This is a wrap-up post of my recollection of Startup School 2006. That weekend out of town was a huge setback on my GTD-weekend-todo-list effort that weekend, so I am just now getting around to write about this, a whole one week later, when everyone else has already forgotten about it. Pardon me please.
My objectives were to meet energetic ambitious geeks, and learn from the veteran tech entrepreneurs.
And that, I did. Here’s what happened:
I attended Startup School 2006 at Stanford, organized by the Y Combinator and I’m sure glad I was there. In fact, it made me regret not being there last year. But now that I know about it, I definitely wouldn’t pass it up next year. I first got to know about this event by following Paul Graham‘s essays (which I highly recommend reading). Although I have not completely read all of his essays, the ones that I have read resonated deeply within me. Suddenly, it all clicked, brights lights turned on from nowhere, and I whacked myself in the head and said “hey, that’s me!”
The event for me actually began Friday evening (being from San Diego, I had to travel a bit), with the reception party thrown by the Y Combinator folks. Kudos to them, they definitely weren’t cheap with the food and service. In fact, they were pretty classy – the very well dressed and very polite waiters, the decent selection of quality food; a very very nice treat for poor young starving college kids (yes, I can’t call myself a college kid anymore, but I haven’t outgrown the mentality and I sure am starving). And in many ways, I don’t want to outgrow the starving college kid mentality. It’s because of that kind of mentality that I saved myself from otherwise splurging on numerous unnecessary cool me-too geek toys that would have burned a major hole in my wallet. My favourite starving-college-kid line of all time has to be “I just can’t justify that expenditure”.
Startup School 2006 was definitely very well planned, the reception on Friday (from a functional perspective) was definitely important because it gave people a chance to connect – which the actual Startup School day didn’t because of the nature of scheduled speeches (and the fact that it is rude to chat when everyone is trying to pay attention to the speakers). In the invitation to the reception, there was a mention of huge metal robots (and they weren’t kidding): everyone got to slobber over the hot cool robots from the Anybots lab. I can’t resist the temptation to keep this post short, so I’ll include just 1 picture (from psychofish on Flickr):
A party so cool, I was actually kicked out when they had to close.
There’s no geek party, like a Y Combinator geek party!!
The speakers for the event were (in order of appearance):
- Joe Kraus, Co-founder of JotSpot and Co-founder of Excite
- Page Mailliard, Partner at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
- Mark Fletcher, Founder of Bloglines and Founder of ONElist
- Ann Winblad, Founding Partner of Hummer Winblad
- George Willman, Associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati
- Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media
- Paul Graham, Partner at Y Combinator and Co-founder of Viaweb
- Caterina Fake, Co-founder of Flickr
- Om Malik, Senior Writer at Business 2.0
- Chris Sacca, Head of Special Initiatives at Google
- Joshua Schachter, Founder of del.icio.us
Plenty of other attendees have taken miscellaneous notes, many much better than mine – so instead of sharing the sub-par notes I have, I’ll show you the better quality ones instead:
- Stanford Daily
- Silicon Valley Watcher
- Om and Niall PodSession
- Notelab (this one appears comprehensive and fluff-free)
- Brendon Wilson
- BillSaysThis
- Krugle
- Ramin Firoozye
- Bharath Madhusan
- Blaghorrhea
- Rhett Garber
- RachnaSpace
There were also plenty of pictures, courtesy of these generous photographers:
(I got the links above from the main Startup School site and duplicated them here because the main page will probably remove them when next year comes around)
I did follow up later with Page Mailliard from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and Ann Winblad from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners to see if I could have a copy of their presentation slides, which they were happy to provide (Thanks Page, thanks Ann!).