I decided to make the trek out to Berkeley to check out this year’s Startup School (and to let it serve as a serious peptalk–it’s working).  Startup School has been held since 2006 by the folks behind Y Combinator, a venture capital firm that specializes in funding early stage startups.  Teams can raise up to $20,000 and get advice from and connections to some of the top folks in startups.

Speakers this year were: Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator; Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and author; Jason Fried, founder of 37 Signals; Tony Hsieh, CEO at Zappos; Greg McAdoo, partner at Sequoia Capital; Biz Stone & Ev Williams, founders at Twitter; Paul Bucheit, founder of FriendFeed and creator of Gmail; Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus and creator of Lotus 1-2-3; and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook.

Paul Graham (Founder of Y Combinator)

Paul Graham started off the morning rehashing his list from the essay What Startups Are Really Like.

Greg McAdoo (Partner at Sequoia Capital)

McAdoo showed up as the lone VC in the group of presenters and gave practical advice on getting users and pitching VCs.

• Prefers personal introductions rather than pitches out of the blue.  He recommended contacting the founders of companies he’s funded and asking them to introduce you to him.  Left the audience with email address (mcadoo at sequoiacap dot com), however.
• Do your research on who you raise money from (due diligence goes both ways).
• Focus on disruptive market opportunities.  ”The cost of penetrating an incumbent market is higher during a recession.”
• Sequoia wants big markets.  They’ve funded the likes of Apple, Cisco, Google, PayPal, and the list goes on.

Jason Fried (Founder at 37 Signals)

I’m personally biased  toward thinking a lot of Jason’s talk since I identify with most of the stuff he’s already said elsewhere. First off, contrary to the whole idea of Y Combinator, Jason’s a fan of self-funding startups. He highlighted two differences between bootstrapped companies and funded companies, i.e., a bootstrapped company looks to make money while a funded company looks to spend money. Furthermore, Jason says being a bootstrapped company helps you get used to making money in the first place. It’s a skill. On that note, Fried said, “The more you practice, the less difficult it will be.”

More high points:

• “Planning is guessing, so then you can take it a little less seriously.”  He’s never been a fan of business plans or extensive design documents.
• “Software has no edges–software is not affected by physics. Nothing pushes back and it will start expanding over time. We (developers) need to be the edges. Keep things out of your software.”  This goes back to 37 Signals’s book, Getting Real–specifically, Start with No (Make features work hard to be implemented).
• “You can’t make just one thing: everything you make has a by-product.” 37 Signals has made a juicy side business out of selling what they know and most of the time that content comes straight from their blog. He gave the example of sawdust and how it used to be a waste product. Now, it makes up plywood and the bedding for guinea pig cages. Everything has a by-product. Monetizing that stuff goes back to making money and how “the more you practice, the less difficult it will be.”
• “USEFUL > Innovative”  Don’t put something out just because it’s cool, but really doesn’t add any value.
• “Someone anointing you to be successful is bullsh-t!” Explains why he didn’t take investment in 37 Signals until much later in the game.
• “Failure is not a rite of passage.”  You don’t necessarily have to fail.  Fried goes on further to say that, “What you learn from your mistakes is not as valuable as what you learn from your successes.”  Whether we’re talking about life or startups, I think he’s both right and wrong, i.e., my time in college is littered with failures that I learned more from and now appreciate more than if I’d been successful in those same situations.  Each case is different.
• On pricing, he asks the simple question, “Would I pay for it?”  That doesn’t help fully determine the price, but it’s a good way to figure out if you have something people would pay for.
• “Price forces you to be really damn good.”
• “People say 9/10 businesses fail, but what does that have to do with you? Those are their failures.”  I liked this as a kick in the head not to take too much to heart what people say about failure in business.  People like to scare with statistics, of course, but why not shoot to be the one that doesn’t fail?

Chris Anderson (Editor in Chief at Wired)

Anderson has really been a huge advocate lately of giving stuff away–not to the point of becoming a non-profit, but instead, offering free products in order to get people hooked enough to pay.  Obviously, it’s not a new idea, but it’s one startups have really come to embrace.  Fred Wilson coined the term freemium for that idea back in 2006.

In Anderson’s eyes, free users are not freeloaders.  Instead, free users are a way to expose apps to the widest possible audience.  The goal then, is to find a way to get people to pay for a better version of the app (or whatever is being sold) once they’ve fallen in love with the free version and need something it doesn’t offer but other paid versions do.

