Thoughts on Startup School
daemonology.net
daemonology.net
YC's goal in selecting Startup School participants is to get a mix of deeply technical people and popularizers. The combination of those two skill sets makes a great startup.
When I saw you at Startup School I was like, "Hey, it's cperciva! Maybe he'll find a co-founder who can sell and together they can make Tarsnap take over the backup business!" That would be a good thing for the universe.
Tarsnap is a great example of a better technology that should be backing up most of the world's data. It would, if you teamed up with the right popularizer to get the word out and close deals. It hurts me to see Tarsnap backing up only a tiny fraction of the world's data, while companies with great salespeople back up most of it badly.
Still, I think we delivered for some people who were inspired to bring their better technology out into the wide world.
Also: I hear you about power outlets. My current MBP runs Emacs for 8 hours so I've lost touch with that need, but I'll bring extension cords and power strips to future events.
And thank you for your comments when we met -- talking to you was the highlight of the weekend for me (I didn't mention it in the blog post simply because I don't like "outing" people, in case they didn't want their presence at an event to be widely known), both because "Hey, it's tlb!" and because of the confidence you showed in Tarsnap's potential. Thirty seconds of talking to you was more inspiring than the rest of the weekend.
As for finding a co-founder... you're not the first person to say that, but after 8 years of writing code I really don't think I could bring in a co-founder at this point.
p.s.: in my ideal world, you are every founder (doesn't partake in shitty, ethically-questionable growth-hacking techniques), and your company is every company (offers a decidedly great service, no gimmicks). I think it's extremely unfortunate that you have to do these extra things to be successful on the next level... I wish things weren't this way. But unfortunately you do have to play this strange ballgame to get there.
Are you a Tarsnap customer?
> The truth is you can be 8 years in, but only 10% of the way there.
I don't think this is true for tarsnap. tarsnap at this moment is a finished application people can get right now. The technology component of the company is completely solid, not in need of any repair or improvement, it's only the UI and other things that have to be improved. Colin's gotten it more than 80% there.
But the technology component is only ~2/10ths of a company.
Rather than a co-founder at Tarsnap you might consider a co-founder at a new backup venture using Tarsnap's technology but with a new brand name and user friendly stuff like a graphical interface and not deleting everything if you don't pay for 2 weeks?
This is the point of Thomas and I trying to convert you to The Dark Side, for values of dark which include "delighting more people, including more Colin."
I rather like your fonts.
The thing that is hardest about tarsnap is that it is not possible to predict my costs, as potio11 noted some time ago. I am OK with the picodollars, personally.
Sounds like attending was worth it for you, after all, and for the same main reason you noted in your post: networking.
On one hand single-founder startups don't get as big, which is a bad thing. On the other, writing code for 8 years as a single founder is right about the definition of doing things that don't scale, which is a good thing. So you can't say Colin running Tarsnap as a single founder for 8 years was bad for Tarsnap.
But it also sounds like unexplored terrain. The more specialized a skill you need for some types of work, the more likely this scenario is to happen. What's missing here is a way forward. If the goal of Tarsnap is to grow, the north star is Tarsnap's growth rate.
Colin, could you share more about what you are looking for?
Well, Tarsnap's goal isn't to grow. I mean, growth is nice, but I'd be perfectly happy if it stayed at its current size; my priority is to have a good product.
Setting aside the question of whether this is true, why is it bad to have a smaller business? I can think of several advantages, not the least of which is the luxury of remaining the sole developer.
It's weird that you spend the comment telling Colin what he's doing wrong, and then ask him at the end what he wants.
It also isn't as weird that I wrote that comment considering I alarmingly find myself falling into Colin's shoes as a single founder. If there's a trap laying ahead that I could avoid, I'd rather know about it sooner than later. It's not to disparage Colin that I wrote the comment. It's to learn from him. I like Tarsnap and I'm a Tarsnap customer.
If there's a way forward that is unexplored terrain, I at least would like to learn more about it.
I wonder how far YC pondered over this question actually. What do you do with the cpercivas?
This gutsy, uncompromising quality is a trait of successful founders. I'm curious to see what will happen.
That is not what the word means in common usage.
Merriam-Webster: "a fledgling business enterprise"
Oxford: "A newly established business"
Wikipedia: "A company, partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model"
Etc.
No wonder that's not what the word means in common usage considering startups themselves haven't been common enough to make it into hundred-year old dictionaries.
