Startup School 2011 Live Stream | Hacker News Reader

Startup School 2011 Live Stream

justin.tv

139 pointsfreshfey46 comments

I was an Ashton hater before today, for reasons probably related to jealousy, but today he won me over. I was really impressed by his groundedness and humility...at least while he spoke on stage.

I really liked his answer to the last question.

24:30 @ http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298680010

Definitely! It sounds like he has genuine interest in helping people. The story he shared on why he's drawn to social media so much, b/c of the power it has to connect people in positive and non-predictive ways, was nice to hear, especially during a time when so many others pursue social for less genuine, fad or bandwagon, incentives.

He gave similar sentiments at the beginning of his talk. He takes it as a warning when he sees someone pursue entrepreneurship primarily for the material benefit, or "effect" as he puts it. Instead, he states, their motivation should come from the passion they have for changing something, or for taking part in the journey involved in doing so.

Sure, others have said this time and time again, but being a bit skeptical of him, it was impressive to hear him say that ... he gets it.

"but today he won me over"

Same. I wasn't a fan before today (but wasn't a hater either).

He will definitely play Jobs in some movie.

(the "Reductio ad Jobs" for today.)

Good looking successful male actors appeal to both men and women. The type you'd like to hang out with. Women from what I've seen are not typically attracted to the same degree to attractive women though. They tend to be jealous. One of the reasons Oprah is so popular with women.

I wouldn't say I was a hater, but I was definitely wary. However I kept hearing about smart people who accepts him and works with him, so I started thinking there's probably something there.

For me I think it was watching too many episodes of That 70s show. He was too good at being Kelso.

The Carl Fischer from his talk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_G._Fisher

What was the company from Office Hours doing Analytics as a Platform?

Even if the guy couldn't explain it on stage, it sounds awesome, definite pain point we see, and I'd love to sign up for it.

Yeah, totally wanna know too. It took a bit for him to explain, but I totally got it.

http://schmetrics.com/

OK, I'm by no means a copy expert but I can see some very obvious problems with the text on that page (which are worth fixing, since it sounds like communicating what the product does is a known problem for the company).

The first paragraph, "Schmetrics was founded by three lifelong friends to address the pain points we have felt repeatedly over years of working in software..." - provides no actual information. You can delete it entirely.

The second paragraph starts "Our platform is based on modular, flexible design principles" and is just as bad. It hardly hints at what the product does.

The last two paragraphs at least mention analytics in passing, but again don't tell me anything that I couldn't have guessed - "we believe our customers are our greatest resource when it comes to generating and validating the ideas" should be taken as default for any intelligent startup.

Don't worry - these aren't dumb mistakes. This stuff (figuring out your messaging) is really, really difficult. Reading between the lines, it sounds like your product solves a problem that I have and I'm very excited to know more about it.

Maybe you should revisit your answer to the YC application question "What is your company going to make?".

simonw,

Not my startup but a friend's.

I'll tell him about your feedback.

I can't thank you enough for taking the time to write up this feedback. I'll post again when we rewrite it later today.

We've had customers and revenue since day 0, and since we're three technical cofounders, we have largely (and, I now see, mistakenly) focused on building our platform as quickly and thoroughly as possible, to the expense of everything else. Our plan was purely serial: focus on the tech first, then build an image and a brand[1] later.

The whole reason we applied to YC was to learn how to better communicate what we do. A YC S11 founder made it clear to me that YC could help us to fix our communication problems before they became problems, and only then did I apply. He said YC could help us learn how to communicate to three audiences: investors, the press, and customers. I give us a F, F, and C- for those respective audiences. We will get to A, A, A.

[1]: Frankly, we're not even happy with the name "Schmetrics", now that we know how hard it is for people to pronounce and spell.

That was me.

Sorry if I was confusing/confused -- I have an extreme personality (I'm far too abstract), which is a big part of why complementary cofounders are so important for people like me. Had they been present, I'm sure we would've done better :)

No worries, my company runs into the analytics problem you're solving all the time, so I totally knew what you were talking about :)

Were you trying to make the point that your analytics can be for more than reporting? Ex: if you have a platform then you can feed the data back into a user-facing site to drive sales of popular items, make automated tweaks, or offer experiences tailored to the specific visitor?

Definitely.

(among other points!)

Is there anyplace where I could watch the entire recording of it? There are just some fragments at Justin.tv.

Will this be recorded and available later to watch? I missed the beginning

probably, yes :)

thanks

Did anyone catch when Ashton Kutcher mention his contact info?

It should be somewhere here: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/298670703

I think it was agrade@gmail.com

He said there's a team of people sifting through that, and he instructs them to pass on only the stupidest and best (?) ideas.

is there a schedule for when each speaker will present?

i know of the list of all speakers but not their order of presentation.

I found one here: http://startupschool.org/schedule.html [edit] this was indeed from last year. Here is the current one: http://pastie.org/2779036

thanks, but i think that's last years schedule. i just saw the heroku presentation and it's not on the schedule list.

[edit] http://pastie.org/2779036 is indeed the right list.

This seems like the schedule from last year. There's a schedule for this year the justin.tv page (scroll down).

Nice! However Pincus' presentation seems to be missing (atfer Matt Mullenweg's is just YC logo).

which speakers did I miss?

Before the 11:00 break

PG & Marc Andreessen - Partner, Andreessen Horowitz; Founder, Ning, Opsware, Netscape

James Lindenbaum - Founder, Heroku

Jim Goetz - Partner, Sequoia; Founder, VitalSigns

Thank you. :) Going to be a long night. (european resident here)

I'm not sure but last year you could watch the replay of every video on justin.tv ;)

Marc Andreessen talked with Paul Graham at the beginning. James Lindenbaum gave a talk and right after him Jim Goetz was on stage.

Why do I have to use Flash to watch this? Doesn't seem to work on my iPhone.

Does an HTML5 live streaming video player even exist on the market yet?

You can't do live streaming using the video tag on any browser except safari (which supports the Apple live streaming protocol). The only container formats supported by the popular browsers (mp4 and ogv) require that you know the locations of all of the keyframes that will appear in the video ahead of time. In order to have live streaming in the browser they'll have to support a streaming-friendly container format like mpeg-ts.

thats totally wrong. you can do WebM live streaming that works in Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Ogg Theora with Icecast also works in Firefox, Chrome, Opera

But not ie9. And I don't believe they support playing h264 video in a webm container, so you either have to write your own broadcasting tools or transcode everything to vp8.

you can do WebM and/or Ogg Theora live streaming with Flumotion, Icecast, GStreamer. This just works in the video tag in Firefox, Chrome and Opera. It does not work in Safari and IOS since Apple refuses to support those formats.

Yes. I believe the Business on Software conference 2011 used one.

There is a Justin.tv iPhone app that would allow you to watch it, but it's $4.99: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/justin.tv/id358612216

Does it at least AirPlay so I can put this up on my TV?

Yes.

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