Startup School Notes
Paul Graham, of hackers and painters essay fame, organized an excellent conference at Harvard this past weekend.
As well as himself, he gathered some of the best speakers I have seen, including Steve Wozniak, who received a standing ovation before and after speaking.
I wont cover all of the speeches, if you’d like that visit the notes of one studious attendee and they will soon have video and/or podcasts of the talks up at the site.
A few random observations:
* Paul Graham was a lot different to what I imagined him when reading his essays. His speech was very much like an essay, which was good, but wasn’t very interactive, which was bad. He could almost have fielded 30 minutes of questions about his writing.
* Chris Sacca of Google basically offered everyone in the room a job. He said that after startups of 2-3 people had something to demo to contact him and that Google would acquire the company and give them the infrastructure to scale their application. Interesting to see how that plays out. He also said he was the product manager for Google Talk, bought Dark Fiber and headed up Google’s Wifi effort. Sergey and Larry call him the “Shephard of Stray Things”. You can either read something strategically important into Talk, bandwidth and Wifi being in the same group or alternatively read something into the fact that they are all in the “stray things” group.
* Steve Wozniak was fantastically humble. He really is just focused on creating great products. Thoroughly refreshing to see someone like him speak.
* I didn’t realize how great Trip Advisor had done. Langley Steinert, who founded the company, opened up the day. They were extremely capital efficient (raised less than $5m), operated in one of the toughest travel markets in history, managed to do about $50m in revenue last year and sold to Interactive Corp. Absolutely amazing.
* Olin Shivers, Associate Professor, Georgia Tech; Co-Founder, Smartleaf, is one of the funniest speakers ever. Go and read the acknowledgements page of an API he wrote. Seriously, it is some of the funniest shit you will read in a computer manual. His speech was just as good.
[…] Paul Graham, who organized the very good Startup event last month, has posted an essay on how the venture capital industry is being squeezed by two sides: one the fact that everything is now cheaper and companies don’t need that much capital and that they are now competing against Google. […]