My Startup School experience.(sahillavingia.com)
sahillavingia.com
My Startup School experience.
http://sahillavingia.com/blog/?p=49&preview=true
5 comments
> Join a startup
"I liked how Adam D'Angelo suggested that people should join a startup that a) has a great team that is still small, and b) has traction, and c) lets you learn a ton of stuff."
This is a really big challenge for me. The decision to join a really young team versus running off and doing your own thing is really hard, especially when you see lots of awesome startups that actually have a lot going for them. For instance, if I wasn't so caught up in my own world, I would instantly want to join airbnb. I'm sure they're going to be huge.
The question is: Does being a founder outweigh the opportunity of being an early employee at someone else's startup?
"I liked how Adam D'Angelo suggested that people should join a startup that a) has a great team that is still small, and b) has traction, and c) lets you learn a ton of stuff."
This is a really big challenge for me. The decision to join a really young team versus running off and doing your own thing is really hard, especially when you see lots of awesome startups that actually have a lot going for them. For instance, if I wasn't so caught up in my own world, I would instantly want to join airbnb. I'm sure they're going to be huge.
The question is: Does being a founder outweigh the opportunity of being an early employee at someone else's startup?
> Join a startup
I'd love to do this, but there are so few late-stage startups in Australia that I'm finding doing this rather tough.
Heck, finding companies that are product-focused shops (instead of consulting shops, like design agencies) is really tough as well.
I'd love to get involved with building an awesome product. I'm going to keep looking, but if anyone is here in Oz and has some pointers as to how to find these people, I'd be very grateful.
I'd love to do this, but there are so few late-stage startups in Australia that I'm finding doing this rather tough.
Heck, finding companies that are product-focused shops (instead of consulting shops, like design agencies) is really tough as well.
I'd love to get involved with building an awesome product. I'm going to keep looking, but if anyone is here in Oz and has some pointers as to how to find these people, I'd be very grateful.
Wasn't accepted this time around. I'll definitely try again next time though, sounds awesome.
I'm sure Startup School was great, but much of this is advice I've already read through various blog posts on HN and elsewhere. Does anyone else think they're reached the point of diminishing marginal returns on startup advice?
Hmmmm...
On the drive back home after attending startup school I was thinking about what advice I had heard/read before and what I had not.
I came to the conclusion that it didn't matter...
I realized, there's a huge difference between attending the concert of your favorite band, compared to watching that same concert on DVD.
That's why I was driving home feeling so much more informed attending Startup School this year, rather than watching it via Justin.tv like I did last year.
On the drive back home after attending startup school I was thinking about what advice I had heard/read before and what I had not.
I came to the conclusion that it didn't matter...
I realized, there's a huge difference between attending the concert of your favorite band, compared to watching that same concert on DVD.
That's why I was driving home feeling so much more informed attending Startup School this year, rather than watching it via Justin.tv like I did last year.
I've had similar thoughts. What I've learned is you hear new things based on where you our in your journey. Regardless, hearing people like Zuckerberg and Brian Chesky is extremely energizing.
Dude, you don't have to move to SF. LA has a good startup scene and high-end engineering talent pool from Caltech/USC/UCLA, plus design/marketing/UX/etc people from the entertainment industry. There are no serious hurdles to founding a consumer internet startup here.
At startupschool, I met a bunch of people from the bay area, but none of them were interested in founding a new company. They were either already founders (looking for employees/funding/revenue), or, pretty happily working for a large company like GOOG/NVDA/AAPL/etc and not quite ready to leave. The people I found most interesting as future potential cofounders, were from other cities with "weaker" tech/startup scenes.
At startupschool, I met a bunch of people from the bay area, but none of them were interested in founding a new company. They were either already founders (looking for employees/funding/revenue), or, pretty happily working for a large company like GOOG/NVDA/AAPL/etc and not quite ready to leave. The people I found most interesting as future potential cofounders, were from other cities with "weaker" tech/startup scenes.
I liked how Adam D'Angelo suggested that people should join a startup that a) has a great team that is still small, and b) has traction, and c) lets you learn a ton of stuff.
We're in exactly that situation. Our startup, iTeleport, makes the top grossing VNC-based remote desktop client on the iPhone / iPad.
a) We're a team of two people -- myself (I did my CS PhD from CMU) and Vishal Kapur (BS/MS from MIT, and has worked at a large company and a successful startup over the past few years) -- and we're having a lot of fun doing what we're doing.
b) We've got traction -- more than 100,000 paying customers @$25 a pop, and growing -- we've even been featured on 37signals' Profitable and Proud blog series.
c) Finally, we're working on some incredibly challenging problems all the way from redesigning the user experience (we applied for a patent on our interface hack, which was recently approved) to squeezing every bit of performance juice out of memory and CPU constrained devices when transferring large amounts of graphical data. We're working on a p2p network stack that enables any endpoint to speak directly with any other endpoint without requiring any servers of our own to manage (and pay for (and worry about)). Most importantly, we're in touch with our users, we know what they want, and we want to learn how we can continue making something they want and like. We're making more than $1m in revenues a year, but we feel we've only scratched the surface, and people who join us now are going to really learn an incredible amount about every single aspect of how to build and grow a startup.
We're a team of two, and we're looking for a third. We're very picky, but for the right person, this could be the opportunity of a lifetime. If anyone's interested, go to iTeleportMobile.com, see what we're all about, and email us from the jobs page.