Packed House At Y Combinator Startup School
Jason Kincaid
64 comments »
Today marked the fourth year of Y Combinator’s startup school, and judging by the overflowing auditorium that persisted throughout the event, it was a runaway success. A crowd of over 650 developers, writers, and entrepreneurs packed Stanford’s Kresge Auditorium for a chance to pick the minds of tech-industry greats. The annual event gives members of the startup community, particularly technically-minded ‘hackers’, a chance to learn and ask questions about venture capital, IP law, and other aspects of the startup process.
This year’s speakers: Sam Altman (Loopt), Marc Andreesesen (Ning, Netscape, Mosaic), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Paul Buchheit (FriendFeed, Gmail), Paul Graham (Y Combinator), David Heinemeier Hansson (37Signals, Rails), David Lawee (Google, Xfire), Jack Sheridan (Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati), Greg McAdoo (Sequoia), Peter Norvig (Google), and our own Michael Arrington (TechCrunch).
Highlights:
-A young man named Brandt who couldn’t understand why Sequoia Capital and other top VCs refused to fund his adult website. Sequoia’s Greg McAdoo responded that he had a hard time picturing a porn site’s IPO.
-David Hansson’s presentation, which was easily the most entertaining of the afternoon. Hansson, who created Ruby on Rails and is a partner at 37signals, espoused a pay-for-use model that stands in stark contrast to the free services that seem to define Web 2.0. As he mentioned, this model hasn’t worked for everyone…
-Jeff Bezos dodging a question on Google App Engine, explaining that his company “doesn’t like to talk about other companies.”
-Paul Buchheit’s joking admission that he spent his last few months at Google “basically doing nothing.”
A video of the entire event can be found at Justin.tv.
The slides plus video can also be found over at Omnisio.
When are these presentations going to be viewable online? I would love to watch a few of these indexed by presenter…
Jon
http://woodmarvels.com - Create Unique Memories!
it’s David Heinemeier Hansson (not Hannon) fwiw
That’s impressive
I love that there’s video for those of us who can’t be there. It’s a far cry from sitting among the developers and entrepreneurs in attendance to watch everything unfold live, but it’s neat to stream the speakers’ presentations.
The whole thing kind of reminds me of Stanford’s Educators Corner.
Wow alot of people alot of competition. What is the chances of someone get funded probably less than 1%
David Heinemeier Hansson’s talk was definitely the best, I agree. Paul Graham’s was good too.
Great to see today’s Tech Giants helping tomorrow’s Titans…Wish I was there.
Hey Mike, Where are you going to be tonight? Partying with any hackers?
gives all the $2000+ conferences something to strive for when you get that kind of line-up, the candid conversations, plus a group of hacker/entreps all free. YCom and Jessica Livingston in particular put together an amazing event.
… how did I miss this? Wow, I feel out of the loop.
Give them a big clap..
It was awesome to be there! PG’s “Make Something People Want,” “Be Good!” talk was inspiring!
We will be publishing all the presentation videos shortly at http://www.omnisio.com, along with the slides and questions in sync. We are editing and transcoding right now.
That’s Great Julian.
I am eagerly waiting for these videos.
I went to this it was really awesome. I think the best speaker was definitely Greg McAdoo of Sequoia capital… all the other speakers were top notch as well, but he stood out in that he seemed to be VERY good at identifying the key components of what makes a great business (not surprising). Paul Graham was actually a pretty cool guy too! He had some pretty good insights.
It was really a great time- everyone loved the talks and it was great to meet the TechCrunch team (and many others) at the networking opportunities in between and after events.
The energy in the room was nothing but positive the entire time (except that few minutes where the projector broke??).
Kind of an interesting mix of presenters. Both, form the perspective of different business models form web 2.0 free to pay as you go leasing of applications.
Michael,
I always had a negative impression of you from everything i’ve read online about you, but your passion about startups really did show in your talk and I really liked that. Thank you.
Your talk was one of the most memorable ones for me.
PS. I think you should work on that second startup. There are plenty of people that attended that would to talk to you
It seems that Amazon has a hidden insecurity over Google App Engine.
David Hansson is a partner at 37signals.. founder ! ?
The guy sure has guts to propose and ask for an adult site IPO.
Porn site’s IPO, that is funny! How about a Troll site IPO, that should work.
Ha ha ha ha…. Wooo! FunnY…
I don’t see the point of attending these events. Do they really help or not?
If anybody from Sequoia Capital is reading through, can we go in person to submit a business plan and demo if we are in the area?
http://www.sequoia1.com/contact.html
We have a new150 meg code base which is not porn and I would like to go submit in person to VC in the state of California along with an associate.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=.....F8&z=7
Quite a road trip to Sequoia, but I think we can handle it. So what are the business hours?
150 meg code base? Are you selling a paper weight or Windows Vista?
Um, yeah, I dont think any VC sets up meetings in a comment section of a blog.
In fact, I dont think anyone except Chris tries to do this. Please stop, it doesnt reflect well on you.
@Tommyboy
Well, thankfully VC is still optional in our case. Our project can self upscale on it’s own revenue if necessary. Thanks for sweating my image though. I feel like I have just been schooled by a publicist.
Am I the only one who can’t see this video? The link brings up a blank page … same when I do a search on Justin TV.
Oh, now its working …. sorry. Glad to hear David Hanson is raising an alternative to the free model (which seems pretty much impossible for startups).
the video on justin tv is not working. It starts playing and then skips. Don’t bother watching.
video works fine. make sure you understand how to use your pc
@31 cjagers
I had the same issue. Just go to the address bar and hit enter, or simply reload.
