9:30 Page Maillard
- Delaware Type C Corporation
- Delaware has a lot more case law protecting corporations
- 20 million common, 12 million preferred
- Establish board and officers
- Don't give away seats too easily
- Board + stockholders have most control over your company
- Put great people on Board of Advisors!
- Only want people who will be there to help
- Give out stock to founders
- Consider vesting!
- Good to make venture capitalists feel better; assures them you'll stay
- Also protects against fallings out, people leaving and not earning their share
- Make sure to assign all intellectual property to the company
- Stock option plan
- Stock option plans have lifetime of 10 years
- Some people won't buy you if you have 100% acceleration
- Acquirers want to make sure you'll stay around!
- Setting up the company
- Company MUST own the technology
- Number of problems
- Former employer
- Employers in CA own everything you do on their time
- Make sure that you don't work on your private company on another employer's time
- Microsoft intern
- Microsoft practically owns everything you ever think of
- Who owns the
- Do not touch them while they work for MS
- Genentech Material Transfer Agreement
- Essentially, whatever you do with this, Genentech owns everything
- Who owns the company?
- No napkin promises!
- No tithing
- ...People seriously have tithed income to God
- Tithing is personal!
- ...Stanford library has no Bibles (made arguing scripture difficult)
- Types of Equity
- Common stock
- Give to founders, employees
- Preferred Stock
- Investors
- Preferences over common
- Board representation
- Wanna make sure you're not screwed by people stuck on board by investors
- Priority upon liquidity event (get money back before common; may share with common
- Dividends (rarely paid!)
- Anti-dilution
- Push for only partial advantage for preferred
- Voting rights
- Sample first round financing - Dilution Impact
- Voting percentage of employee pool is almost nothing
- First round investors don't want dilution
- But, the things they will argue for will be control over your company
- Founders should get 10%
- What about that first term sheet?
- Be very clear on the value proposition, the market opportunity and the significatn ramp-up in value your company can achieve
- Non-technologists need to understand your company
- Make sure you meet the investors' market goal
- You may be able to re-define the market, but make swure you give them the projections they "need"
- Keep your slides and presentation short (10 slides, 15 minutes)
- Be credible - do your homework - on the fund, the people you meet, your market proposition, your market projections, and your references
- Hire A players
- Listen to others
- Others can provide advice
- Listen to yourself
- You're not going to be fine just listening to others
- Go with your gut
- Your best leverage is another term sheet
- Make sure to keep options open
- Keep showing yourself to firms
- Questions (answers)
- How to avoid being sued?
- Make sure not to piss off your former company
- If your thing is similar, maybe sit down and talk w/ them
- Check to make sure they're not litigous
- Any fees to Delaware C?
- $800/year to do business in CA
- How to get legal advice?
- Some firms act with contingency on being funded
- Is it normal for seed investors to be diluted as much as founders in following rounds?
- Maybe
- Sometimes given an extra kicker
- Can you take things away (like board membership)?
- Don't give away titles, cause its hard to get rid of them (if you need to hire later...)
- Hard to take people off the board
- Only have one guy of founders actually on the board
- Do law firms expect to take away stock?
- ...Aren't salaried employees on company time all the time?
- No
- Things like leave of absence are clearly not
- Just make sure not to touch it during business hours
- Company pays for cell phones, DSL...so would they own it?
- Be careful
- They probably won't win, but don't want them suing
- Make sure not to use their email address
- What do you (investor/lawyer) want to hear?
- Be professional
- Explain value proposition
- What is the compensation to give on board of advisors?