What will people pay for?  According to Anderson:

1. People will pay to save time.
2. People will pay to lower risk.
3. People will pay for things they love.
4. People will pay for status.
5. People will pay if you make them (once they’re hooked!).

Then, he launched into a list of freemium models.

1. Feature-limited: the free version is actually useful, but has some limitation that encourages power users to convert up to a more useful/flexible version.
2. Time-limited: really easy to do, but doesn’t encourage commitment since users get cut off after the trial period is over.
3. Capacity-limited: think storage services where you get 2GB or so for free and then once they’ve hooked you into storing that much, you upgrade to a higher capacity account.
4. Seat-limited: charge on a per user basis.  It’s easy to do, but encourages cheating.
5. Customer class-limited: easy to do, but hard to enforce.  Gave the example of Microsoft’s BizSpark which gives away all of Microsoft’s software free to startups that are writing software, privately held, less than three years old, and generating less than $1M in revenue annually.

Anderson wrote the book Free: the Future of a Radical Price and the audiobook is available here (285MB Zip file)…for free-99.

Paul Bucheit (Founder of FriendFeed, creator of Gmail)

Bucheit winged things a bit and gave his life story.  I was most moved by his advice: “It’s important to do things that make you feel uncomfortable.”  Cliché, but I figure some of the most basic truths always seem that way after a while.

Biz Stone & Ev Williams (Founders of Twitter)

True to form, the guys took questions from the audience via Twitter after going on for a few minutes about how Twitter got started, technical issues (it’s a joy to see the Fail Whale a lot less these days!), and things they’ve found to be surprising about Twitter.  Biz talked about being surprised about how Twitter influences people’s movements at times, i.e., a guy tweeted about one bar being too crowded at SXSW and that he was going to another bar.  Thanks to having tweeted about it, everyone crowded into the bar he was going to.

Mark Zuckerberg (Founder of Facebook)

His session was an interview format with Jessica Livingston rather than prepared remarks.  A lot of his session was rehashing how Facebook got started, etc.  Zuckerberg dropped a few gems later, though, including:

• “Eventually you get judged not by how things look, but the value you provide to people.”
• “The biggest risk you can take is no risk at all.”
• “Don’t make the mistake of trying to be too perfect.”
• Figure out what users want more of from what they’re already doing on the site.

Mitch Kapor (Designer of Lotus 1-2-3)

Talked about company culture and how startups can be horrible in that regard, i.e., research shows that startups have more public humiliation and bullying than regular companies.  Kapor also emphasized the idea of a “Meritocracy vs. a Mirrortocracy.”  He thinks that startups often confuse talent with “people like us.”  In some respects, that’s a whole ‘nother post, but for another day.  Kapor also implored founders to “Walk the walk yourself–mind the gap between stated values and actual practice.”  There’s a Wall Street joke in there somewhere…

Tony Hsieh (CEO of Zappos)

Hsieh talked about customer service, company culture, core values, and positive psychology.  His talk was different in that he deeply emphasized the soft aspects of running a business instead of the usual pontifications on just profits.  On vision, he said: “What you’re thinking, think bigger.”  Then, he asked the audience, “What is your goal in life?”  and “What would you be happy doing for the next 10 years even if it didn’t make a dime?”  On values, he talked about the concept of “committable values,” as in “values that you’re willing to hire and fire people based on.”  For Hsieh, at the end of the day, Zappos is not about delivering shoes, but about “delivering happiness.”

Finally, he recommended a few books:  Good to Great and Tribal Leadership (the audiobook is available for free from Zappos’ website).  Also, Zappos publishes a book about company culture.  Gave his email address (ceo at zappos dot com) which you can use to ask for a free copy.  Slides from his talk are available here.

Mark Pincus (CEO of Zynga)

Pincus was the last up and gave a talk about being a world-class CEO.  Some high points:

• “Who gives a sh-t what your valuation is–only your ego!”  This one hit home not because of having to worry about a valuation right now (I struggled for while myself with how valuable I thought anything I’d done might be), but because it reinforced the idea of not doing things for that very reason.  CEOs and big heads don’t mix.
• “An internet treasure is something where consumers can’t imagine what life was like before it.” Google and most things they put out come to mind here.  Strive to create something of that calibre.

