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.
We had about 17-18 software + hardware folks (and one reporter! we have no idea how that happened). The venue was perfect, people brought snacks, drinks, lawn chairs, and we ordered pizza. Most of the attendees are not surprisingly, from the San Diego Hacker News meetup.
