One of the big reasons that YC exists is to mentor young entrepreneurs. I would love to have a mentor, but I think that I"m going to branch out on my own to find them, instead of drowning in the crowd at Start-up school to exchange three words with Jessica or Paul. Instead, I've been considering volunteering at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to hang out with some elder geeks. The Computer History Museum has a bunch of volunteer hardware/software hackers who restore vintage main-frames. These are all really smart hackers who have spent decades in the tech business, and they are spending time in retirement doing geek stuff, because they love it. These are the kind of people that I want to spend time with.
My team and I just moved to Silicon Valley this past year, and we're setting up out entire lives around the idea of having a series of start-ups. We've driven a combined total of 12 thousand miles to get here. We're set up financially so we can afford to iterate through start-up ideas without breaking the bank. We have a great space to work in, and we're meeting a lot of cool people. I actually talked with a man a few weeks ago who knew William Shockley of Shockley Semiconductor fame.
Yeah, It's been a hard road just to get to Silicon Valley. I'm sad that I didn't get in to the startup school. But, I'm sure that I'm going to get a lot more rejections throughout my career as an entrepreneur. If I wanted something easy, I'd choose a different career. I'm doing this because I enjoy the challenge. I'm doing this because I love technology. I'm doing this because I love the game, and I'm in it for the long haul.
Just made a wiki so we can all coordinate stuff to do and share rides: http://startup_weekend.bluwiki.com/
When I first got involved with a proto-startup (redundant?) I came across a podcast of some previous year and it was by far the best crash course in startup business I've seen.
Has there only been one previous year? Other online?
We have a meetup discussion going in here: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=2757
It'd be great to meet the startup community "after school," so let's decide on a place.
last time I went (in 2005), there was absolutely no security and plenty of free chairs. Anyone could've easily shown up without being questioned...
I don't know if it will be the same this year, but if you're in the area maybe you can try showing up?
Who knows... if they catch you... maybe PG will appreciate your hacker-ish persistence :)
Please don't just show up. It's very nice of Stanford to lend us the auditorium, and we don't want to be bad citizens. If we have too many people for the room, the campus police won't like it.
http://up.facebook.com/event.php?eid=2251607090
anyone else coming from out of town? (I'm coming down from Portland, OR)
http://carlos.bueno.org/2007/03/startup-school-startup-culture.html
-- Ryan Park, Stanford grad student