More Notes from Startup School
I was amazed at the popularity of the previous post. Even considering that I wrote it on a plane from Boston to Frankfurt, and it contained plenty of errors, it still tripled my website's traffic.
So I decided to sort through my hand-written notes and type them up to cover the other speakers as well. In the previous post, I only really talked about Michael Mandel and Chris Sacca, who left the strongest impression. Aaron Schwartz announced that there would be videos of the talks, so you might want to watch those once they come out. There is also a notes section at the original Startup School site.
Langley Steinert
Langley is the Chairman of TripAdvisor, a travel advice website. He had also worked on Viaweb with Paul Graham. His talk was about his experiences in the early stages of TripAdvisor, which he eventually sold to Expedia.
I remember him making a strong point for keeping an eye on liquidity: "Always have 12 months of money in the bank, raise money as soon as you fall below." There are two reasons for this: First, you have to be able to focus on running your company instead of spending all your time on chasing money. Second, once your bank account is empty, it won't be easy to get favorable terms: They have you by the balls.
In the early stages of a web startup, you're interested in getting visitors, quickly. Langley suggested three ways of doing this:
1. Do PR. The media people have to fill their pages and sites with content. They'll be especially happy if you give them statistics and nice little stories. Be opportunistic, not aggressive.
2. Have a good product.
3. Search engine marketing. TripAdvisor did this heavily in the early stages.
Overall, this was a very good talk. Langley seems like a nice guy and his slides had plenty of interesting data.
Mark Hedlund
Next up was Mark, who started with some general advice about doing a startup, and then went through a list of startups he found interesting. In the first part, he warned about founding a company that has no foreseeable chance to generate revenue – otherwise, there's no way to get VC money.
Also, he warned about starting a company on the basis of being "the Google for X". Simply offering a variation of search for a different field may not cut it.
He went on to talk about some startups and their respective stories. His examples were Flickr (photo sharing), Jotspot (corporate wiki platform), Koders (search engine for source code), Odeo (podcasting), Project PlaceSite (social networking for people sitting in cafes), Spike Source (open source heavy-weight), Splunk (search software for log files), 37signals (web-based collaboration), upcoming.org (social event calendar, acquired by Yahoo), and Zimbra (AJAX e-mail). Most of these were new to me: I only knew of Flickr, Jotspot, Odeo, and 37signals. I love the 37signals products - Basecamp is fantastic, and their simpler-is-better approach rocks.
Qi Lu
Qi (pronounced "Chi") is a VP Engineering at Yahoo. He talked about some of the new Yahoo products and their efforts to reach out to developers. Also, he wanted to recruit some talent for Yahoo. While this wasn't so directly related to startups, he did show some interesting stuff.
Previously, I had only seen the new Yahoo Mail from screenshots, and Qi demoed some of it to the audience. The new Yahoo Mail looks much like a web-based Outlook, is similarly interactive as a desktop app, I'm sure the average user will like this, as this is what he/she is used to. Maybe GMail will have its behind kicked. Time will tell.
Disclaimer: I once interned at Yahoo and still think it's a very good company.
Hutch Fishman
Hutch is a startup CFO veteran and has worked at many young companies.
He took us through the typical startup funding stages. A company might go through all of these or just the first few:
At the end, he made a strong point for working with top-tier firms: If you work only with the best lawyers and the big 4 accounting firms, this will make things much easier during the preparation of an IPO or a sale.
Paul Graham
Paul's talk can be found here.
When I was a TA for a CS class last year, I motivated (or tried to motivate) my students by saying that the best way of getting new ideas is to know the old ones. And then taking them apart. Therefore, I think Paul is right about the need to find new ideas through questions. Also, Paul was the first speaker without slides: Peter Norvig would be proud of him.
David Cavanaugh
David is a patent attorney and explained the different IP protection schemes of interest to startups.
Michael Mandel
See my previous post.
Steve Wozniak
There is no need to introduce Woz. He talked about his experiences from HP, Atari, and the early days of Apple. I didn't know he was such a funny guy. At the end, the audience thanked him for his achievements with a standing ovation.
Stephen Wolfram
Stephen is the founder of Wolfram Research and the creator of Mathematica. In addition, he is an extremely smart guy.