Hmmmm. If I want to start a new company, do I listen to Jeff Bezos or Michael Arrington? What a tough call.
You missed the best part. The adult entertainment guy went on to ask the next speaker, David Heinemeier Hansson how to get motivated to work 14 hour days.
Was great to be there, my favorite was the contrast of Hannson’s forget the VCs with Greg McAdoo’s we are the VCs. And icing, I even made the post picture as the girl surrounded by approximately 649 dudes. (left side)
I really enjoyed Startup School. I heard a lot of people walk out saying “that was fun, but I didn’t really learn much”. Not sure what they were looking for, but I definitely got a bit of knowledge, along with a good amount of entertainment and inspiration.
Regarding Jeff Bezos ‘dodging’ the appEngine question; I’m not sure he did. Sure, he gave it the “we don’t talk about other companies” treatment, but he followed that up with the fairly valid points that 1. they react to customers not competitors, and 2. that AWS provides a foundation element that people could use to build their own application engines (if not ‘appEngine’s) on top of.
What an amazing, amazing day of presenters. I literally moved out here to Palo Alto from Indianapolis, IN after deciding to jump on an opportunity that came to my attention about 2 1/2 weeks ago. The people, opportunities and intellect that seem to be more common than Starbucks out here in the Bay Area are incredible and events like these are one of the main reasons why I now call this amazing place home.
Of course, reading Mark Andreesson’s 3 part blog series on career planning (http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-pmarca-gu-1.html) gave me a little nudge as well. Definitely worth a read if you have a few minutes to spare.
of course he was a speaker at the event, too. See what I mean?
Anyways, quickly here are my speaker highlights of the day:
- Paul Buchheit being able to crack a joke about the SMTP protocol and the crowd actually getting it - and laughing.
- Paul Graham’s sandals and amazing presenting skills. He had a slide that was a huge cockroach and it actually worked.
- Peter Norvig’s penis joke and sweet Hawaiian shirt.
- Greg McAdoo’s ‘hair on fire’ and ‘big wave’ analogies.
- David Heinemeier Hansson making fun of Greg McAdoo’s ‘hair on fire’ and ‘big wave’ analogies. What an intelligent smart ass.
- Marc Andreessen correcting the question about him burning though $15 million a month with a start-up by stating that in fact he was burning through $20 million a month. Get the fact’s straight, people, geez.
- Jeff Bezos talking about the rocket ship that he’s building. I mean, the 3 rocket ships that he’s building. Being a billionaire has to be fun. Personally, I would rather build a cruise ship or two, but that’s just me.
- Michael Arrington’s inspirational and nearly epic ‘ode to community and down with the trolls’ ending to his presentation. Preach on, bruthu - preach on.
Amazing group of geeks and I was glad to be one of them.
they couldn’t find ONE qualified woman to speak? (penis jokes?) nice.
@antje
Well, the audience was 98.9% tech dudes, so even though I’m sure that there are plenty of qualified women out there who would of fit the mold for a possible presenter I’m guessing that they weren’t too worried about getting someone with two X chromosomes involved.
Also, the penis joke was based around being able to interpret long word stings and Peter Norvig mentioned a few bad domain name choices and one happened to be penisland.com, which is a place to buy pens in bulk.
@Ryan Hupfer
The person asking the question said 20 million while Marc corrected him by saying it was really only just 15 million. Geez, get your facts right.
Antje,
It’s a great question! But to answer it, we’d have to know:
- What’s the ratio of men:women in startupland?
- Was there an open invitation to present at this event?
- Were women specifically invited? And if so, why did they decline?
I think it’d be awesome to have more female rolemodels in this sphere, but I believe it’s particularly important to take lots of issues into consideration and not 100% blame conference/event organizers for a lack of gender balance.
I really enjoyed this event! I thought McAdoo and Hannson gave the best talks, but Andreessen made some very insightful comments about decision-making and how great ideas must happen at the right time as well.
http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/....._Opsware_N
I was rather disappointed with Bezos’ talk because while I have heard that he is a great speaker usually, he devoted almost an hour to talking about how great AWS is rather than offering any insights or advice for people interested in entrepreneurship.
@Alaska Miller
Hmmm…I must have been too distracted by the glare off of his signature, clean-shaven dome. If in fact it did go down as you claim, then this is officially the first documented instance of me being wrong and it’s definitely not nearly as funny.
Dang it.
@David Tran
Although Bezos did in fact basically pitch his own product during his entire presentation I do think that it had some relevancy to the audience and he at least tied it back to a startup that has had some early success with it, http://animoto.com, which I thought was cool.
Pretty solid marketing if you ask me.
I was wondering more about who the guy was who answered several of the questions for him that he apparently had no clue about. That was interesting, eh?
in summary - a bunch of me-too morons coming in on the tail end of the flip-your-site cycle, to hear b-listers talk about how f-listers can become d-listers. meanwhile the chemistry geeks need to get their knees much dirtier because saving the world with greentech apparently isn’t sexy enough
@Ryan Hupfer
You must be new to Silicon Valley if you think Marc’s signature is his bald head.
I just can’t load the videos completely, spent all day trying to watch Greg McAdoo’s presentation. Can anyone make it available for download? That’d be great… Thanks.
This meetup is generating mucho media, man. I especially like the quote from Wired.com ” Zappo’s sells f*cking shoes!” Insightful and vulgar. Also, nothing like pizza and Rice Crispie treats to show the young’uns what’s in store for them after they burn away their youth pursuing ill-fated Web 2.0 startups. Nice.