Poll: Best speaker at Startup School 2008? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: Best speaker at Startup School 2008?

17 pointsraghus13 comments

If you were are today's Startup School, whose talk did you find the most valuable/impressive/useful?

The great thing about this event was not only the quality of speakers, but the wide range of topics they spoke on. I thoroughly enjoyed pretty much all of them.

Overall it was an excellent event. Except that one annoying guy who kept asking the speakers "questions" that ended up being rather ridiculous advice.

Yeah, I was one of the multitudes that applauded when Jessica finally reminded him that there was a line behind him.

Are you talking about the guy that got up just to tell PG he was wrong (about going to college)? Why do you go to Startup School then, if you're so smart?

I still bet you all end up working on building the next facebook despite, as I write this, DHH has the most votes. LOL

When he asked "Would you really want to give up programming, and start sitting in boring meetings, just for some moolah" (Something like that), I was thinking "Well duh hell yeah. Then I'd quit, and do programming again".

Vesting over 4 years...

I am fascinated with everyone's response to DHH.

Maybe it's because I am a bit older. I've been working in industry for 20 years. The subscription model and the idea of going after Fortune 5 million businesses, is from my view, the standard business approach.

It's what you do when you don't have an idea that you are excited about. He's right that most ideas won't work but so what. From my view, it's not about the success, it's about the effort and the process. If you find an idea that you are passionate about, you give it your all and see what happens.

Still, I think that DHH really connected with the audience. When I questioned DHH at the conference, he said that the approach he outlined is actually the approach he's taken. So, it is very interesting that this approach resulted in something as revolutionary as Rails.

The guy with those motivation comments was badass. In these long preceding years, all the general advice that could be given has been given. Now, the only words remaining that can really help are those that make people act.

all the general advice that could be given has been given

But any one of us has only heard a small portion of it. So there is value in repeating these things.

This suggests that if you listened to enough advice then you'd be able to form one big unified theory of everything startups. Not so, too much advice directly conflicts. Too much is based on improbable anecdotes.

Where is this level beyond which more advice is no longer worth it? I think this line exists. Hmm

I'll tell you the speaker I didn't like. It was that dude with the dead cat stapled on his head, the one who got up in front of the microphone, supposedly to ask a question, but really just so he could speak truth to power about how college graduates all work for dropouts.

I have news for you: You didn't impress anyone. You're just a dude with a dead cat on your head. I didn't drive an hour down to Stanford to hear your truthiness. The only advice I want to hear from a guy like you is something that Paul Graham has written out and that DHH has then tattooed on your ass. That way, the next time you're in a room full of mirrors, you can read it verbatim.

Where else could you find so many speakers expousing diametrically opposed ideas while all being correct?

DHH by far and that isn't to say the others weren't good, just that his was stellar by comparison. In other years PG might have won -- nothing wrong with it, it was pretty good, just that DHH was stellar.

Some of the top points for me (my interpretations):

1) Rails - first version was 1000 lines. You don't have to make something gargantuan that solves every problem as a first version!

2) Rails was a means to an end, something used in the process of making something REAL. It wouldn't work as a day job, it would be horrible to just work on a framework all the time.

3) If you only HAVE 2 hours a day, working on it is something to look forward to (my inference), whereas if you have all day every day you procrastinate. Don't expect yourself to work on it all the time, it's not realistic.

4) Reverse terror alerts -- SO much coverage given to the one in a million success stories that we subjectively feel it's much more likely than it is. We are brainwashed with overexposure. The odds are much better of building a small business, and of course there's nothing preventing you from selling that anyway. I suppose it's like flipping a house -- make it someplace nice and live in it and you can enjoy it, and that doesn't stop you from selling it later if you want. If you are focused on flipping it then it becomes kind of an albatross because you're too attached to a low-probability outcome that depends on other people, which makes you a bit desperate and unable to enjoy the process, which just becomes an interminable wait.

5) Calling the shots, running at your own pace -- not having to "yes, massa" and do what your investors tell you.

6) Having a bunch of small customers vs. one huge one means you don't have to placate some fussy demanding customer or risk losing the account and all your income. If a small customer isn't worth it, you can refund and let them go.

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