PG: Thank you for putting on Startup School

Thanks, but the credit for organizing it goes to Kirsty Nathoo, Jessica, and Kate Courteau, and of course BASES. They organized everything. All I did was show up and speak.

This was a good one though. The speakers really delivered.

I loved the talks by Ron Conway and Dalton Caldwell.

Ron for giving the 'long view', a different view of what investing is like from the way people usually have.

Nice to make the distinction between 'investors' and 'company builders'.

And Dalton Caldwell was on top of his game there, taking the failure of imeem, showing he gave it his 100%, and why that didn't even matter, and not even pausing his stride, on to his new venture.

What an energy.

Thank you, I really appreciate the fact that people seem to be receptive to the things I had to say.

Frankly, I wasn't sure what kind of reaction my talk would get... but since pg personally asked me to do it, how could I pass up the opportunity?

Median quality of atendees was also -phenomenal-. Lots of really smart and driven hackers.

I also got to meet edw519. I can confirm - he is as awesome as his HN comments suggest.

Thank you for the kind words, T.J. I really enjoyed meeting you (and many others), too!

Median quality of atendees was also -phenomenal-

Something magical happens when you put a bunch of us in a room together: SUS = HN^n.

At one point, I just stood in the middle of the courtyard during a break, closed my eyes, and picked up random bits of conversation:

  - we had to load the source code...
  - our MVP was a little too minimal...
  - we may pivot again...
  - we made it to 100,000 uniques...
  - try a different framework...
  - finding another audience...
  and my favorite:
  - we're gonna change the world...

I love it when you guys talk dirty.

I think Jessica deserves most of the credit. So thank you Jessica and crew!

I was going to submit the following, but wasn't sure if it was following the rules of HN posts, so here it is:

Tell/Ask HN: I attended startup school as a non-founder and it was awesome, how was your experience?

I attended applied and attended Startup School 2010 as a non-founder and it was quite possibly the best day of my life in recent memory.

I want to say thanks to Paul, Airbnb, Bases and all the volunteers, and anyone else that put in any effort to make this event what it was.

Second, thanks to all the speakers! You all did an awesome job. Well done! Words cannot describe how well everyone did. By far the best event/conference I have ever attended mostly because of all the interesting and insightful talks.

Some of my highlights:

I sat next to the 3 awesome intelligent founders of Dr. Chronos (plug: http://drchronos.com) and spoke with them about all sorts of interesting topics through out the entire event and after.

I met Alexis and Christopher from Reddit and we joked and talked about many interesting topics during lunch. I even got some pictures taken with them.

Speaking of lunch, that might have been some of the best pizza I have ever had.

I feel like I met almost the entire Airbnb team, they were all awesome. Sorry, if I can't remember all your names, so I want to say thanks for the awesome after party! Special thanks goes to Nick, Joe, and Erin for putting up with me.

I briefly met Paul and got my picture taken with him, truly an honor. Thanks again Paul!

I met tons of intelligent, fun, awesome developers and founders. The networking was worth every single penny alone (just a little over $600 total including hotel from Oklahoma). I learned a ton! It was truly and inspiring time for me throughout the trip.

To all those I did not mention above, thank you for making this quite possibly one of the most fun, exciting, and enjoyable days I can remember in recent history.

I hope I can attend next year. I'm looking forward to it.

Videos are here I believe: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool

I wish those videos were broken up by speaker

2008 Videos: http://www.youtube.com/startupschool#g/u

2009 Videos: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/videos?kind=highlights

2010 Videos: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/videos

Thanks for all hard work that went into Startup School! Especially for going through the extra work to record and stream online! Really hope to make it out next year!

Yup, I miss the omnisio startup school videos - they were brilliant.

Seconded!! I loved Omnisio; I can't believe Google just effectively killed it.

Here is what I did for myself.

9:30 Andy Bechtolsheim Founder Arista Networks; Founder, Sun Microsystems http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/271978319 0:02:00 (not full)

10:00 Paul Graham Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/271983983 0:00:00

10:30 Andrew Mason Founder, Groupon http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/271983983 0:29:30

11:00 Break

11:30 Tom Preston-Werner Founder, GitHub http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/271992324 0:03:20

12:00 Greg McAdoo Partner, Sequoia Capital http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/271992324 0:36:00

12:30 Reid Hoffman Partner, Greylock; Founder, LinkedIn http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/271992324 1:04:00

12:55 Lunch

2:30 Ron Conway Partner, SV Angel http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272002787 0:01:00

3:00 Adam D'Angelo Founder, Quora http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272002787 0:40:00

