Paul Graham has hit on a fairly different and seemingly effective way to help ambitious geeks launch new businesses. Part of this effort is Startup School and I was fortunate enough to attend today’s instance on the Stanford campus with about 250-300 mostly male, mostly white, Oriental or Indian folks. Honestly I was surprised there weren’t more women since compared to the average tech event in this area this was much more about business than technology. Oh well.
Paul himself was one of the speakers and, frankly, he speaks pretty much like his essays. Intelligent, articulate but, well, essays are meant to be read not listened to. Joe Kraus, founder of Excite and JotSpot, was the first speaker and probably my pick for best presentation. He, like most of the non-lawyers, structured his talk as lessons learned from being the founder that you really don’t get even from working in a very early stage startup. Maybe it was going first and just being a better story teller. The last founder speakers, Caterina Fake (Flickr) and Joshua Schachter (del.icio.us)–coincidentally both acquired by Yahoo!–were much less compelling.
Page Maillaird, a lawyer at Wilson, Sonsini, gave good practical advice and an overview of the legal aspects of the startup; her co-worker George Willman’s patent lecture, mostly had the crowd looking at their watches to see if it was lunchtime yet. Om Malik was good because as a journalist he has a perspective and voice that are different yet very important. Ann Winblad, as the only VC speaker, had everyone’s attention but I thought she didn’t truly deliver to expectations. Chris Sacca, head of special initiatives at Google, was another very good speaker who kept everyone involved and his advice, to get out of Silicon Valley and the US and be inspired by the opportunities and differences in other cultures, sounds good if not quite practical for me just now.
I also spoke with quite a few interesting people over the breaks and lunch, some of whom travelled quite a distance to be at the school: San Diego, Massachuesetts, Seattle, even Mexico City.
Afterwards I picked up TS1 to go to a surprise birthday party for one of my RawSugar co-workers, who was really surprised, and turns out that Joe Kraus is a good friend of hers and was there with his wife and very cute little boy. Chocolate birthday cake from the Prolific Oven is a good way to end the day!
BillSaysThis 