Startup School 2011 videos | Hacker News Reader

Startup School 2011 videos

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116 pointstitel28 comments

If you're trying to decide which to watch, I recommend:

* Lindenbaumm on Heroku and creating a great developer experience. * Ashton Kutcher with the story of Carl Fischer. * Matt Mullenweg on the journey of making WordPress. * The office hours with Paul Graham (if that's there). Interesting to see the questions he asks the startups.

Some of the talks were actually Q&As, which aren't my favorite format. Talks are much more compelling to watch because (ideally) the speaker tells a story and each part adds to the story. Q&As may have a few good answers or quotes sprinkled throughout, but most of the content is not so useful.

The VC talks were also not as interesting to me, as they seemed mostly to recap information that most of us here probably know (like the examples of entepreneurs in Conway's talk).

It was really cool to see the people behind the startups -- its easy to forget that products like WordPress and Dropbox were just nuggets in someone's head at some point.

I like talks if they're compelling stories, but in my experience, most aren't. They're usually canned same-old-crap stuff.

Q+A on the other hand, love those!

My problem with Q+A sessions is that the ones that are from people in the audience to presenters (like the last portion of Ashton Kutcher's video) I have no clue what the audience members are asking since they don't have microphones.

Definitely agree with ya there. I wish organizers would remember to mic the people asking questions if they're going to film it.

or the presenters remember to repeat the questions.

I set my alarm and sat at my desk on Saturday to watch the streams live (which may say more about me than I'm comfortable with), and my recommendations for the three to watch (if you don't want to watch all of them) are:

* Max Levchin's talk. I'd never seen him talk before, but I thought he was great. I thought he had a good mix of cool insider-y founder story and useful advice.

* Matt Mullenweg's talk. I'm not a huge fan of Wordpress, but I thought his talk was incredibly personable (he comes across as a ridiculously nice person, which is kind of heartwarming).

* Ashton Kutcher's talk. I was among the people who were surprised by him. I don't immediately assume everyone famous is an idiot, but I wasn't sure if he was going to be able to target a talk to an event like this. I think he did a really good job.

By all means the other ones were good as well, but those are the three that I see myself watching over again in the future.

The Ron Conway labeled video is another copy of the Drew Houston video, as far as I can tell. Any way to get the Ron Conway video fixed?

That's a lot of videos to wade through. Any recommendations for top videos to watch with actionable content?

I really enjoyed Mark Zuckerberg's video: "The biggest risk is to not take any risks."

Ashton Kutcher's was good. He had an interesting and motivational story about Carl Fisher and he gave some insight into how he perceives founders.

Ashton was pure. Deeply moving, insightful, perfect delivery. I loved the Carl Fisher story.

But if Carl were as blind as a bat, how could he see the city he indirectly developed from... a blimp?

I wondered the same thing. Doesn't really add up. Maybe he was as blind as a seeing bat.

Kutcher,Max L, Zuckerberg, Ron Conway.

First three were most candid and honest(for the most part). Ron Conway was interesting to me cause it was interesting to see examples of great entrepreneurship.

I'm surprised a few people mentioned Kutcher. I would have guessed his speech was motivational, but not actionable.

Then you're missing the point of his points.

Kutcher told a great story and had a great point. Tell me what's actionable from the Palantir speech or Dropbox speech. They were bragging for the most part.

Matt Mullenweg's talk has some great starting advice. Max Levchin's talk shouldn't be missed.

In addition to the ones already mentioned, watch PG's "office hours" sessions. It's painful to watch but every founder should take the lessons to heart and then go think about it some more and then really make sure they get it.

Too bad Mark Pincus' talk is not there.

What's the quickest way to open on mobile? I'm on ios5 and I have the justin.tv app.

The justin.tv iphone app doesn't support vod's at the moment. I'm afraid you'll have to watch on a computer.

See this sucks. When I look at the damn site on an ipad and see that I cant seem to be able to view it then I Would think of buying the iphone app so that I can.

Now later if I fidn that even though I've shelled out 4.99 for hte app (equivalnet to paying for $30 meal when a regular mean costs $10) that I still cant watch the damn videos, then I'm really going to hate justin.tv ...

Where's Mark Pincus' talk?

You need to invite 5 friends on your wall to see that.

It wasn't filmed because they're in a quiet period due to their S-1 filing.

You can read a news article on his talk though ...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2011/10/30/why-zyngas...

thanks for posting these, guys.

one request - could you please get rid of the devastating meebo bar?

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