Doing things that don't scale isn't good in and of itself - it's just a means to figuring out what product people want, and offering an early version of it without investing in the ability to scale. Once you've done that, I think the point is to figure out how to scale the previously un-scalable activity, and then you have a business.
I understand where you're coming from, but in the present context this is consideration bordering on madness. Trevor is one of the founding Y Combinator partners. How on Earth could it be "outing" him to note that he was at Startup School?
I wouldn't say that Trevor was trying to go incognito, but he certainly didn't seem to be trying to make his presence obvious either.
I say this as a single founder of a startup that didn't grow.
That's awfully shortsighted. What about Bezos and Amazon?
What? At best it's correlation, not causality, but besides the point... coercive already has a successful business operating for several years. How on earth someone coming in to his existing/operational/profitable business years after its inception could or should be considered a "founder" is such an abuse of the word as to be nonsensical.
I have to say, I love this autocorrect.
I bet the next 10 years will see a lot of celebrity-driven startups. Will.i.am, Tom Hanks, Justin Timberlake etc. Looking for your 3rd co-founder? Talk to your local celebrity agent.
Something about the term 'popularizer' annoys me. Why not just call them 'marketers'.
IMHO, the perfect startup team: 1 technical co-founder, 1 technical co-founder who loves analytics and online marketing, 1 celebrity. Followed by celebrity investors.
They prefer young people because bullshit is harder to swallow the older you get -- and if your bullshit detector is hyper sensitive, like Colin Percival or Maciej Ceglowski, you either can't tolerate the thing (Maciej) or you feel like it leaves you cold (Colin).
But it's also an extremely successful cult --possibly one of the most successful ones ever?-- so who are we to criticize.
Literally accurate.
What critical things did he say about YC?
You know, it's frightening this sentence is still true if you replace "bullshit" with "dreams" and "swallow" with "believe." It's frightening because ignoring your dreams is the most common regret of the dying.
So age might only on the surface be a filter. The true filter might be optimism.
I sincerely hope you don't ignore your dreams.
I thought that "Startup School" would be more like the "How to Start a Startup" lecture series that YC is running at Stanford.
Instead, it was just a bunch of celebrities talking about their startup experiences; a concentrated shot of survival bias. There's nothing practical to learn from the Startup School talks.
As for inspiration, I guess some people might be inspired by celebrity speeches like those, and I don't want to begrudge anyone that if that's what they got out of it, but I'm much more inspired by new products. (Especially imperfect products that make it seem easy to improve them.)
The Office Hours are the best part. Throw away the talks, let PG give a keynote, and turn the whole thing into Office Hours.
Now that would be an event I could imagine attending.
Not knocking on YC, just pointing out that that's not happening, doesn't make financial sense for YC.
Sam and PG did a great job last year. They seemed to be able to hit the right balance of probing questions while being respectful of the people they were interviewing.
They didn't seem mean spirited to me; but they certainly did rip people apart (especially with the UI critique). At the end of that I left thinking "I'm glad they weren't doing this on Tarsnap, because they would probably have opened patio11's blog post and read the whole thing out in front of everybody".
Depends on whether any of speakers had a track record of two or more successful startups. Not advising, not managing, but actually starting a company from zero and growing it into a meaningful business.
Because, as they say, once - you're lucky, twice - you're good, a bunch of once'es is a selection bias example.
Although, YC wouldn't attempt giving 'real' advise at this point. (advise that would end up being labeled elitist, misogynistic etc.) They're under the spotlight, and have to be politically correct.
As startup advisors and accelerators go, they are google/microsoft. Held back by their own weight.
Alexis Ohanian, Reddit founder, just started a podcast where the content includes real-life office hours. http://www.nyrdradio.com/
It's obvious that in an audience of 1000+, there are differing people at different stages of their startup.
Some people need to hear the motivational speeches to dare take their first step toward starting their startup.
Other people are further along and really are just looking for very practical or tactical advice that would solve their current issue (it could be related to growth, finding customers, dealing with press, dealing with co-founder fights, the list is long).
And other people are looking to network, find their co-founder or that business person who'll help them close their first sale, or get an intro to a famous VC.
When you put an event together, you try to address all those differing needs into one coherent package. Therefore, any geek can figure out that some content will not be directly applicable to why they attended. But overall, if the organizers do a good job, the event will turn out to be valuable.
The last important factor is that a significant part of the audience doesn't know what they really should know, so they sometimes attend for one reason, but are enlightened by something completely different.