He talked about his first company that he founded while at CalTech. He eventually left because of disagreements with management and sales. Therefore, he kept his second company, Wolfram Research, strongly engineering-based.
Eventually, he took some time off to write A New Kind of Science, and showed some examples of where this science could be used: I found his ringtone example rather amusing. Almost equally impressive was the fact that he got the auditorium's audio system to work right away – that stuff never works the first time at my school.
Stan Reiss
As the VC representative, Stan Reiss of Matrix Partners stood in a pretty tough spot; Paul Graham has repeatedly bashed VCs as being unhelpful herd followers.
Stan picked up on this and incorporated some self-humor into the presentation. Overall, he offered a good overview of the VC landscape.
One of the questions from the audience was: "How do you protect yourself against a VC who listens to your idea, and then turns and gives it to someone else?" Stan argued that quality VC companies don't do this. I certainly hope so.
Mark Macenka
Mark is a partner at Goodwin Procter, a law firm. He held a great talk about the legal traps and mistakes that startups should avoid. According to Mark, it all begins with good advice. Personally, I think having a good lawyer is important, but you should focus your energies on building the product.
It helps to have a person on board who is obsessive about legal stuff: You can avoid so many pitfalls later on if you make the founders and early staff sign papers that bind them and their inventions to the company.
Chris Sacca
See my previous post.
Olin Shrivers
Olin is a co-founder of SmartLeaf, a company that makes automatic fund allocation software for mutual funds. He is also a funny, straightforward kind of guy.
He recounted some anecdotes from his company's early days, the herd cult among VCs, and the fact that when you look at it honestly, a startup is all about money. He argued that startup founders need to have a high tolerance for feeling like a moron, as any great new idea will first encounter much initial resistance.
One of his strong points was that you have to have good technology and be respectful of the user. For example, it pays to have a one-sentence privacy policy; his went something like: "Barring legal process, we will not give out your information to anyone, at all".
Summer Founders
The event closed with a panel that featured this year's summer founders. They talked about their startup experiences, and the up and downs they had experienced.
So I decided to sort through my hand-written notes and type them up to cover the other speakers as well. In the previous post, I only really talked about Michael Mandel and Chris Sacca, who left the strongest impression. Aaron Schwartz announced that there would be videos of the talks, so you might want to watch those once they come out. There is also a notes section at the original Startup School site.Langley Steinert
Langley is the Chairman of TripAdvisor, a travel advice website. He had also worked on Viaweb with Paul Graham. His talk was about his experiences in the early stages of TripAdvisor, which he eventually sold to Expedia.
I remember him making a strong point for keeping an eye on liquidity: "Always have 12 months of money in the bank, raise money as soon as you fall below." There are two reasons for this: First, you have to be able to focus on running your company instead of spending all your time on chasing money. Second, once your bank account is empty, it won't be easy to get favorable terms: They have you by the balls.
In the early stages of a web startup, you're interested in getting visitors, quickly. Langley suggested three ways of doing this:
1. Do PR. The media people have to fill their pages and sites with content. They'll be especially happy if you give them statistics and nice little stories. Be opportunistic, not aggressive.
2. Have a good product.
3. Search engine marketing. TripAdvisor did this heavily in the early stages.
Overall, this was a very good talk. Langley seems like a nice guy and his slides had plenty of interesting data.
Mark Hedlund
Next up was Mark, who started with some general advice about doing a startup, and then went through a list of startups he found interesting. In the first part, he warned about founding a company that has no foreseeable chance to generate revenue – otherwise, there's no way to get VC money.
Also, he warned about starting a company on the basis of being "the Google for X". Simply offering a variation of search for a different field may not cut it.
He went on to talk about some startups and their respective stories. His examples were Flickr (photo sharing), Jotspot (corporate wiki platform), Koders (search engine for source code), Odeo (podcasting), Project PlaceSite (social networking for people sitting in cafes), Spike Source (open source heavy-weight), Splunk (search software for log files), 37signals (web-based collaboration), upcoming.org (social event calendar, acquired by Yahoo), and Zimbra (AJAX e-mail). Most of these were new to me: I only knew of Flickr, Jotspot, Odeo, and 37signals. I love the 37signals products - Basecamp is fantastic, and their simpler-is-better approach rocks.
