Startup School - An Inspiring Room Full of Hackers

Many people working for a relatively large corporation might bristle at the prospect of speaking face to face with 500 hackers with an average age of 22. I had exactly that opportunity this past Saturday as an invitee to Paul Graham's YCombinator Startup School held in Harvard's Science Center. Hands down, it was one of the most enjoyable experiences of my career.

The setup was simple: pull young aspiring entrepreneurs from around the world into one place and give them 36 hours of relentless exposure to tech luminaries, IP attorneys, serial entrepreneurs, VCs, and corporate sellout interlopers like me. The speakers ranged from Woz, who gave a fantastic account of the early Apple days to Stephen Wolfram, Sergey's first 'boss', who remarked that Sergey still owes him some deliverables. (I will be sure to let him know.) Olin Shivers gave a wonderfully ominous account of taking venture funding that contained one slide titled: "VCs – Soulless Agents of Satan, or Just Clumsy Rapists?” One for the scrapbooks, to be sure.

As I entered Harvard Science Center's Room B, where the event was held, I was instantly struck by the sheer energy of the crowd. It was between speakers, and the ambitious gaggle of hackers was comparing screens, showing off mashups, and climbing over the seats to continue protocol preference debates in closer proximity to their combatants. No one was running off to check in with their assistant or jump onto a mindless conference call with sales finance.

As speakers sequentially took to the podium, the students took to their seats, but by no means did the activity die down. The glow of screens (from a refreshingly Powerbook-dominated audience) revealed an array of real-time collaborative note-taking fora virtually assembling the room's minds in a concurrent recording and discussion of the event. Rather than laptops providing an instant messaging fueled distraction from the content, as is often alleged in schools (and in many of the meetings in which I sit at work) and where their use is being restricted, these kids were actually using them to dive even deeper into the content of the speeches. Every aspect of the proceedings was noted in real time and then integrated in a bevy of wikis that covered everything from speaker bios to where the parties were later that night. I relished when it was my chance to speak. Such open and idealistic minds looking back at me.

Having spent so many days speaking to relatively jaded trade conference attendees who half-listen to me, perking up only when my speech intersects with their pre-hardened agendas, it was a treat to be in a room of eager and ambitious geeks. So what did I have to say? Well, I think that others have covered topics such as how to start a company more thoroughly and with more authenticity than I ever could. Mark Fletcher, founder of Bloglines, is one of my favorites on this theme. (via Andrej) The 37 Signals guys are also getting a bit of worthy press for a recent interesting take on minimalism in entrepreneurial software efforts. I took the opportunity to consider the underpinnings of Google's success and describe a few potentially overlooked five cent nuggets from our experience:

Start! - Just get going. Don't waste a lot of time writing business plans or strategic roadmaps. It actually takes a lot of conceit for any of us to think we have a space so figured out so well that we know what the next five years will look like. Instead of spinning wheels, just start coding.

Solve User Problems! - What to code? It always shocks me how meek some hackers are about determining what to build. It seems we have created a technology culture where the MBAs and their Powerpoints somehow suck all the air out of the room and leave geeks feeling inadequate. Actually however, no one is better suited to invent than users of technology who realize that the user experience can always be improved. There is always the temptation to start from the money and work back to the user, but this never bears remarkable fruit. Instead, start with what is broken today. Fix it, and you will be richly rewarded.

Go Big! - While I love that the Internet has enabled the emergence and growth of niche businesses, I still believe that the most alluring opportunities for real hackers lie in building applications (and infrastructure/platforms) that will benefit hundreds of millions of users.

Stay Cheap through Demo! - I see too many entrepreneurs these days feeling they need to build an entire company to support what is essentially a feature of a larger search engine or portal. It depresses me to see creative people wasting productive cycles on the mundane aspects of building full companies. YCombinator gets this. Their Summer Founders Program gives kids stipends of a few thousand dollars each to build baby companies over a two month span. No directors of HR, no accounts payable. Just sheer pragmatism and code intended to create working demos. When talented people are allowed to focus on their core competency without distraction, cool things happen.

Geeks rule! - Echoing my earlier sentiments that we frequently confuse whoever is loudest with being the folks getting stuff done, we can't forget that is actually the geeks who rule technology. More than ever, thanks to cheap/free development environments and powerful hardware, individual developers are empowered to have direct, scalable, and meaningful impact. I don't want to completely dismiss the ecosystem of those of us on the periphery of coding - businesspeople, VCs, lawyers, consultants. However, I think all of our hand waving can often discourage the guys and girls who lie at the heart of technology. As such, I believe that all the venture money in the world is no substitute for talent.