- 25,000 shares
- That's just what people expect
- Superstars might want more, but make sure to think about that position
- Probably put vesting on it
- How clear do you need to be on ownership
- When you walk into proprietary info agreement, make sure you know what the company knows before walking in
10:45 Mark Fletcher: Bloglines: Lessons learned birthing and building web start-ups
- Garage philosophy
- Passion for the idea
- For OneList, created an alternative to listserv
- For Bloglines, created alternative to checking 100+ blogs a day
- Solve a need that you have
- If you start a company, it becomes your life
- Cheap technology
- Doesn't have to be perfect
- Release early/often
- Involve your users
- Users will think of things you won't
- Creates a snowball effect/virtuous cycle
- Moonlighting limits risk
- For funds, look to family/friends
- Downside: put them at risk
- Updside: they may get rich
- Longer you can go w/o outside funding the better
- More control
- Free service = less pressure
- If people aren't paying for it, will cut slack for problems
- No need for marketing (not completely...)
- Hire a lawyer
- Long term, hiring a lawyer saves much time
-
- Outsource
- eLance, Rent a Coder
- Don't outsource your core stuff
- If you don't know how to do something, can be easier to outsource (eg, windows coding)
- Try outsourcing translations for other languages
- Not perfect, but gets job done
- Can outsource design as well
- Make proposals as specific as possible
- PR is cheapest marketing you can do
- Good idea to partner w/ someone who can talk to reporters
L
- Don't worry about business developement
- Focus on viral aspects
- Make users your biggest cheerleaders
- Encourage them to sign up their friends
- Hard for competitors to duplicate
- Focus on user growth
- Design Philosophies
- Putting the fun in functional
- Software Choices
- Hardware Choices
- Dedicated servers vs. buying/hosting
- Owning machines is a pain
- Renting is not that expensive
- Design for cheap hardware
- eBay!
- APC PDUs for remote power cycling are good
- Don't wanna have to go in to reboot at 2 am
- HP ProCurve
- Avoid Seagate Ultra SCSI drives
- Good phone for SSH
- Architecure Choices
- Copying files vs. Client/Server
- Copying scales infinitely
- Calculate on the fly vs. Cache
- Memory vs. Disk
- Ex: Autoreponders suck on a mailing list
- Notifications for bloglines are in memory
- Storage choices
- Relational DB vs. Flat files
- Don't underestimate flat files
- RAID vs. Redundant
- ONElist/eGroups with hardware RAID
- Bloglines did not use hardware RAID
- Makes things more complicated, but better uptime
- Linux software RAID1 bulletproof
- Hardware, bad exp.
- SysAdmin choices
- DNS round robin for web servers
- Hot backu-ups for off-line processing
- Worry about cooling in the co-lo
- Avoid making stupid bets
- Questions
- How good is outsourced code?
- With Bloglines, just looked for stand-alone functionality
- Made outsourced code independant, very modularized
- Disaster to try to outsourcing the core of the code
- Be careful
11:15 Ann Winblad (site)- How to write a fundable business plan
- What is your idea?
- Who are your customers?
- What is the business?
- Keep it simple
- First, describe it as a customer would see it! (not tech)
- Do you understand the market?
- Is the need real?
- Define the rules to create barriers to entry
- Will the customers beg?
- What is the secret sauce
- Show venture capitalists your secret
- Something patentable, or something that someone else can't duplicate easily
- Can you attract excellence?
- Engineering roadmap
- Can the product be built in less than one year?
- If it can't, it won't be funded
- Do not try to pack in management team in the beginning
- Generally fund 2-3 people
- Don't need the whole team from the beginning
- Don't want to force venture capitilists change management
- Really don't want to show that you're hiring incompetents
- Do you know what you don't know
- Read "Competitive Advantage" by Michael Porter
- Know your assumptions
Do the numbers make sense?
- Do the numbers reach software economics
- 80% gross margin, 20% EBITDA
- Make sure its not professional service (only 45% gross margins
- Essentially, automate everything possible!
- Capitialization - Total < 15 million
- COGS - Are COGS > 30 million
- The Market bats last
- Customers
- They bleieve in your pdouct and team
- They have a budget
- There is a common problem
- You know how to reach them
- Venture investors will dive deep with your customers!
- What do VCs bring to the table?
- 3 Ps: People, Partners, Process
- Money gives some competitive advantage, but not enough
- Being part of a portfolio company, where VC can give you a heads up on the market
- Do you need to write a business plan?