Qi Lu
Qi (pronounced "Chi") is a VP Engineering at Yahoo. He talked about some of the new Yahoo products and their efforts to reach out to developers. Also, he wanted to recruit some talent for Yahoo. While this wasn't so directly related to startups, he did show some interesting stuff.
Previously, I had only seen the new Yahoo Mail from screenshots, and Qi demoed some of it to the audience. The new Yahoo Mail looks much like a web-based Outlook, is similarly interactive as a desktop app, I'm sure the average user will like this, as this is what he/she is used to. Maybe GMail will have its behind kicked. Time will tell.
Disclaimer: I once interned at Yahoo and still think it's a very good company.
Hutch Fishman
Hutch is a startup CFO veteran and has worked at many young companies.
He took us through the typical startup funding stages. A company might go through all of these or just the first few:
- Seed: Strategy and market research, develop business plan
- First Round: Complete initial product, build initial team
- Second Round: Bring product to market, initial customer deployment, complete team
- Third Round: Expand sales and marketing, significant risk taken out of business
- Fourth Round / Mezzazine: Working capital needed for liquidity event
At the end, he made a strong point for working with top-tier firms: If you work only with the best lawyers and the big 4 accounting firms, this will make things much easier during the preparation of an IPO or a sale.
Paul Graham
Paul's talk can be found here.
When I was a TA for a CS class last year, I motivated (or tried to motivate) my students by saying that the best way of getting new ideas is to know the old ones. And then taking them apart. Therefore, I think Paul is right about the need to find new ideas through questions. Also, Paul was the first speaker without slides: Peter Norvig would be proud of him.
David Cavanaugh
David is a patent attorney and explained the different IP protection schemes of interest to startups.
Michael Mandel
See my previous post.
Steve Wozniak
There is no need to introduce Woz. He talked about his experiences from HP, Atari, and the early days of Apple. I didn't know he was such a funny guy. At the end, the audience thanked him for his achievements with a standing ovation.
Stephen Wolfram
Stephen is the founder of Wolfram Research and the creator of Mathematica. In addition, he is an extremely smart guy.
He talked about his first company that he founded while at CalTech. He eventually left because of disagreements with management and sales. Therefore, he kept his second company, Wolfram Research, strongly engineering-based.
Eventually, he took some time off to write A New Kind of Science, and showed some examples of where this science could be used: I found his ringtone example rather amusing. Almost equally impressive was the fact that he got the auditorium's audio system to work right away – that stuff never works the first time at my school.
Stan Reiss
As the VC representative, Stan Reiss of Matrix Partners stood in a pretty tough spot; Paul Graham has repeatedly bashed VCs as being unhelpful herd followers.
Stan picked up on this and incorporated some self-humor into the presentation. Overall, he offered a good overview of the VC landscape.
One of the questions from the audience was: "How do you protect yourself against a VC who listens to your idea, and then turns and gives it to someone else?" Stan argued that quality VC companies don't do this. I certainly hope so.
Mark Macenka
Mark is a partner at Goodwin Procter, a law firm. He held a great talk about the legal traps and mistakes that startups should avoid. According to Mark, it all begins with good advice. Personally, I think having a good lawyer is important, but you should focus your energies on building the product.
It helps to have a person on board who is obsessive about legal stuff: You can avoid so many pitfalls later on if you make the founders and early staff sign papers that bind them and their inventions to the company.
Chris Sacca
See my previous post.
Olin Shrivers
Olin is a co-founder of SmartLeaf, a company that makes automatic fund allocation software for mutual funds. He is also a funny, straightforward kind of guy.
He recounted some anecdotes from his company's early days, the herd cult among VCs, and the fact that when you look at it honestly, a startup is all about money. He argued that startup founders need to have a high tolerance for feeling like a moron, as any great new idea will first encounter much initial resistance.
One of his strong points was that you have to have good technology and be respectful of the user. For example, it pays to have a one-sentence privacy policy; his went something like: "Barring legal process, we will not give out your information to anyone, at all".
Summer Founders
The event closed with a panel that featured this year's summer founders. They talked about their startup experiences, and the up and downs they had experienced.
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