Starting Up Silicon Valley Style | Hacker News Reader

Starting Up Silicon Valley Style

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128 pointsStudyAnimal19 comments

I've never heard of the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association before, but they've recorded some very interesting interviews. I recommend looking through their uploaded videos. There are a lot of gems in there.

I've heard some crazy stories about financial difficulties before, but Atari takes the cake: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY8GpCCBWWc . Sheriffs standing in the lobby to garnish income. Everyone rushing to the bank to make sure their paychecks didn't bounce. It's totally crazy and I'm amazed they had the determination and luck to survive that time.

I believe it is the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association.

Whoops. Thanks for correcting me.

This video picks up where Steve Blank's secret history of Silicon Valley left off: http://steveblank.com/category/secret-history-of-silicon-val...

I enjoyed Blank's very thorough description of the military / government agency technology that originated in the Valley and this clip helps to tie it very nicely to recent times.

I just watched his entire presentation, which was better than his blog posts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFSPHfZQpIQ&feature=relat...

absolutely brilliant and a must see. Steve's blog is great, but he also has a good presentation style thick with interesting content.

I was amazed at some of the deals these founders took. Starting up owning 5% of the company on day one. Or taking in $7M on a $9M valuation. Are these kinds of deals still happening?

No. That's what's so interesting about it for me. The shift in power from investors to founders isn't just something that's been happening during the last 10 years. It's been happening throughout the history of VC.

Just spent a little while watching through 5 of those videos. Incredible stuff... good clips to play in the morning just in case you need that right kick in the pants.

Oracle was started with $2000!

That's insane.

Atari was $250, crazy stuff.

Today, we need few million dollars for a Facebook poke game.

I think Oracle had a CIA contract from nearly day one. So CIA was pretty much an investor. If In-Q-Tel had existed then they probably would have funded Oracle from that.

Funny to see that some of the buildings shown as various companies in 1998 are all owned by Google today.

This is fascinating.

Incredible how these world renowned companies we know today started out with so little and were denied by most of the venture capital firms at the time. Definitely inspirational and an example to look up to when bootstrapping. I'm keeping this bookmarked.

"First you need a buzzword,

Then a second and a third,

Pick at least two industries you'll revolutionize.

Find yourself an engineer,

Feed him pizza, buy him beer,

Give him just a fraction of a fraction of the pie.

Need a good domain name,

Must be cheap, can't be lame,

Something cool like Flickr, Meebo, WikiYou, Mahalo, Bebo,

'Telephone' without the 't',

'Digg' but with a triple 'g',

Make your elevator pitch,

Code it up and flip the switch!"

--The Richter Scales, "Here Comes Another Bubble"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

This is great! About 8 minutes in listen to Bob Graham talk about the negotiation with a firm that wanted all of the company for 7mm. His response was classic.

Talk about perspective...

There's a new documentary coming out about the creation of the VC industry called Something Ventured

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssR0sdKqNs4&feature=playe...

Looks pretty good

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