3:30 Dalton Caldwell Founder, Picplz; Founder, Imeem http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272002787 1:08:30

3:55 Break

4:15 Mark Zuckerberg Founder, Facebook http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272002787 1:50:30 and http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272007200

4:45 Brian Chesky Founder, Airbnb http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272007200 0:23:00

Justin.tv lets users trim and title recordings (they call it "highlighting"). I did that for my favorite talks, here are direct links with no skipping required:

Paul Graham: Recent trends in startup fundraising http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272030715

Andrew Mason (Groupon): Polishing your turds and getting SUPER RICH http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272030648

Tom Preston-Werner (Github): Optimizing for happiness http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272031754

Ron Conway (SV Angel): You can do it too http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272031486

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) interviewed by Jessica Livingston http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272031868 + http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272031906

Brian Chesky: 1000 days of AirBnB http://www.justin.tv/c3oorg/b/272030551

Anyone wanna do the rest?

If you can only watch one video, watch Dalton Caldwell or Ron Conway

Great thanks

Anyone know if it's possible to export videos from justin.tv to something that would play on my iPod?

If you watch a video could leave a comment saying what speakers spoke and what time.

another thanks. the more i think about it, the more i appreciate how invaluable the talks were. this was my second startup school. but oddly i think the most valuable thing is a sort of subconscious quieting of the mind around the key places where startups really need to get going.

for so many people starting new businesses there are just a lot of unknowns that can create noise in one's mind (and prevent one from innovating around the other more real domain problems). when you see and hear other people's stories, strangely, i think the mind starts to normalize them and all these classes of fuzzy / unknown obstacles, that we don't even realize are there, start to disappear.

serial entrepreneurs often have already created this normalized, orthogonal, clean parse tree in their mind from experience. and big name institutions or big name angels create the same quieting of the mind. but i think in part you can get the same thing from startup school, whether one realizes it or not. the ultimate hack is that you don't actually need anything to 'quiet the mind' whatever that means, if you realize how important that resulting action is in the physics of it..

Thank you to the YCombinator crew and BASES for creating the event, and to all of the awesome people to came as well. Hopefully some of you will be on that stage in the next couple of years!

The airbnb presentation is excellent, just watching it now, interesting because I've already heard the most of the story in other interviews but it's still worth hearing again.

I watched most of the speakers on Justin.tv as well. What an incredible group of individuals. I wish I could have been there in person and there is no doubt I will be next year. It is amazing the impact YC has made in just 5 years. I hope you guys keep it up, you truly have a wonderful thing going all the way through. benevolence and kindness will surely pay off in cash as well for you guys (I think we all know it already has).

Kudos to PG and the YC team!

I've never been to SV but watching through these video's gives me a sense of the sheer intensity of the energy that seems to be there with so many companies and founders focused in one place. It's intoxicating; I'm so jealous!

Thanks to all involved in the event and justin.tv for showing them. I'm probably going to go through them all again at some point - there was so much good stuff and I was too excited to write notes as I watched.

Thank you PG, Jessica and team! It was very motivating to see everyone! I did not attend personally but the videos were terrific!

Though I wasn't able to attend this year, I did stream some of the live talks on justin.tv, and I plan on watching the rest tomorrow. What I saw and heard was very motivating, not to mention fun! I really wish I could have been there, but maybe next year. Anyway, I'd also like to say thanks to all involved!

Yes, thank you so much for doing this. The quality of both speakers and attendees was fantastic. It's really awesome to be surrounded by that many people that are as technical and as focused on building businesses as I am. I feel very blessed to have the opportunity to attend.

Great show! Worth the trip. Everyone was great but the most memorable speakers for me were Groupon, imeem, and airbnb. If anyone is wondering if they should fly out to see it, DO IT. So much better than watching streams.

thanks ycom

~mrC from Cambridge, MA

Yeah, thanks to YC for organizing it and to the speakers for volunteering their time. I have almost never learned so much in one day for free. You guys have really made me think about what I want to do with my life.

Thanks, this was an amazing event to follow, even only the stream. The chatbox action was also interesting at times, except for the inevitable trolls. Good job Justin.tv

Perhaps off-topic question: how is HN traffic affected by Startup School? I want to see a traffic graph with each speaker's talk time marked ;)

Thanks, the quality of the speakers (and talks, since I've heard a few of the speakers before) was immense.

Thanks Jessica, pg, and team for such a wonderful opportunity. Great speakers and amazing people.

Thanks another great year at Startup School. The Airbnb after hours was good too.

Anyone working on transcripts or summaries? Would love to pitch in.

Thanks for streaming the event