Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and Founder of Facebook
This year again I had the pleasure to attend Startup School. Startup School is a conference for hackers that want to create their Startup. It’s basically a crash course on a lot of different aspects that matters when you create a startup, from human resources, funding, vision and execution. It’s not like a normal class though, because it’s not one professor, but a lot of different experts speaking about their own experience of creating startups. This year again the speakers were amazing, and the main ones were Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Tony Hsieh, Jason Fried, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Chris Anderson and other very good speakers. The atmosphere of energy in the room at startup school is something you have to experience to believe. Many founders have told that this event was what finally made them take the leap.
So, what did speakers talked about this year? I’m going to go over the best moments of the conference, in my opinion. After the break.
Paul Graham is such a great entrepreneur. He started the conference and talked about what startups are really like, with quotes from a lot of CEOs of the YCombinator baked startups. You can read his talk on his website, along to some great essays.
Greg McAdoo from the famous VC firm Sequoia Capital told that during the last 12 months, Sequoia did no less than 12 Seed/Series A investments, which was more than during the 2 previous years. He then pointed out that since the 1970s, most of the successful companies were created and got funding during tough economic times. He concludes by pointing our that there’s a correlation between difficult economic times and the conditions needed to build a great company. In difficult times, people are more careful about their spendings, it’s easier to get office space, you’re hiring only resources you need, etc… Linking back to last year’s “RIP Good Times” from Sequoia, that the point was that during good times a lot of startups fall into bad habits, which is much more difficult (and hence very good) in difficult times.
Jason Fried is one of the Founder of 37signals, that make simple, useful and in a word great web applications. He emphasized his presentation on the fact that you should sell your product, first because it puts a value on it, users are going to care much more about it, give more valuable feedback. “Selling your product is something you have to learn” and he compared that skill to playing Piano, the more you practice, you better you’re going to be at it, so start practicing and selling your product now. Jason also compared cocaine (or other drugs) to VC funding simply because it’s addictive. Investors want you to come back for money they want you to be addicted to the money from Round A, Round B, Round C,… it’s just addiction.
Chris Anderson talked about Freemium business models. I’m not going to say much about it, because everything is very well explained in his book, “Free” which I recommend you to read.
Evan Williams and Biz Stone answered a lot of questions both from Jessica Livingston and the audience that was able to send their questions via… Twitter, of course. They talked about the before Twitter and how they got the idea and started to really work on it. Everything started when they all worked on Odeo, but they were not really into it, not really passionate about it, they found that podcasting was kind of boring, and didn’t wanted to be the kings of the podcasting. Then one day they gave employees 2 weeks to work on something, and that’s how Twitter was born. Another part of their talked that I really liked is their current focus of making Twitter a great company, and the fact that they are working really hard to have a good corporate culture. Twitter is participating and donating a lot to some associations, for example, which is an example to follow. All the rest of the questions and answers are available on TechCrunch.
Mark Zuckerberg started his talk by saying that the crowd in the room were “his people”, which was a really good ice breaker. Mark basically explained how he arrived to what Facebook is today, and what are the goals of the company. Facebook is trying to get the world to be more open, and he also mentioned that openness and transparency are going to be important in the future. One of his quote that I really liked was “not taking any risks is the riskiest thing you can do”.
It was the first time I was seeing a presentation by Tony Hsieh, and it was pretty impressive! If you don’t know Zappos, it’s basically a website that sells clothes and shoes online… but wait, far from everything you experienced before in terms of customer service. He basically wants to think of Zappos as a company that deliver happiness, and that maybe in 5 or 10 years, Zappos will be an Airline, or a company doing other things far from what they are doing right now. Zappos has very clear core values, values that inspire employees, and that are reasons of hiring or firing employees. He said that “vision and culture can inspire passion and performance”. Before going into details about the different types of Happiness, Tony asked the question “What is your goal in Life?” then he asked us “Why?” Then to the answer he asked Why again? And in the end everything leads to HAPPINESS, that’s what people want, and that’s what Zappos is delivering, both to employees and customers.
To conclude, it was once again a memorable day. Attendees and Speakers are simply amazing, and you leave the room with inspiration, motivation and you simply want to Crush It! (More about this expression soon.)
You can see the full set of pictures I took on my Flickr, all the talks and slides are available online at Justin.tv, TechCrunch did a nice coverage of the event too, and Mark Bao well summarized all the sessions with key points.
Evan Williams and Biz Stone, Founders of Twitter
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