The Most Memorable Quotes (I Could Capture) From Startup School 2012 | Hacker News Reader

The Most Memorable Quotes (I Could Capture) From Startup School 2012

jasonshen.com

82 pointsjasonshen15 comments

Technology companies follow an extreme power law curve.

Of all tech companies started in the US in any one year, around 15 ever generate $100M in annual revenue.

Those 15 companies are ultimately be responsible for 97% of the market cap for all companies started that year. 15 companies! That’s way harder than making the NBA in any given year – most of you would never attempt such a difficult thing. And yet here you are.

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Wow.

Edit: I mean you hear a lot about it's near impossible to have a super profitable startup and that most fail, but when you say 15 only ever generate 100mm in revenue, that puts a new perspective on it. For me anyway.

100mm annual.

100mm lifetime is still one hell of an achievement, but I'd imagine significantly more reach it than 3%. Lots of B2B companies survive for a few years with 8 figure annual rev.

The counter-complimenting (but not contradictory) point is that it's also true that you could create a business, especially a purely software-based business in terms of how it scales, and it could hit only say $1M or even $200k in revenue or profit each year, and that would be a huge success -- as long as you kept the team small, the ownership in your hands, etc., ideally as close to 1-2 people as possible even. Getting say $200k/year of mostly passive income would be a huge life-changing state of affairs. We don't all need to become GitHub or Pinterest or Facebook, etc. In business, a homerun is relative. FU money for a single founder with 100% ownership is pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

jasonshen, you misspelled at least 4 of the names of the people you covered. I wouldn't have said anything if it was just one or two (everyone makes mistakes), but 4 (at least) is kind of excessive.

Edit: in fear of downvotes for calling jason out on such a detail: I think getting people's names right is important; it shows attention to detail and respect for the people you're naming. (It's also a pet peeve of mine, but that's irrelevant). So my comment is meant to be constructive criticism. BTW, the names that are misspelled (that I know of) are:

Kalanik -> Kalanick; Collision -> Collison; Andressen -> Andreessen; Preston Warner -> Preston-Werner

(I didn't write them before because I was on my phone and it was time-consuming to do)

Woops, thanks! Meant to go back and fix those at the end but forgot. Fixed Travis Kalanick and Tom Preston Werner but didn't see any other typos - which were they?

edit: got the rest, thanks! You might have to hard refresh to see the changes.

Funny, I just did the same: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685011.

Nice! These two are also good:

Startup School and Surviorship Bias -http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685042 My Key Takeaways from Startup School 2012 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4681791

Thanks Jason and everyone else updating us on Startup School 2012. Really good to still hear this stuff without actually being there.

I can just imagine how funny it must have been for Travis Kalanick to whip out the Uber revenue graph like that haha.

You missed the most important one by jl :p

http://www.teespring.com/fundraising

True. Everyone laughed at that one. How are sales? =)

haha, looks like 5 people reserved it so far. No one gets anything if 100 people haven't reserved one in 21 days though :)

I love Jason's Hen. Great site.

"I love Jason's Hen. Great site."

I didn't realize I had a chicken. Thanks =)

"The greatest thing about being rich is that you don’t have to do business with people you like.’”"

That was 'people you don't like' :)

Thanks, fixed.

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