- If VCs like you, they will read it
- VCs will not sign an NDA
- Need an executive summary
- Problem + unfair advantage
- Team
- Market analysis (size, position, competitors)
- Secret sauce overview/background
- Key assumptions
- Customers (potetntial or referencable) - but do not make them up!
- Product plan
- Engineering plan
- Sales model and marketing outline
- How long will it take to be profitable
- Business model/financials/cash flow
Goal: Hook them in 15 minutes!
Questions
- What's the value of the business plan
- Some science to valution
- This is why they want to see your plan
- A round investors take most of the risk
- Make sure you have accomplished something before getting to B round investors
- How to sell company?
- Companies are bought, not sold
- Want to be sure you're able to say no
11:45 - George Willman - Patents for the startup
- Basic requirements for patent
- Utility
- Novelty
- Non-obviousness
- Description
- Statuatory bars
- In the US, if any of the following happen more than one year prior to US or PCT filing date, no patent
- The invention is already patented
- Printed publication
- Public use
- Offer for sale (even if confidential or not actually sold)
- Other countries: absolute novelty
- How to obtain a patent
- File application
- Office actions
- Prosecution/Amendment (lawyer does this)
- Allowance
- Issuance
- Avoid abandonment! (not paying fees or meeting other deadlines)
- Patent strategy: What to patent?
- Patent your core tech
- You can patent something that's not your product (an alternative)
- Patent improvements
- May apply to compatible products
- File patents on concepts for future products
- Essentially, be a total asshole and do everything you can to keep out competition
- Business method patents
- Patent clustering
- Create many aspects of a product
- Alternatives, every individual piece of the product
- Patent bracketing
- You can patent things related to someone else's patent
- Doesn't give a right to produce the thing
- Creates a situation for cross-licensing
- Ex. Abel patents telephone, Bob patents voice mail; cross-licensing needed to actually implement voice mail
- Questions
- How to protect against patent trolls/bad corps?
- A portfolio puts you in a better bargaining position
- Patents gives some ability to protect yourself
- How to avoid infringement
- There are a lot...
- Can't search to make sure you're not infringing (not economical)
- What to file?
- File a couple early to protect core, avoid bars
- Are patents be owned by company or inventor?
- Without agreements, patents are owned by inventor
- Start-ups need to make sure agreements are in order!
- Open-source and patents
- Open source doesn't prevent patents
- Could open source parts of tech instead of whole thing
1:30 - Tim O'Reilly - How to think about the future
- Want to have a big goal for the company
- Google - Organize all the world's information
- Goal for O'Reilly - Changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators
- Don't just think about the business opportunity
- Look at the big picture, big idea
- Keeping this in mind (and not money) is what has allowed O'Reilly do a lot of things first
- Watch the alpha geek
- O'Reilly's filters
- The technology is on track with a long term trend
- The technology is disruptive
- Good new technology destroys the old
- The technology uptake is accelerating
- The technology has grassroots support - its bottom up!
- It inspires passion
- Ex: p2p and the interenet operating system
- Don't be afraid to be ahead of the curve. Keep telling your story
- Make the vision concrete: Amazon and Google web services
- "The difference between a man and a sheep is that a sheep just bleats, but a man keeps saying the same thing in different ways till he gets what he wants"
- Marketing
- "Find a parade and get in front of it" - Jim Barksdale, Netscape
- Whole Internet User's Guid
- Commercializatoin of the internet
- "People don't care about books, they care about issues" - Brian Erwin
- Amazon one-click patent
- "Do the right thing. You will gratify some people and astonsh the rest"
- Engage people!
- Stallman wanted to boycott Amazon, O'Reilly tried to discuss with them
- Bring people together to tell your story!
- Assymetric competition
- You can compete with MUCH fewer people
- Enable customer self-service
- Figure out where there's an industry ripe for disruption
- "I'm an inventor. I became interested in long term trens becdause an invention has to make sense in the owrld in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started." - Ray Kurzweil
- Need to look ahead
- If you're moving at the speed of everyone else, you have a chance
- Much easier to move faster
2:00 - Paul Graham - Hardest lesson for start-ups to learn
- Release early
- Get a version 1 out fast, then improve it
- Version 1 doesn't mean lots of bugs!