While I disagree with you, your post is important, and I'm glad you wrote it. Those who are undecided about attending SuS in the future whose expectations match yours can decide against it if they read your post. Then, one more space will be available for someone who may have gained a lot, but wasn't accepted.
Thank you for saying that. I hesitated for a long time before writing this -- hence the posting almost a week after the event -- because it felt like I was being rude to criticize an event which, after all, we were all invited into for free.
Those who are undecided about attending SuS in the future whose expectations match yours can decide against it if they read your post. Then, one more space will be available for someone who may have gained a lot, but wasn't accepted.
That would certainly be one positive outcome. For me, an even better outcome would be to have Startup School cut down to 100 developers and gaining a technical focus... mind you, maybe that just means I want "hacker school" more than "startup school".
Interesting you should say that. We've tossed around the idea of HN sponsoring a hackery summit a la Startup School but with a purely technical focus. It might complement Startup School well.
The YC/HN world has always had both technical and entrepreneurial hemispheres, if you can call them that, and some people identify more with one than the other. Cross-pollination between the two is beneficial (which is one reason why we've always resisted the idea of splitting HN into sub-communities) but yeah, it can be frustrating when you find yourself in a local optimum for the side you don't find interesting. We hear similar complaints about HN pretty regularly even though we try to keep both sides well-stocked.
I wouldn't want to attend a "hackery summit" which simply consists of people writing code; I can do that better at home, since having people around is distracting.
On the other hand, a "hackery summit" with technical talks from people who have built cool things would be very interesting.
*Design of the app comes first! (don’t lose too much time on engineering on early stage).*
On the bright side though, the Winner of the Challenge was a startup called 'Connected2Me' (IM mobile app) which was run by 2 guys: A Python developer (seemed to be the hardcore kind) and a DevOps guy who recently jumped up probably to handle the load and sys-admin. The startup had more than 2M users in Turkey alone. They both seemed (dress, talk, etc.) more like pure geeks more than business people.
[1] About a month ago I've seen a bio-informatics startup on HN (can't recall if it was about fighting a disease e.g. HIV or about genetic modification). The team was made by 7 members, 6 business oriented people (CEO, CTO, this and that manager) and ONE biologist with IT background. Seemed extremely ridiculous!
Yes, that's the idea. À la Startup School but with a technical focus.
I think you're absolutely right about you wanting a "hacker" school. I'm involved in a startup from the business, marketing, and front-end side and while I have a very deep and sincere respect for the time and mastery it takes to become a great engineer/developer, in my opinion there is much more to building a great product/company/startup (whichever word you prefer) than amazing tech.
pmarca expressed it well in a talk to Stanford's MBA class in that he thinks the post-dot-com pendulum swung too far to the side of purely technical founders. He believes that when engineers and technical founders realize their efforts can be greatly complimented by inspired and business driven leaders, we will see the greatest innovations. I strongly agree with that sentiment.
You're a far more accomplished developer than I am, but even I feel like I can mostly do what I need to, technically, given the time. I'm weaker in the other departments - finance, marketing, UX - all that stuff. So truth be told, I'm actually more interested in exposing myself to ideas from those fields. One thing I thought was interesting from MicroConf Europe last year is that I had very, very few conversations about actual technology, even though some of the people were certainly capable of it.
Every Startup School there are a few good talks (Andrew Mason's and Reid Hoffman's were two I liked), plus office hours, which are engaging - but again, these are all uploaded online. I'm not sure how office hours participants are selected, but doing that would be an obvious reason to attend.
The real reason to attend Startup School is to meet a fairly interesting, relatively accomplished, friendly crowd of folks. There's a business bent to the demographic - everyone is interested in startups, but most people I meet are technical. If you really want to, there's the chance to talk to some of the YC partners. Some of the speakers will stick around to answer questions. Last year one of the Airbnb cofounders stayed to answer questions for a while.
To get the most out of it you definitely need to introduce yourself to random people. You certainly shouldn't pull out a laptop. I never sit down with friends because sitting down next to a stranger is a great opportunity to introduce yourself.
Over the past three events I've met a few people I've kept in touch with; that alone makes it worthwhile. It also makes a lot more sense if you're local to the Bay Area - it's a great excuse to meet up with friends in the area.
The event was ok... but really lacked anything you couldn't find elsewhere. I was particularly annoyed that they didn't even try to sort the companies or founders or attendees into discussion groups, make connections, or even foster conversation after the event. In fact, it was almost like they were working against that, by whisking away all of the speakers and interviewers imediatly following the event and during the one intermission....
