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Haris Khan
Today I had the great pleasure of attending Startup School 2008. It’s a brain child of Y Combinator which invests into young startups by students/hackers to come up with really cool ideas. Its like summer camp for startups. It was a day long event and following are few key highlights:
- First of all I loved the way everyone got connected with each other via Chat room on Chatterous.com, Twitter , live feed from Justin.tv, live pics and a wiki. It was great to get live feedback from everyone.
- Greg McAdoo from Sequoia Capital advised startups to consider their potential markets as waves. He suggested that startups should think like surfers to respect the wave and get on it when the time is right to make the most out of it. I kinda agree with the fact that without Flash from Adobe and high capacity bandwidth, YouTube would have never been a hit.
- Apparently Jeff Bezos , Amazon’s CEO was the main speaker but apparently he wasn’t well received. He kept talking about AWS and AWS. Nothing special there.
- Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and FriendFeed had a very good presentation on “Listening”. He gave some really good tips and he shared his experience that within Google their decision to launch Gmail was decided when 100 internal users were “happy with Gmail” not error free but happy. I think it’s a great way to test your product and we shall start doing the same.
- Techcrunch’s Mike Arrington was next and I was expecting some fireworks. He mentioned that he only got 15 mins which in my view was fair complaint because he deserved more as his session was way more interesting. He quoted that he wants to write stories that startups don’t want about themselves, which makes sense at times for Techcrunch. He suggested a book Purple Cow by Seith Godin. His final take away was if anyone wanted him to write a story, its better to yank him once and hard rather then pitch him continuously and become a noise. I liked the fact that he was a straight shooter and got to the point very quickly.
- There were another presentations too and you can see the recorded video at Justin.tv or read about it on Techcrunch.
Later, I got the chance to meet Mike Arrington in person and to be honest I was expecting he be hard to impress/get through. Well I was right but what I learned that he does genuinely love startups as he quoted earlier. I just introduced him about Zigron and how we are working with startup with our offshore office . This got him some what excited and he asked me to contact him later to meet up. I didnt expected that he will be interested in anything beside killer products but he did prove my assumption wrong and listened to me very carefully. Though in a second I tried to be a smart ass and gave an impression that I didnt approached him for PR to which he got back to me instantly and said “you do want f***ing business with me”… which is true
Anyway lets see how it goes.Overall it was a great experience to see what makes Silicon Valley so special.
Update: You can see 37Signal’s David Heinemeier presentation notes here and corridor discussion here.
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Shahab Riazi 10:49 pm on April 20, 2008 Permalink
This is really interesting although, I must admit having Jeff B. there was probably the least of all the edgy ideas and approach.
They should market this better since I had not heard of it and would have gladly spent a day there.
SHAHAB
Ryan Hupfer 1:01 am on April 21, 2008 Permalink
I agree - this was a very, very good example of why it pays to be out here in the middle of the madness in Silicon Valley. Arrington seems like a pretty laid back dude and he truly seems that he cares about startups and the community in the valley.
I can’t wait to check out another event like this - I was pretty blown away that this even took place…AND that it was free.
Y Combinator is the real deal in my book.
Raza Imam 6:36 pm on April 21, 2008 Permalink
Thanks for sharing… I’ll be there next year.
Raza Imam
http://SoftwareSweatshop.com