Just in case you’re looking for a problem to solve, real quickly – here’s the current list of world’s top problems:
Take your pick! 
Last week, I made a trip to LA for Startonomics, held on UCLA’s campus. Like most Web 2.0 conferences these days, the presentation slides are all online, and streamed live on the Web, and the videos of the talks to be available online soon. My favourite video + slides startup is still Omnisio – they still do the best job IMHO in presenting the video and slides together in sync.
So why go if all the content is online for free?
Because you can’t meet cool new people and do the face-to-face interaction thing 
During the conference, I jotted down some notes, pen and paper. The following are a tiny subset of them .. in a very scribbled fashion (because I have no time to make it pretty :/ )
Morning Keynote Address by David O. Sacks, Founder/CEO of Geni & Yammer
- Lesson from PayPal, don’t rely on someone else’s buy-in to succeed. If your business model hinges upon someone else saying “yes” to you, you’re fighting an uphill battle.
- Avoid deep tech in first few iterations, fail hard and fail fast. All technology as time goes by eventually grows deep anyway, once you’ve tested it on the market and you know you have a rough diamond. “Not right today, but I can fix it tomorrow”
- On the flip side, if you fail too fast, you don’t learn anything. Aka, “pace” your failure.
Get Your Bootstrap On: Starting Up When the Economy is Down by Mike Jones, CEO, Tsavo Media
* This was by far my favorite, I got to speak to Mike during the break and he’s a really cool guy. I can’t seem to embed, but you can find the video here
- Aim for success, prepare for failure
- Good startups, they send weekly status reports to their board of advisors without being asked. It measures where they are and how far they are from the projected objectives. Transparency is good.
- When you raise money, it’s your responsibility to bring back the money to your investors!
Just Like the 405: Seven Ways to Drive Bumper-to-Bumper Traffic by Jason Nazar, CEO, Docstoc
- Like Docstoc: You must ask yourself what piece of the puzzle are you solving? Are you adding value over time?
Afternoon Keynote Address by Richard Rosenblatt, Former Chairman, Myspace.com, Former CEO, Intermix Media, Co-Founder, Chairman & CEO, Demand Media
- When running a startup, things *will* go wrong. Everything MBAs project will be wrong. But if you go in knowing that you will fail, that’s okay. Because you know you will need to change and evolve your product/b-plan anyway.
- What kind of company will you build? (a) King of my hill (b) Get what the market gives you (c) Go big or go home – change landscape
Pitching and Packaging for Partnerships: How to Land Amazing Deals and Tell If They’re Working by Peter Pham, CEO, BillShrink
- You want your partners to say “you’ve built what we’ve wanted for years, but just didn’t have the resources to build it ourselves”
- You won’t get to be there in person to pitch all decision makers inside of a large corporations, but your email will be forwarded throughout the chain, so include screenshot mockups, they speak volumes for your product.
- Send partner weekly updates, move deals along, don’t let the line go cold.
How to Create a Web site the Users Eat Up and Beg for More by Ted Rheingold, Top Dog, Dogster, Inc.
- Use the “so what” litmus test on proposed new product features, fight feature-creep.
- Actionable insights are everything, don’t do inconsequentials.
- Quantitative success does not equal qualitative success.
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.. and many more below other good talks below. Check out the links, for the preso slides as well.
Jim Benedetto (SVP MySpace) on Scaling for the Masses (session 3)
Mark Jeffrey (Mahalo) on the Art of Product Development (session 2)
Neil Patel (ACS) on Finding Users (session 5)
Sean Percival (CEO Tsavo Media) on Social Media is Dead, Long Live Social Media (session 6)
Jay Weintraub (CEO LeadsCon) on Monetizing by Numbers (session 9)
Frank Addante (CEO Rubicon Project) on The Dynamics of Olympic Startups (session 10)
Dan Gould (Fox Interactive) on Idea to Advisors to Angel Funding to Series A (session 11)
Mark Suster (GRP Partners), Brian Garrett (Crosscut Ventures) and David Travers (Rustic Canyon) wrapped up the day to give their take on startups in LA, valuations in ‘09 and what it takes to get them to cut a check.
The Internet culture is characterised by four layers: The techno meritocratic culture, the hacker culture, the virtual communitarian culture and the entrepreneurial culture [...]
The culture of the Internet is a culture made up of a technocratic belief in the progress of humans through technology, enacted by communities of hackers thriving on free and open technological creativity, embedded in virtual networks aimed at reinventing society, and materialised by money-driven entrepreneurs into the workings of the new economy
From the book The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies) by Manuel Castells. Via The four holy cows of the Mobile Data industry at Open Gardens.
Hah .. the title of this post is not the result of a broken caps lock key. It’s a direct quote that I’m stealing from my now-colleague, Carl Mercier. Carl is the founder of a startup named Defensio, that my current employer just recently acquired. In a post-acquisition interview on StartupCFO, he said,
I think the best advice I can give to entrepreneurs is STOP THINKING AND START WORKING. I’m one of those guys who’s afraid to fail. I hate losing. I used to try to come up with the perfect idea and the perfect business model. Obviously, it was never quite as good as I wanted it and I was never starting anything. Not starting meant not failing: it was my comfort zone. But not starting also means not winning. It’s very cliche, but your original idea really doesn’t matter. It’s all about execution and being able to seize the opportunities that arise.
I’m a thinker, planner, strategist, but often I get stuck in the planning phase because I want to get it soooo right, the first time round. Dare I say I’m a perfectionist? I certainly don’t think so (and certainly don’t want to be one!)—but then again perhaps it’s my blind spot. I just don’t want to do a sloppy job. I can live with “good enough”.
This interview made me realize that Carl and myself had rubbed shoulders at least once before at Y Combinator’s Startup School @ Stanford, just last year. We just didn’t really know each other then. Certainly happy to know another YC SUS gang at the work place. What a small world!
I actually really like this quote. I’m posting it here, also to remind myself .. that subconsciously, maybe I’m just afraid to fail, as much as I convince myself that I’m not, and that I just need to get the hell out there and execute. I like it also because it hurts a sore spot.
As my Practical Product Management teacher John Milburn would say, “it ain’t worth a flip if you can’t prove it.”
p.s. Carl—By golly I swear I will make it to the cool kids pre-SUS robot party See you there!
The test of innovation lies not in its novelty, its scientific content, or its cleverness. It lies in its success in the marketplace
—Peter Drucker
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