Food! - This may seem like a non-sequitur, however too often we forget about the human and collaborative nature of what we do. There is nothing like a free breakfast/lunch/dinner to bring folks together, loosen them up, and encourage sharing, debate, and brainstorming. Too often, I hear people remark that they expect us to cut out the free food now that we are a public company. I don't blame them for their shortsightedness because I think the last bubble burst ingrained in each of us a healthy skepticism. However, food provides a cooperative, egalitarian, and participatory foundation for everything we do. For a few thousand dollars per employee per year, a workplace can feel more like a home, or better yet, a community for the mind. In that light, it is worth noting that Google didn't wait until the company was rolling in dough to start meals. I believe the first chef at Google was approximately employee #40 or #50.

Be Open! - I mean this is many senses of the word. First off, most literally, there are few reasons not to use open source software these days. It allows you to scale faster and leverages the collective expertise of developers around the world to advance your project. Open source software also maximizes the chances that your code will integrate well with an eventual acquirer. Beyond that though, openness should be a characteristic of your business at all levels. Be transparent to your users and listen to their feedback. Be clear with your team and employees and inspire their trust.

Following the talk, I spent the next two hours in the hallway of the auditorium answering questions, hearing pitches, and seeing demos. With this crowd, I could have stayed all week. Congrats to Paul, YCombinator, and to the participants themselves. I have already heard from many of them, and I expect we will all continue to see great things from this gang.

Comments

[Ousama Abushagur]

I was in attendance at this great event and was lucky to hear Chris Sacca's talk. He gave one of the better talks of that day and it was very inspirational. It gave us something to believe in and the energy to believe we are going in the right direction.

[Beau Hartshorne]

The SubEthaEdit part was really fun, here's a screenshot taken during one of the talks:
http://www.hartshorne.ca/startupschool/SubEthaEdit.png

There were up to 12 people taking notes at once. The guy with the dvorak key layout was a rocket. I've posted the notes here, but haven't had a chance to edit them yet:
http://www.hartshorne.ca/startupschool/

Paul and Y Combinator: thanks for organizing this. And Chris, thanks for the inspirational talk.

[Jared Cosulich]

I've heard really great things about this conference. On my way to work today I listened to a great interview by Paul about Great Hackers ( http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail188.html ). Looks like Paul is doing some great stuff for the startup community. Now if only we can get a startup school on the West Coast (I'm trying to start CommunityWalk - www.communitywalk.com - out here and would love to meet with other like minded people, but heard about Startup School too late) (actually it looks like someone at Stanford is putting on something similar - http://groups.google.com/group/startupschool/browse_thread/thread/5aeadc858ca86d0a/07f34f3be3bd7ab9#07f34f3be3bd7ab9
)

Paul mentioned in the interview noted above that so many of these startups start from universities because the admissions process fascilitates putting lots of really talented people in the same place where they can get to know eachother and work on interesting projects. Its too bad there is something else like that outside of the university setting... Startup School is a great step in the right direction.

[David Ganzhorn]

I was at the Startup School, and your talk was, to me, by far the most inspiring. You genuinely treated us all like a room full of intelligent peers, and for a college student about to step into the real world, it was a direly needed experience to be shown that kind of respect from an employee of a company like Google. Afterwards I saw the world as holding a bit more opportunity.

I hope I have the chance to hear you give another talk someday, or bump into you at Google if I come to work there.

[polina sorkin]

When Chris made a comment about girls not asking any questions I felt compelled (being one of the VERY few girls at Startup School) to come up with something good. Unfortunately, I must have been in too much awe to come up with anything worth asking. But I thought of a question, Chris, what can I do to get hired by Google?

[the hand of god visits the midwest]

you forgot something on your list: customers

are the 90s back already? all the frittering in the world doesn't mean anything unless there are customers for what you are doing. cool ideas are just that- cool ideas.

value is a whole different subject

I find google going down the path of the old "throw it against the wall and see if it sticks" type of development. How much is really sticking? This method is good if your goo(gle) is very sticky all the time. But most people just isn't.

One can never go wrong by building something people want. The energy of creative people is awesome.

But the energy of hungry customers is orders of magnitude better.

[Sarah Blow]

That sounds like a wicked event, I wish they would do something like that over here in the UK. On a slightly different note, do you think the meaning of the word Geek is changing. It certainly seems to be over here in the UK. In fact we are trying really hard over here to make geeks cool, smart, innovative, sexy and socially adept to the real world.

We are even managing to get the girls out and about in London for the London Girl Geek Dinners. Events like the one you are talking about and these are all great and should help promote technology to a new level.

Sarah
:)

Ps. Are Google finding it hard to get Girls to their events as well (Microsoft seem to be having issues with this as well) You may find that you are going about it the wrong way. The last girly geek dinner had about 30+ women at it.