- Users hate bugs
- Users can stand not having all the features now
- You won't know your users; hard to guess what they'll like
- Even without users, releases help
- Still shows problems
- Idea is stupid, founders hate each other
- Makes you work harder
- Unreleased, problems are intriguing
- Released, problems are alarming
- Keep pumping out features
- If you're releasing something low on features, make sure to keep adding them
- Doesn't mean add buttons; make user's lives better
- Users love web sites that improve! They expect them to improve!
- Keep thinking of ways to improve
- Make users happy
- Start-ups can't force anyone to use their stuff, make deals
- So you have to make a good thing or you're toast
- Most visitors are going to be casual visitors; design for them
- Have to shout out "I'm not lame!"
- Tell users what your site does
- What not to do
- Should be able to describe what you do in 1 or 2 sentences
- Try to put everything on one page!
- Tell visitors what you do by showing them
- Need to convert visitors into users
- Need growth or you're dead
- Fear the right things
- Start-ups often fear the wrong things
- Visible disasters are generally not that bad
- Things like changing name, losing founders are actually common
- Don't have to worry about big companies
- Other start-ups are more dangerous
- They're also cornered animals
- Don't relax because you don't see competitors
- Biggest threat is themselves
- Internal disputes
- Intertia
- Ignoring users
- Recipe for disaster: Plan what you want to build, and build it, hell or high water
- Your initial plan is probably broken
- Commitment is a self-fulfilling prophecy
- Its nice to think that intelligence is the most important thing, but its not
- In software, best to invest in grad students
- Have to be smart too?
- You can lose a lot in brains and not be killed
- Losing any comittment kills you
- Start-up workers have to do a TON of hard, random shit
- Really easy to find an excuse to quit
- Without comittment, will seem like you're just unlucky
- People will ignore you
- What motivates investors is the fear of missing out on the gravy train
- Have to convince people that you're determined to fight to the death
- There's always room
- There's always room for new stuff!
- We adjust to how things are, and think that's the way that things have to be
- No limit to the numbers of start-ups
- No limit on number working at big companies
- So, why should there be a limit on people at smallers ones
- No limit to number of thingfs people want
- Don't get your hopes up
- Start-up founders are naturally optimistic
- Treat optimism as a nuclear reactor core: powerful, but dangerous
- Ok to be optimistic about what you can do, but assume worst about machines and other people
- Very important with deals: Assume it won't happen, period
- Then, if it goes through, you can be pleasantly surprised
- Don't wanna lean your company against something that's going to fall over
- Deals are usually dynamic
- Deal is generally not done at the handshake
- If they sense you need the deal, they will try to screw you
- For deals, you can't need it! You can't fool VCs; they're professional
- "We want to invest in you" - should evoke "Don't get your hopes up"
- Conclusion - Is it worth it?
- Look at it as a way of working faster
- Attempt to get working out of the way in a single shot
- Don't look at it as a way to make money
2:30 - Caterina Fake - Flickr, questions
- Flickr started out as a game
- Front end designers finished before back end
- Flickr one of seven products created by bored front end people
- Started out as a chat room type deal
- If you were doing Flickr over again, what would you do over again? What do first time entrepeneurs get wrong?
- Hire slow, fire fast
- Flickr hired too fast, fired too slow
- Except, this is why Flickr happened: front end people outpaced back end
- "Fuck up fast" development strategy
- Make mistakes, but learn from them fast
- "Nothing"
- What kind of usability testing did you do?