------------------------------------------------- [1] My complaint letter:
Hi Kathrina,
I really enjoyed ~87.3% of startup school, but wanted to pass along a few thoughts on how future events could be better.
1) Introduce the interviewer - not just the interviewee. I had no idea who Aaron Harris was until 2/3'ds of the way through the interview.
2) Don't choose startups at random. Everyone had to apply to be at Startup School - you should use those applications to chose which startups get to present at office hours.
2A) Don't chose 3 startups at the same level of growth. I run a b2b saas startup in its early growth stage. the three startups chosen for office hours we're all in the early development stage.
2B) Don't choose 3 b2c startups. I'm sure I wasn't the only enterprise b2b company in the audience.
Office hours was the section that fell flat with me. None of the companies interviewed we're in my companies stage of development (all earlier), and none we're business to business.
Furthermore;
3) I guess its OK to leave the attendees to fend for themselves... but it could work a lot better if you used the intermission to have groups cycle through quick talks with the speakers, or with YC partners. That would also add more value to attending the conference.
3A) The speakers should be more public during the break, and during the social following the event.
I'm Looking forward to future startup schools, and I hope this advice is helpful!
All the Best, Jason
An example of this reinforcing itself is the idea of having a laptop for IRC channel usage, however, if no one else in the audience is on IRC what's the point? Even if there were sockets there the only people that would be on IRC are the like minded, when the whole point of the exercise is to get out of whatever bubble you're in.
The successful superficially tech founders are actually really good at both games, but bridging those two worlds is a far rarer skill than it looks, and contributes to the scarcity of successful startups, but also the rarity of good technical management in large organisations.
For that particular event a journalist passed on the way out and we had an amusing conversation making fun of how poor the battery life is and how Google doesn't provide any power to keep them alive at events. Good events for hackers/developers have power wired to every seat. Bad events, well you can see the write up here.
... and when circumstances are such that it's not possible to find a venue with power wired to each seat (as is the case for many conferences), good organizers bring bins full of power bars. You can get a lot of laptops plugged into daisy-chained power bars connected to a 10A circuit.
Obviously you don't want to go crazy, but you can still get a significant socket expansion ratio.
I think the danger outside of load would be rare, but IIRC US specs for power cords specifically don't require compliance with daisy chaining (similar to C undefined behaviors?) and I bet most commodity power bars are cost-optimized to all hell.
Disclaimer: I am not an electrical engineer.
Even the $4 things I picked up out of a Fry's bin one day are 14AWG -- in other words, 10a@120v for 75+ feet, even through aluminium(!) wire, is still under 5% voltage drop.
I've bought nothing but the highest-end model of Apple laptop for years. I've never measured more than about 100 watts even under load with charging, the power adapters aren't even rated for more than about 1.5 amps on the input side. You're not going to have 10 people in a row gaming on 15" MBPs at one of these events.
The best reason not to do it has nothing to do with safety. It's that if there's an inspection and/or anyone reports it, you risk an abrupt drop in your bank balance.
(Also, I just tried, I can't even make a charged late 2013 MBP with a bunch of crap plugged in go over ~0.7amps off a 122v supply, the CPU actually throttled below rated speed to prevent it!)
I showed up to startup school with no electronic devices other than my phone. I figured that I was there to go, listen, maybe talk a little bit, and then go home. If I want to sit on a laptop I can do that much more comfortably in bed.
Not all speakers are saying interesting things all the time. Also, having my laptop out at BSD conferences allows me to engage in the IRC backchannel, which is often just as informative as the talks themselves.
1. YC Hacks Hackahton Goal: Idea (0 People) - Founding Team (2-3 People) People who wanted to build products. It was all designers and engineers with ideas working together for two days to build a product. The end goal was light pitches of products to prominent people in the startup community. Lots of design, building, and engineering.
2. Startup School Goal: Founding Team (2-3 People) - Small Team (6-10 People) People who want to run startups. After you've got your product, startup school answered questions like: Where do you go from there idea? What keeps you going? what pitfalls are you going to encounter? What types of people are you looking to work with? etc...
From your post, it seems like you were expecting YC Hacks. I would suggest going to that next year.
"Perhaps my expectations were misaligned"
The comment about the power outlets, leading the piece, seems like the clearest example of misalignment. I'm not able to speak for YC, but I think the point of startup school is to help people (hackers) who might not have read every PG essay but have some interest in startups learn how to start startups. Power outlets and other stuff you'd find at "cons" aren't really the point.
