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by Micah Elliott.
Original Post: Startup School Impressions -- Should You Attend?
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I flew down to SFO last weekend to attend Startup School. Lots of energy in Kresge and it was pretty easy to start talking to people. I even met a few fellow Portlanders. I was really looking forward to hearing fresh ideas from some great innovators of our day. Turns out that these guys already blog about most of the things they tell you. What's more, you can simply download all the talks.
But I'm glad I attended in person. I probably won't make the trip next year since I now understand the whole experience: highly successful geeky speakers (that you can even talk to!), lots of ambitious young people, fancy setting, and pretty nice weather (compared to Portland).
The two biggest benefits of physically attending the show were: meeting people like me, and being inspired (by the vibe) to go out and take the plunge.
In chatting with fellow geeks, I learned that geeks have wild ideas. None of the ideas I heard resonated with me as things that I'd really want to team up to do. I wonder if people felt the same way about my ideas. I've been thinking about ways to organize groups in Portland to try and do some brainstorming. Looks like startupdrinks might be getting some traction. My other idea is to just start showing up and introducing myself at user interest groups, like those focused on Ruby, Python, and Linux.
There was not full concensus in the messages -- I need to use my own judgement in rolling up my take-aways. So here is my view of key points from the talks in summary:
Big companies make lots of acquisitions -- lots of startups aim to be another.
Raising money: as late and as little as possible. But when the time does come, get twice as much as you think you need.
There are some business terms and concepts you should get familiar with, but don't worry about this too early -- hackers are much more important than business types. Focus on hacking.
Get a good team of engineers (I think two is optimal for most cases).
Make something people want.
Build your business plan around benevolence -- when times get tough, you'll need a "good-will justification" for maintaining morale and pulling out of it. When facing adversity, "getting rich" is not a strong enough motivator for success.
Do whatever is best for your users.
Find a good wave to ride -- it's very hard to create your own.
Tie your problem to money already being spent.
Find a way for your technology to be disruptive.
Target a market who has their hair on fire -- they will be happy with whatever you build them.
Setting a price comes between building a great app and profiting -- don't forget to have a price.
Target the Fortune 5,000,000. Lots of businesses only have 1-5 employees -- they are a huge market.
You don't have to be viral.
Focus on solving real problems -- ones that you face personally.
Find an enthusiastic user.
Focus on making 100 users happy before launching.
Be lazy and selfish in implementing user-requested features.
Iterate rapidly.
Leverage scalability of Amazon and Google elastic offerings.
Become a part of the community -- start blogging (personal and business)
Be part of important discussions.
Embrace criticism.
Data is more agile than code -- find a way to generate and leverage it.
My impressions in summary:
Talks are great, but they are wholly available online -- if you don't attend you really should spend a day giving them focused attention
Lots of speaker messaging is repeated one year to the next
Speakers are not all on the same page (Sequoia vs 37Signals)
Young persons can be successful if they are motivated; but older fellas should not feel excluded from entering the race
You can meet some friendly geeks and maybe even make some useful connections
You need to break out of your shell and talk to people in order to meet your future partners
People actually use Lisp for project code (I'll be blogging about getting started with Lisp soon)
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