- None
- Get it out early is the best way to do usability testing
- Watch what your friend (while they use the site) do
- Had a forum for help, checked it daily
- People are not afraid to say you suck
- Why did Flickr not make the move into video sharing to take on YouTube
- Originally, Flickr was going to be all things to all people
- Rich text files
- Garage band
- Town hall
- Wanted people be able to point at Flickr and simply say "This is X" (where X = photo sharing site)
- Photos seemed like the natural thing to do
- For most sites, photo sharing was a loss-leader
- What happens after acquisition? How have things changed for Flickr now that you've been acquired?
- Yahoo! seemed to have the most understanding of social software
- Risked being crushed by "love"
- How did you first start getting good press for Flickr?
- No marketing, PR budget
- Product designed to be viral
- Figured that blogging would be a good way to spread the word
- Created badges for bloggers
- Created a "Invite friends, get pay service for free" promotion
- How did you start getting users?
- Create a great user experience
- People compliment on UI
3:00 - Om Malik - A journalist's perspective - "I'm gonna go it old school; index cards!"
- Its all about the money
- Paul was wrong! It is about the money
- Never forget that
- 1996-2000 people forgot that, and all shit happened
- Products that succeed
- Those that solve problem, cause behavior change
- Index cards make a lot of money ($5 billion), but Powerpoint blew them outta the water
-
- Flickr succeeded because of its simple, clean interface
- Changed the way we stored photos
- Now, use tags; even if you don't care what tags are
- iPod has changed the way people listen to music
- All your music in your pocket
- Made it so you could carry your entire collection everywhere
- Memeorandum
- Changes the way you interact with blogs
- Problems
- Most Web 2.0 stuff nowadays is making stuff for Alpha geeks
- What's cool is almost never profitable
- How to make sure you're changing behavior?
- KISS
- Simplicity is very hard
- Listen to the world
- If it takes more than 15 minutes to figure it out, you're hosed
- Time is the only thing which is not a commmodity
-
Look at lifetstyle
- Ex: Target cubicle culture
- YouTube
- Traffic spikes from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM in all time zones
- People are tired after eating!
- Questions
- How to get attention from journalists (specifically, Om)?
- Journalists have to participate to get the stories nowadays
- Journalists are now proxies for end users
- Journalists must be able to figure things out fast
- Examples of sites you consider bad?
- Doesn't want to be negative, so list loves
- Netvibes
- Sling Media
- 30 Boxes
- You talk about time, what about attention?
- Good example: mySpace
- A lot of people are paying attention, using it
- But, haven't figured out how to make money yet
- How do you decide what to write about?
- When writing for a larger audience, be careful
- Look at audience carefully
- Magazine is writing a speech
- Blog is a conversation in a bar
- Do you see an actual trend in decreasing Web 2.0 companies?
- Nobody's thinking things through
- No one's looking at making things useful
3:45 - Chris Sacca - Google, Head of Special Initiatives
- Stay cheap
- Organize all the world's information and make it universally accessable
- Going for everything, you will find stuff you didn't know you were looking for
- Go Big
- Focus on user experience
- In the beginning, eliminated advertisers who performed poorly
- Even though it would seem you can't afford it
- Food is important
- People put their guard down when eating
- Mix w/ people you wouldn't normally otherwise
- Be Open
- The secret sauce
- World's best engineers
- Engineers need $$$
- Give them many perks as well
- Give "Founder's Awards": Give individuals who do great things huge stock awards (like they were being bought out)
- The largest infrastructure
- The hardest problems
- Geeks rule!
- It looks like talented people are turning into sheep w/ their business ideas
- People are pushing the tech
- In terms of idea though, things are going stale
- Interestingness!
- People who are founding things seem less and less interesting
- Forget about coding for yourself!
- 20 something geeks are a small portion of the population
- Think about building stuff for other people
- Fortune 500 companies
- People in the developing world need interesting software
- Get out of your comfort zone; get away
- Global means local
- Tokyo and Soeul are 5-10 years ahead of us technology-wise
- Log off now and then: The internet is supplemental
- Care!
- Seems like there's a lack of passion
- A lot of apathy these days
- Not in Google's mission statement to go local with things like produce purchases, but its important
- Best way to be interesting: Listen more than you talk
- Questions
- What's the worst thing about Google?