I didn't attend this year's startup school, but have attended a few prior, and I can say that the talks, while not completely filled with new information, helped me understand what it's like to be a startup founder. Now, as a current startup founder, I feel like as I've watched the videos this year and talked to one of our employees who attended, I feel empathy with the talks. They don't add to a huge trove of new, previously unearthed knowledge for me, but I don't really think that's the point.
To some extent, I'd liken them to the YC dinners themselves. The point of the YC dinners, in my view, is not so much to give the inside baseball of what it's like to be a silicon valley startup founder... instead sometimes you hear anecdotes that so tightly align with what you're currently going through that you think, "Wow, I'm dealing with that exact thing. And these guys are actually successful now!" It's some sort of helpful external validation which is so often lacking in early stage startups. It helps you keep going, for sure. Startup School talks are like the open source / public version of a YC dinner. The office hours are like the open source / public version of YC office hours.
But back to Startup School itself, I don't think you missed out... I don't even think your critique is invalid, I'd just caution the blanket statement at the end:
>> I would hesitate to recommend it to any other startup founder. If you're considering launching a startup and you need some "inspiration" to push you into going ahead, then by all means attend. For that matter, if you're looking for an audience to practice your "elevator pitch" on, you could certainly do worse. But if you're already working on a startup? Your time is probably better spent staying home and writing code.
Sure, I didn't go this year because I had just gotten back from a week in NYC that was particularly unfun for me, not to mention we're in a totally different place than when I've gone in years past (employees and stuff).
However.
If you feel like you're struggling, and you want to do something that actually could result in an impactful company, there's a whole lot of things worse than going to startup school. For me, it was extremely instructional especially before I had launched my startup. After I had launched, it provided some catharsis / empathy that I really appreciated.
It's definitely not a wasted day. That's for sure.
A great example: Jessica's "Startup Monsters" talk is one I go back and re-read at least every 6 months.
http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-wrong...
Hearing talks like that, and, when you live in a place like Utah, being able to socialize with other people who you could work with forever (we hired someone we met at Startup School) is an extremely great reason to attend. Maybe it wasn't for you, Colin, but I think it could help a lot of people... especially anyone considering launching a startup. And for people who've already launched a startup, if you feel like you're having a hard time, it'll help, I think. It compresses a lot of the essay reading / knowledge gathering into an 8 hour block, combined with meeting extremely great people. For already launched startups, it's a refresher course, with a dollop of community building.
And it's on a saturday... so it's not eating away at your precious work week. Maybe you don't need it, but I think a lot of people will benefit.
(BTW Colin, I've always loved your contributions to HN, and I hope you take this as additional perspective from someone it helped.)
I just decided to roll the dice a LOT of times, and came out with a few serendipitous contacts that will probably be sustained for years to come. But I do think that you need to go in with the mindset of having to converse with many people with whom you don't have anything in common with, before bumping into someone who you find interesting.
I have dozens of people like that in my orbit. Smart, ambitious, connected etc. We just haven't found the right opportunity yet.
I feel like it just makes me feel even less qualified to do what I'm doing, since I'm not a socialite. Sure, I can be friendly and engaged and talkative for short stretches, but the idea of being around a thousand excited people trying to network is just really depressing.
And I think after just reading/skimming the lean startup and steps to the epiphany, there's really not much to learn from lectures... small groups and an expert discussing specifics sure, but such large groups have to trend towards generalities which I just find exhausting.
Really, I'm at my happiest when I'm in the lab building and testing things, and at my least happy when I'm feeling like I need to be constantly "on" selling my ideas. I assume lots of other technical founders feel similarly... I can deal with sales, and I can deal with negotiations, but even when I really do enjoy hearing other people's stories it gets emotionally and intellectually taxing fast!
Lots of on point lesson to learn Lots of tips&tricks if that is what everyone else wants to call it! Just awesome overall for me as I'm doing my 4th startup, I still learned new things and gained wisdom!
Personally I've been watching the videos online. I think the information is incredibly valuable because it's from people who have some of the most experience in the world at advising and working with startups. Even more useful if you have no experience and no prior education on what it is like to start a new venture.
[Begin Anecdotal interleave
We recently moved to a new office in the university. The office plan was designed by the old school professors. It has three big tables in the middle of the room and a few computers and a printer in a side room. It's very comfortable for meeting and discussing or working in groups, but the outlets are in the walls.
