Startup School Diary Entry #3

The last 48 hours have been some of the most tiring but enjoyable hours of my life. I arrived at Kresge Auditorium at Stanford University around 8:30 this morning; there were bagels and coffee, and it right away you could tell people here meant business. This was not the typical college campus at 8 AM on a weekend- everyone was alert and assertive, eager to hear what the next big thing would be in Silicon Valley.

The speakers were pretty big "Web 2.0 Celebrities," ranging anywhere from Amazon's CEO to the creator of Netscape to the editor of TechCrunch to Paul Graham himself. The most interesting part of the conference for me, and probably most of the attendees, was that these speakers weren't there to tell us about the future of the technology and the Internet- they were there to learn about it.

The 650+ hackers and entrepreneurs in that auditorium this morning are the future of the Internet, and that became most evident to me during the networking opportunities in between speakers. I met an incredible array of people way more intelligent than I could ever hope to be, and they were all working on things you'll be using religiously in the next 18-24 months. More on who exactly I met and what they're doing will come in a future post.

On the whole, the speakers were very good, and you can watch the archived footage on Justin.tv. The only one I was even moderately dissatisfied with was Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO. I don't think he gave one piece of valuable advice in his entire talk; he basically just did a 30-minute sales pitch for an Amazon product (I'm not even going to say which one because I don't think he deserves a free plug). He was not overly charismatic and he laughed awkwardly while the audience was stone-faced. It was a poor performance in every aspect, and the Q&A turned into a tech support session. I respect what he's done as an entrepreneur, but I didn't like his talk at all.

The resounding champion of the day was David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals, the creators of Basecamp, Campfire and some other really great business web apps. He was extremely down to earth and explained that you don't always need to make a billion dollars when starting a startup. Sometimes it's okay to just be happy. Other noteworthy talks were given by Mike Arrington of TechCrunch on how to get press for your startup and Sam Altman of Loopt on what to do when approaching Venture Capitalists.

After the event I got some food with the guys from Justin.tv again and again they invited me to an awesome private event, this time at Paul Graham's house in Palo Alto (he's the guy who makes Startup School happen in the first place).

Not only is his house amazing, the event was fully catered and the people there were teeming with ideas, ambition and tons of brains, as seems to be the trend with Y-Combinator events.

I was lucky enough to get to speak with Paul for quite some time, as well as Mike from TechCrunch, and the food was great.

I'm amazingly tired by this point in the weekend so I'll do a full review of my experience early in the week but I just wanted to get this online as soon as possible.

See you on the East Coast,

Brian