- All the bottled evil waiting to get out (joke)
- Getting big, so very hard to collaberate
- How do you stay small when you're big?
- Women seem to present their ideas less forcefully. How do you fix this "testosterone driven challenge"?
- Blogging is the great equalizer
- Can't impress with a forceful threat
- Look at Meebo
4:15 - Joshua Schachter
- Backstory
- Built a web site called memepool (a blog)
- People sent in links, so stored them in a text file
- File got really long, so put tags into flat file
- Then, could just grep the file for the tag
- Put it online
- Then, made a MMO version (which became del.icio.us)
- Got big, acquired by Yahoo!
- Problem
- "I'm bored, where can I find some good links"
- Make sure its a problem that you have that you're solving
- About passion, determination; must be the most passionate person around
- Ideas
- Keeps an idea log
- Make sure you can understand them and write them down
- Make sure you can implement it
- Need to get good at evaluating ideas
- Secrets
- No VC will sign an NDA
- Now, being secretive and cryptic about your product hurts more than helps
- Be very careful about secrets
- You want people talking about what you're doing
- Market
- Every feature you release is something to talk about, worry competitors
- Look at who to infect next (viral strategy is good!)
- Turn barriers into pluses: Everyone else had import from del.icio.us, but no one had export to; ask why
- Listen
- Always doing usability testing
- Though it may not be the traditional idea with focus groups and users
- Watch how people do things!
- Ex: IE users didn't know what bookmars were (IE calls them favorites!)
-
- Firefox/Netscape users would be hard-pressed to realize this without watching users
- Offer people free lattes at Starbucks to use your stuff while you watch them
- Don't give tasks!
- Per Krug: People are going to be on best behavior
- Try to get the "in the underwear at home" experience/effect
- Design
- Understand what you need to do to solve the problem
- Then, reduce!
- Don't necessarily remove "elite user"; just make it not strictly necessary
- Scaling
- Don't
- You don't know what the hell you're doing
- Social scale
- A lot of systems scale badly
- Ex: forums with too many people have problems of oldies vs. newbies
- Abuse
- If its happening, it means you've done something right; people think its worth it to abuse
- Don't worry too much about it
- People who's goal is to harass you are more creative and smarter than you think
- So make sure you can watch behavior to try to spot deviants
- Technology
- Assume the worst, then plan for 10x that
- Ex: Browser rendering bugs/javascript bugs suck up A LOT of time
- Lazy
- Don't spend a lot of time in low value transactions
- Focus on what you're actually doing, and use time wisely
- "Outsource" as many non-core tasks as possible
- Its going to be a hell of a lot more work than you expect
- Questions
- Enterprise vs. Personal apps
- Make sure you're saving time for a person you can point to for enterprise stuff
- Unless its a single person's responsibility, there will be no one at the enterprise will be able to sell to
- What was the turning point to turn del.icio.us into a business?
- Group at work blew up, so needed to look for a job anyway
- Decided to try it
- What was your business/revenue money?
- Had a bunch of ideas
- At the end, traffic made clear advertising was the source of revenue
- VCs, acquirer said not to worry and just work on product
- Advice for start-ups?
- Make sure co-founder is easy to work with
- Make sure product in hand before going to VC pitch
- Was starting in NYC hard?
- Investment banks make it hard
- People make a ton of money in NYC
- Got around this by hiring people from out of state/city
- Looked at interesting sites, hired their founders
- Has the guy, Fred Wilson, for internet consumer ventures
4:45 - 8 Recent Founders
- List of founders:
- Bo Hartforn (pixo -> snipshot)
- Justin Kahn (kiko)
- Kevin Hale (wufoo)
- Steve Huffman (reddit)
- Adam Sevil (inkling)
- Sam Waltman (text pay me)
- Matt Kleiger (flagr)
- Jeff Mellen? (YouOS - web operating system)
- Where do you find co founders
- Kevin - similar to finding a good wife; both in terms of silliness of question and in terms of committment
- Justin - find people who are smart and hard-working
- What would you do different?
