Paul Buchheit: The future of venture capital and high-tech entrepreneurship | Hacker News Reader

Paul Buchheit: The future of venture capital and high-tech entrepreneurship

stanford.edu

73 pointsjuiceandjuice13 comments

Great talk. Favorite quote so far: "The thing that we've noticed is that the longer you spend at a big company, the worse of an entrepreneur you are."

Quite profound. Companies seem to thrive on sould crunching. My own experience leads me to believe so.

But would the inverse also hold true? Is unemployment a fuel to entrepreneurship? The longer you are unemployed or under employed leads to one just going for it?

I'd imagine that the number of successful entrepreneurs that couldn't find employment if they wanted to is pretty low. Personally, and from what I've seen, entrepreneurs and self-employed people just really really don't like working for 'the Man'. Even if 'the Man' is a great employer.

Opposite of big company != unemployed||underemployed.

Could be working for startups, starting a startup, grad/school, independent contracting/freelancing, etc.

Yeah, I think staying at a big company is a proxy for a few things that can work against entrepreneurship: risk aversion, used to "playing a role", divorce of your daily thinking from the marketplace... It's like at BigCo you become a specialized, mature cell. Startups require stem cells, ready to adapt into whatever the market requires.

For those who missed the webcast:

http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/videologger.php?target=120...

This link doesn't seem to load any video. :/

Sorry for the stupid question - how can I watch the talk right now? The "CLICK HERE" didn't bring me anywhere.

It was in the join the webcast link, but the talk is now over.

Here you go:

http://ee380.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/videologger.php?target=120...

The part about being holed up in an apartment resonated with me. I worked for a startup in the valley and then moved to India to start a new company. So being in a place where running a tech company is not the default is a lot of friction!

Its talks and videos which help I think.

This was such a great talk. The best comment was from the Professor when someone in the audience asked about being a single founder.

Thanks but I wish that I had come up with a nicer way to say it. (And, I'm not a professor - I'm officially a part-time lecturer but I really just introduce speakers.)

Perhaps "There's nothing wrong with working on something for a long time but real founders ship".

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