.
I’m no programmer, but I’m curious to see what goes down at an event like this. Here’s what happened:
Cody’s a Startup School veteran; he was here last year. I was told to show up early, for the venue gets packed very quickly. Taking his advise, I got there right on the spot. 
The venue:
Needless to say, Stanford’s beautiful.
Cody was right, people were here early. A long line was formed when the door for registation was not even opened, yet. There was free food right next to the venue, too. These programmers weren’t here to joke around. Fully committed to getting that name badge as soon as they could.
Meanwhile…
I got free food all to myself.
After breakfast, I almost got what I needed:
Networking is a big thing here at Startup school. Everyone had a stack of business cards ready and ready to start a conversation when your eyes meet theirs. I felt a bit intimidated. But hey, that’s seem to be the rule of the game. Like a big funnel, if you talk to 50 people, you just might find 3-5 (that’s 10%) inspirational ideas/potential partners/people that are really genuinely talking to you.
Cody came to the rescue. A familiar face always ease the awkwardness over small talks.
The talk starts at 12PM, people are lining up to get good seats.
Here. We. Go. The 15 things I learned at Startup School:
Mark Zuckerberg’s up first. People went wild.
1. It’s about building what you want to use.
This won’t guarantee your success, but it’s a good start. Mark (most people call him Zuck) never expected to build a company and raise billions. He just wanted a service to connect the students. Plus, even if you failed at making yourself rich from doing so, you’ve still built something that’s of good use to yourself.
Up close and personal.
Founder of Uber, the crowd-sourced taxi service.
2. Make your users tell stories about your products.
Uber has lots of creative marketing campaigns. At valentine’s day, they had drivers deliver roses to their passengers. On presidents day, 1 in 20 cars would be treated as if the rider’s the president. They would have black Cadillacs sandwiched the taxi and drive towards the street where both sides are lined with American flags. And to top it off, when the passenger arrives the destination, the driver would wear shades, ear piece, acts as FBIs and opens the door for the passenger—a true presidential treatment.
The operation for Uber’s definitely beyond fun and game, a complex operation strategy tree is all set in place:
Next up:
3. Every entrepreneur needs determination—resilience and drive.
Resilience is the flexibility to morph your failed ideas to a successful one. It’s the trait that could pick yourself up when time gets tough. It’s the capacity to endure countless rejects from investors and yet able to keep your chin up. Drive is the ambition, the ability to strive for greatness, and the will to succeed.
4. Don’t doze off, otherwise you’d miss a great talk.
He was a quick talker, I simply couldn’t keep up. Sorry, guys.
An hour for Lunch!
Complimentary pizza, my favorite! They ran out very quickly:
…and by the end of the day:
Programmers have enormous apetite.
A line for the restroom.
Only at the men’s restroom. Why?
Because the male to female ratio’s 50:1. Just like what you’d expect in an engineering couse:
We’re back and there’s Tina Seelig!
Executive Director of Stanford Technology Ventures Programs and author of “What I Wish I Knew When I was 20.” Good read.
Ben Silvermann, founder and CEO of Pinterest.
5. Committing Matters.
When there’s no backup plan, success is your only way out. Ben Silbermann quit his Google gig in May of 2008. Started Pinterest in Nov of 09. Lunched on March 2010. And finally reached 3000 users in June 2010 after 8 months after he initiated the project. It was not a glorious track record, but he pushed it.
6. Build something you believe in.
When he pitched to a group of investors, some walked out even before he finished his presentation. It was difficult times, but he knew he had to stick with his guts.
This guy’s awesome, Ben Horowitz, the founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. His firm was evaluated at $800mil, during the rise of the tech bubble. He was one of the first few firms doing cloud computing at the time, but it was burning the cash FAST. Within a couple of years, the bubble crashed and he was forced to IPO to keep the company going. They IPO’d at $200mil. It was devastating. But worse was yet to come. After a few quarters passed, cloud computing part of the company was still working hard at burning its capital resulting an evaluation at $55million mark. Ben pulled the trigger and dissolved the cloud computing portion and focus strictly on software. In 2007, he sold the firm to HP for $1.6 billion. Happy Ending. Moral of the story—startup’s like a roller coaster ride.
7.Greatest thing about being rich, is not having to work with people you don’t like. So says Warren Buffett.
A photo taken at Ron Conway’s party.
8.Products Matter—building a product that improves how some large group of people does something important by 10x. The significant notion being 10 times better. It’s not about being just a little better. If you want your product to blow people out of the water and actually convert and start using your product, you got to make sure it’s got what it takes.
9.Taking the market—there is no crying in baseball and no profit for number 2 in technology markets. Investors like number one, consumers pay attention to number one. Michael Phelps took Gold in the 100m butterful, who took silver? Exactly.
10.Have courage.
Even James Cameron, the director of Avatar/Titanic said “Failure is an option, but fear is not.”
Then, it was Tom Preston-Werner’s turn.
Github is still a unfamiliar thing to me. Cody told me it’s got something to do programming. It went way over my head.
Quite dramatic. No distraction, all talk, as he put his phone on the stage:
11. A good business is made up of people, product, and philosophy. Good people make good decisions. Good products attract good consumers. And good philosophy brings in good people.
One of the biggest angel investors in Silicon Valley—Ron Conway of SV Angels.
SV Angel’s invested in more than 650 companies, some of the big ones include Google, Facebook, and Twitter…etc. Ron shared his insight on a few interesting meetups with the founders of Google and how he choose to invest.
12. Invest in people.
After seeing thousands of startups and its founders. Ron can tell whether to invest in a person after 10 minutes of conversation. He’s got a good instinct on whether the person would succeed.
—whether he/she has the charisma, leadership, passion, ability to execute…etc. A good case would be Jack Dorsey of Twitter. He loved Ev William and his team, where Jack’s a part of. So when Jack started twitter, Ron was in, no questions asked.
13.Growth is the lifeblood of innovation.He gets growth. When the product/service attracts crowd, innovation’s certainly involved.
Rakuten’s THE biggest online market place in Japan, taking 35-40% market share. It’s like the Amazon of Japan. Taking only $200,000 in VC, majority of the funding came from operations itself. The company started off by asking merchants to pay 6 months’ fee, at $600 USD/mo, up front to maintain the cashflow of the platform.
14. Success = innovation + operation. Innovation’s crucial, but without proper execution and operation, one could still run a company down the sewer.
15. Improve, improve, improve. Hiroshi believe that it’s in his Japanese culture to strive for greatness by constantly improving. Same philosophy I heard from the working culture of Toyota.
Due to a prior obligation, I had to miss two speakers, Joel Spolsky of Stack Exchange and David of Weebly.
Though, I didn’t get to hear the stories of two phenomenal CEO, it still ended with a good note—free snacks:
Well, that’s it. A terrific event that would certainly get you pumped and inspired to take that leap that you’ve always wanted. In fact, Cody and I went to a cafe immediately after we left the event to come up with potential new projects. But that’s for another post.
’til next time,
-Benson