- Bo - start as soon as you think of your idea
- Justin - don't inncorporate as an LLC
- Kevin - don't start something else
- Steve - using lisp...maybe
- If you want it done right, do it yourself (eg hosting)
- Adam - needed more talking about vision, where you're going; less pure optimism
- Sam - Don't rely so much on 3rd parties
- Matt - Have the dificult conversations first; best up front
- YouOS - kept things secret, but shouldn't have
- When should you implement a stock option plan? What are the implications of switching from 2 owners to many?
- Sam - From the beginning
- Important that people seriously invested feel compensated
- What to read
- Kevin - viral marketing
- Justin - 10 Day MBA
- How do you find investors
- Matt - Ran into a guy he had previously done work for, showed new stuff, guy was interested
- Hardest thing about starting a company
- Adam - actually starting
- Hard to leave the idea of making good money behind
- Actually, once you leave it becomes simple
- What will an investor ask you
- Sam - Why someone else can't do this
- How are you going to make money (good ones don't care about "e;We don't know"
- Ask about high level strategy
- Don't get in your way (if they're good)
- What happens when you get lots of users?
- Steve - Users are good at finding bugs
- Most of the community wants to help you
- Good users outweigh spammers
- Whats it like to work on such a big idea? (YouOS)
- Lots of chatter, both good and bad
- Lots of users come out of the woodwork
- What keeps you motivated when things are not looking good (kevin, steve)
- Kevin - A lot of people act like kids, cursing you out
- ...so, hung up pictures of happy places on the path to the office
- Steve - traffic and feedback = impact
- Rewarding experience
- What changes when you change to a big company?
- Sam - Lose a lot of urgency, energy
- How do you deal w/ girlfriends, family?
- YouOS - "I'm single, let's put it that way"
- Matt - Just have to make the time, or you'll break down
- Sam - Make sure to keep up relationships, or life will suck
- What talks do you wish you had with your co-founders?
- Justin - Originally had a 3rd co-founder, but he did nothing, so kicked him out (good to get done early)
- Matt - Need to make sure you all going same way; VC, or get bought out by Yahoo!, or whatever
- Everyone says to not take money until last second, so since you guys did Y Combinator ....?
- Kevin - knew they were going to do a start-up period, but Y Combinator gave the final push, so they didn't have to spend so much time building seed capital on their own; no regrets
- Adam - Y combinator doesn't give very much money, so no worries there. Makes you look at a lot of quesions re: customers
- What's the right mindset?
- Sam - Don't think about money, think about fun
- Bo - Think about 6 years, not 6 month
- How do you vet co-founders outside your expertise?
- Adam - a lot was by word of mouth, personal contacts
- Else, find someone who knows that domain, and get them to vet the person for you
- Matt - Don't underestimate yourself; don't automatically assume you're gonna lose out. Try.
- What did you learn
- Bo - Thought there was some magic barrier. The trait people in Y combinator seemed determined.
- Kevin - There's more paperwork than you expect. Don't be afraid of lawyers and accountants; they know what they're doing, and they're worth the money.
- Steve - Not all lawyers are competent
- Do any of you have product management experience
- Adam - Poli. Sci. major, so most of his was product management
- Sam - don't want to hire someone with title of product manager. Engineers know what they're doing; so hire engineers who could be product managers
- Why?
- Justin - Didn't want to get a job
- How many of you don't know how to code
- Matt - Even designers can write ActionScript. Make sure you don't hire only master codemonkeys
- Kevin - Most of the time don't want design gurus, want counselors. Make sure they have no problems with completely rewriting things if asked (humble about ego).
- How necessary is proximity with founder
- Bo - shares an office with a guy he works on mojiken about. When he moved in, noticable difference; bouncing ideas off someone is really helpful
- What did you outsorce
- What would you say if you're non-americans?
- Bo - much simpler with a degree; can use an H visa. Talk to a lawyer
- Talking in person with other people is really important, so Bay Area/Cambridge important