Startup School 2013 Doodles | Hacker News Reader

Startup School 2013 Doodles

startupnotes.org

350 pointssimonebrunozzi74 comments

This is fantastic and beautiful!

I made a few sketches myself as part of a larger project I'm working on (a year without cameras): http://crafture.me/post/64711241777/startup-school-2013

Wow what an awesome project. Keep up the amazing work!

Thanks!

Love your project - were you experienced as an illustrator when you decided to do this? What was the purpose behind it?

Not really. I was a hobbyist sketcher/painter up till high school and then didn't have time for it when I went to university other than a few random spurts. I felt like I wanted to bring back this passion of mine after a good 10 years of being away from it. I had also been feeling completely addicted to capturing moments on my phone/DSLR and wanted to channel that desire to capture into something more creative and challenging.

I wrote a post explaining my motivations if you're interested: http://crafture.me/post/60578682070/a-year-without-cameras

Thanks for posting! If anything is unclear (it's always hard to find quotes without trimming too much context), let me know.

Gregory, I think you did an amazing job! If you want, I can send you some pictures you can use, if you'd like to add them. Let me know.

Would love to! username at gmail

Sent! Feel free to use.

How did you get the pictures to each person at the bottom of the page? Photoshop over their genuine pictures?

Yup. I experimented with adding some features.. but it looked way too creepy: http://cl.ly/image/3s2P2z0j1Q33

Yeah, the picture linked above kinds of creepy. I like the one currently being used better. By the way, it's a really impressive piece. Job well done!

Using less detail definitely looks better. I noticed that when my window is ~950 pixels wide, though, I lose the names above each person as the display scrolls down. I found the names helpful for understanding who someone was, as I didn't decipher all of the doodled versions perfectly.

The minimal-profile is something I experimented with when I made my current profile picture (http://stackoverflow.com/users/55720/machinaut) and really liked the look of it.

Your lineup of speakers looks great! To me it's a good combination of minimalism with just enough details to pick out what's important.

Hi Greg. Thanks for your work here -- it looks great! I have a few questions.

Which mistake was Zuck referring to with "That mistake cost me billions"?

What did he mean by "When a problem arises, lockdown"?

What did Chase mean by "The worst part of being a nonprofit is that nobody says no"?

What did Balaji mean by "Show people what a world run by Silicon Valley would look like (without disrupting)"? Politically?

Good questions!

1) They naively structured Facebook in the early days, and Peter Theil had them restructure. Then Eduardo didn't move, so his stock didn't vest. That cost Zuck billions (according to his offhand comment).

2) When there was a problem, nobody would be allowed to leave. They don't do that anymore (because it's illegal), but teams sometimes commit themselves to it on their own.

3) People don't want to write him a check, but they also feel too bad to outrightly say "no". So, he had a ton of "they're about to write us a check"s, yet nobody ever did.

4) He wants us to show the world the benefits of SV's way of doing things. However, imposing it would upset people. Rather, we should be enticing them by showing them what it could be like.

Simply want to join my voice to others by saying this is amazing and the design is very inspiring. It is simple, informative, and feels personal. Kudos!

Beautifully implemented. If it's not too much to ask, please consider making public the source code behind the display and design - really gorgeous way of showing a collection of notes.

Already is: https://github.com/gkoberger/startupnotes

(I did it fast; I need to refactor soon. Also, I'll add a license.)

EDIT: Open license added, have fun with it!

You are the man. And you just got yourself another twitter follower :)

Super nice job!

Very creative, good job!

Awesome design and thanks for open sourcing!

These are beautiful! You should sell these, maybe individually as mugs/posters - I'd definitely buy some key one-liners for our office.

For those of you who want a bit more context, here are two sets of notes from this weekend:

https://github.com/charlesfeng/startup-school-2013 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Xo99mjzc4nyK3J4_GBiba_Kz...

There is some overlap between the two but also some differences so I'd suggest reading both.

[Disclaimer: I produced the first set - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6578780]

Beautiful! Did you tweet it? Can you post the link? We are curating a list of the best content on theneeds [1] and I'd like to add this one (we only import feeds or tweets).

[1] http://www.theneeds.com/learn/top-content/startupschool

https://twitter.com/gkoberger/status/392334524257804288

added, thanks!

Ciao Emanuele, nice to see you here as well :)

That is actually so slick. I wish more web services had designs like this.

Thanks!

Awesome. Much better than my hand-written notes.

http://justink.svbtle.com/my-hand-written-notes-from-startup...

I took the courtesy to convert these into pdf slides (for easier reading on iDevices, etc) you can download them from here (http://blog.websecurify.com/uploads/aa_StartupSchool.pdf) for now but it will be great if Gregory puts them on his website next to the github link.