The problem if that I and a few new school professors have notebooks. I'd like to have my LaTeX editor configured in the correct way. A few compilers just in case. Leave my gmail account open. ... So when the battery is low the only solution is to sit in the extreme of the table that is nearby the wall in pass the electric cord though the four foots aisle. Perhaps put a chair so no one runs into the cord. Emit a public warning. Watch for incoming problems.. ...
It's very difficult to add the electric plugs under the table, so I'd like to add some retractile plugs in the lamps, so the electric cord can go to the roof to get the electricity.
End Anecdotal interleave]
In a room with a few hundreds people, a cord across the aisle is dangerous. It's not possible to allow it to make the event hacker friendly. The only solution is to find a venue that has a plug in each seat, so everyone can connect the notebook without disturbing the transit and emergency exits.
It was pretty cool to see some startup "legends" in real life. There where definitely interesting "geeks" in the crowd, if you went to the trouble of sniffing about.
I think you're right in assuming that one of the most important (perhaps the most important) aims of the event is recruitment for YC. Given that YC are organising this event, giving out free food and generally going to a lot of trouble that seems pretty obvious going in though. They're not a charity, they seem like a nice bunch of guys running a business.
I met a great group of people (including you Colin!) and got to hear about some interesting projects people were working on. While the talks weren't terribly interesting or teach me anything I didn't know already, I felt the people aspect more than made up for it.
Maybe Startup School should have a hackathon type project for 1-2 hours, that's completely optional for people to participate in.
I watched some of a Startup School video, maybe the most recent one. Ron Conway was interviewed, and there were other speakers.
And I just read Jessica Livingston's talk
What Goes Wrong, 10/25/2012
at
http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2012/10/what-goes-wrong...
and from the post by Randell in this thread at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8474689
I will start with Livingston's
"Making Something People Want is Hard"
Here's a suggestion of another way:
Step (1) Problem.
Pick a problem where there is no doubt that the first good or a much better solution will result in enough eager users/customers to make a financially successful business. That is, we want a problem where plenty of people want and will like the solution very much. Here we want no doubt. Maybe the ideal such problem would be a safe, effective, cheap, one pill cure for any cancer.
Step (2) Solution.
For the solution, to exploit Moore's law, etc., stay in information technology and there do some original research.
Step (3) Implementation.
Write the software to do the data manipulations specified by the research.
So, the result should be a solution to Livingston's
"Making Something People Want is Hard"
Livingston also warns about co-founder disputes.
She has
"Not making something people want is the biggest cause of failure we see early on. (The second biggest is founder disputes.)"
So, here's a solution to the second biggest "cause of failure" -- be a solo founder.
But Livingston also has
"single founder and it's hard to do a startup as a single founder."
Here she loses me: There are a lot of successful businesses, small to giant, that had solo founders. So, I'm lost on why it is such a bad idea for a solo founder to try to get a company going. Sure, once the company is growing rapidly, then take on, say, an office manager, a guy to run the server farm, a programmer, a marketing guy, etc. as needed.
I think that startup school has an implicit and very powerfull message: Startup successful founders are common people and not divinity
It may not be my place to say, but...Is anyone else here....irked that a singular genius like Colin, with as impressive a product as Tarsnap still has to worry about money? Especially considering that said worry could easily be ameliorated by yielding to even one of patio11's entreaties?
Wouldn't it be cool if there was an event where people have 60 seconds to pitch what they're looking for, and if you're looking for the same thing, go talk to them after all the pitches?
i'd also traveled for startup school and would say it was just worth it for me. if i'd been local, it certainly would have been worth it, just for meeting people like the guy who created tarsnap with whom i shared a power outlet until the ushers scolded us. =)
(to be fair to the ushers, the cords were in the aisles, which could be a hazard)
one of the lytro engineers taught me a bit more about light field photography, and an arduino hacker and i chatted about locomotive robotics. on the other end of the spectrum, there were discussions about ad tech business models. so to me, it seemed to be a good mix of people with all kinds of technical skills.
I won't be attending this year, unfortunately, but I went last year and thought it was a great time.
It seems worth going to once, if you don't already know/follow "startup ethos" but otherwise, It doesn't seem very useful from a practical standpoint.
Over the years there are a lot of cool people with whom we interacted but then have lost the connection. Startup School is a great place to meet them again, and learn all new things they are doing.
it was a fantastic event with nuts and bolts business and hacker types talking about how they actually got companies/products off the ground and then operated them.
point is ..need more of those! @nickpinkston on twitter was one of the organizers > that team brought in all the right presenters.