This weekend was Y Combinator's Startup School. My friend Dave, also an ex-Evo'er, and I drove up from LA to attend.
Maybe the most interesting thing about Startup School was that I was directly faced with the fact that these guys started companies. Nothing magical, they just did it. And most will fail, but that's how you learn, and it's important not to be afraid of failure.
Other than that, some of the speakers were interesting (I wouldn't have guessed it, but the lawyer was great) and some were not (is a presentation about how awesome Google is supposed to convince me to not start my own company?). Paul Graham has a new essay based on his talk from this Saturday, “The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn”.
There are notes online, but they might only be interesting if you were there and missed something in your own note taking.
You can find lots of pictures online of Startup School. I have some photos of the surrounding events, but if you've seen one conference with entrepreneurial nerds backed by powerpoint you've seen them all (though you might find some of Trevor Blackwell's robots interesting).
The blog posts are trickling in, along with the articles. (Jesus,) there are even (fucking) podcasts.
Between the Y Combinator reception, Startup School and the Lisp brunch organized by Dan Moniz I met a lot of interesting people and lemonodor stalkers. Actually it's great to meet lemonodor fans—thanks, guys. And I got to see a few friends (Gavin, est, dnm, Joshua) I don't get to see often. But holy shit am I tired now, and glad to be home.
Posted by jjwiseman at May 01, 2006 12:42 PMI was looking for you, but for some reason I thought your name was John Highsmith. I wish I'd gone to the Lisp brunch.
What did you think of Mr. Sacca's (Google) presentation? It sounded to me like he drinks a lot of (organic) Google KoolAide at Cafe 150. Message: given enough money you can behave like you have a lot of money, spend it on your employees.
Posted by: kevin on May 2, 2006 11:11 AMThere wasn't much in Chris Sacca's presentation about starting a company. A little bit, but most of it seemed to be about what a great place Google is.
Posted by: John Wiseman on May 3, 2006 12:20 PM