Thanks for the great work Greg!

Great format, simple execution and presentation for us who were unable to attend, lots of valuable insights.

I think the theme that stands out for me personally from all of these notes is: Find something you can work on almost non-stop, expect to fail a lot (because you will), learn and adapt, keep trying.

Dude, sweet post!

Big fan of sketch notes myself so I'll definitely be forking that repo.

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/22019990/V84GJ7NUzlOJ_V9l...

^ Sketchnote, but not from Startup School.

Is there a video of these presentations?

The official website says: "We'll have videos of the individual talks up as soon as we can." (http://startupschool.org)

Dat affiliate link ;). Only joking, you deserve it, this is great work.

I'm calling it a "Series A(mazon)" round

Wait, where's the affiliate link? I don't see it anywhere.

Small comment about the site: looks great and well-made, I just wish that every next page click didn't populate browser history, such that I needed to hit 'back' 10 times to get back to where I was.

Annoying, but it allows for linking to specific "slides".

It would be better if you could anchor link then (like http://startupnotes.org#zuck or something)

http://startupnotes.org/#page/18 above the book

Man this website is gorgeous. Great work. follows @gkoberger

Great Job! All of the startup school notes being posted on the internet have helped me make up a little bit for not being able to attend startup school 2013!

Great work. I noticed on the Dan Siroker (optmizely) slide that he states them having 140 customers, is that number right? Their site says 6000.

Excellent work! One thing you missed on Nathan Blecharczyk's talk... "VCs want the B's Baby! (not the M's)"

haha I wanted to include it, but I left that out because he didn't actually mean it -- he was quoting someone else and it was bad (albeit probably true) advice. Hard to convey all that in a simple doodle.

Yes, agree.

Awesome. Love the sketches. Did you use Paper?

Only in the most literal sense :)

Paper: Mixed Media, 5.5inx8.5in notebook by Strathmore

Pens: Uni-ball Vision Micro

Scanned; shading was done after in Photoshop. I tried using Paper, but it was too hard to write longer quotes.

This is beautiful!!.... Thanks for creating this. This will be good reading material whilst waiting for the videos.

This is great! Awesome summary, and your quote doodles kicked the pants off of mine for sure. :)

How'd you create the Doodles? Just sketched them by hand and scanned them? or Photoshop?

Sketched (pen+paper) and scanned, touched up and colored in Photoshop.

Can anybody elaborates on Mark Zuckerberg's note "That stupid movie..."? :)

pg asked about FaceMash, and he said something like "It was nothing. Everyone thinks it was a huge deal. That stupid movie..."

He was frustrated at its portrayal that Facebook was a direct result of Facemash.

Mark was talking about how he always envisioned a way to connect people. And he was citing examples of early hacks he made in college. Of course, his most notorious one was the "FaceMash" hack, the one the movie, "The Social Network," put a lot of emphasis on. Hence, Mark was venting a little frustration that his other notable achievements went largely unnoticed by the public.

I would buy this as a little hand book. That'd be awesome.

I've been doing them every year ( http://gkoberger.net/m/startup-school ); would love to eventually do something like that. I wouldn't want to make money; maybe I could donate proceeds to Watsi?

these would be cool swag !

(also, nice step up...I like the booklet > scroll)

It looks really nice, but there might be a problem for someone reading these notes who didn't actually watch startup school. For example in Watsi's section you write "Worst part about being a non-profit: Nobody says NO", that could be a sarcastic comment, or it could be a problem of too much funding, or it could be it's actually meaning that everybody actually says no, but just not to his face. Also, the starting quotes without ending quotes drive me a little crazy, but that's just a personal thing.

In context, Chase Adam said something like "The worst part about being a non-profit: everybody is like 'yeah, this is really cool', but they don't write a check. Nobody says 'NO'."

Insanely great. I'm a huge fan. Thank you!

when we will have the videos?

Dear Gregory, this is really brilliant! Very well done!

You are ridiculous!

Simply. Excellent.

Great work!

Nice work.. and some good 1-liners.

Everyone is praising you on the look/feel of your website, which I agree is pretty cool; however, the content of what "people" learned from the conference seems all but completely useless (unless the conference sucked that much that all you got out of each speaker was a couple of 1 liner's??). Not sure if you were serious about the content or just messing around to demo your website.

I don't think the idea here is to transcribe everything that got said during the conference. Ideas which translated well into doodles have been captured here. Not to mention what qualifies as "completely useless" is highly subjective.

Too bad your page flip animation violates Apple's patent.

http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?docid=D0670713&SectionNum=1&IDK...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com