Overall, it was a great event that served as a nice pep-talk en masse.  And funniest of all, the peer pressure is building up to move to San Francisco, but we’ll see what happens.

Editor’s Note:  Twitter and Y Combinator just announced a partnership for start-ups using the API, they have a similar partnership with Justin.tv, check out the full coverage about the RFS (Request for Start-up’s) and RFS extension over at TechCrunch.

(Courtesy of Tyler New Media, BlackandMarriedwithKids.com)

Blogalicious Weekend makes it debut in Atlanta tonight with two of BlackWeb20.com’s best: founder/publisher Angela Benton and legal columnist Latoicha Givens. Both will join hundreds of female bloggers of color for the first event celebrating our unique presence in the blogosphere.

Angela will be seated as a panelist in the breakout session, Upgrade You: Taking Your Blog to the Next Level. And Latoicha will be seated on the panel, Possibilities and Pitfalls of Having YOU on the Net. Both sessions will take place on Saturday, October 10.

Authors Denene Millner and Nelson George will be there as well as corporate marketing reps and a few other surprise guests.

The conference closes on Sunday, October 11.

BlackWeb20.com isn’t sponsoring a “bring a buddy” bus trip to this conference and we’re not endorsing it, but have to admit that it is awfully smart. Huh? Watch the promo and take notes. This is our present and in the message conveyed in this video is our future.

I’m indulging my tech crush on Guy Kawasaki who talks to blogger Zadi Diaz about the beginnings and mechanism of Alltop.com. Guy (sigh) also discusses everything from his background in technology to the future of new media. I love his suggestions for PBS.

Quincy Jones is the cat who performed with some of the greatest names in music, produced some of the hottest music for some of the hottest musicians; most recently and notably Michael Jackson. He is the founder of Vibe magazine who found the perfect formula of bringing together multiple genres of music with a focus on the vibe and less on the difference. Do you think I’m a fan? I am. Yet I have to admit that he just earned a zillion cool points for keynoting at SxSW and demonstrating that older doesn’t mean antiquated and out of touch. He gets it and I like that. Listen to him dish on Napster and the future of music in the digital age.  “Baby, the train is on the way…” (Watch the video to see what that means.)

The DJ and radio host (KCRW) credited with jump starting the careers of Van Hunt, Dwele, Jill Scott, Kelis and Gnarls Barkley and creating the genre “urban alternative,” Garth Trinidad will be speaking at Digital Media Wire’s Digital Music Forum West in Los Angeles, October 8-9, at the historic Hotel Roosevelt.

Mr. Trinidad will join over 300 senior decision-makers from record labels, music publishers, producers and distributors, technology companies, wireless companies, rights organizations, industry bodies, radio, advertising, attorneys, artists, investors and venture capitalists. The two-day event is the industry’s only comprehensive digital music conference focused on the evolution and future of digital music.

M. C. Hammer (Stanley K. Burrell) has a return engagement at Harvard University on August 31 to keynote the Gravity Summit. This isn’t the first time the multi-platinum selling entertainer has spoken at the Ivy League school. He talked to students at the Harvard Business School about social media and Twitter in February.

As of this writing, M.C. Hammer or @mchammer has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter. He has used his Twitter account to tweet (or post) about everything from his family life to his reality show to his love for God. And he has been known to micro-blog his autobiography. All of which has made him a social media darling and a welcome (read: influential) sight in Silicon Valley. And obviously, at Harvard.

Gravity Summit endeavors to bridge the gap between new media marketing tools and the business community. The summit is a one day event held at the Harvard Faculty Club and not affiliated with the university in any way. If you have an extra $439, and a hankering to hear M. C. Hammer deliver a keynote address, then try to attend. If not, then CNN.com/Live will multi-stream the event starting at 9 a.m. ET on August 31. ($439+airfare/travel or CNN.com/Live?!)

Purewire™ secures business and social interactions on the Web, keeping the Web a place where users can be productive and safe. Purewire is the only vendor that addresses the complete Web security threat landscape, providing unique algorithms and scalable services to protect users from malicious people, places and things on the Web™. Better than we could explain it ourselves check out this video of Dr. Paul Judge, CTO of Purewire, at the DEMOfall ‘09 conference showing a demo of a tool his company created called Purewire Trust. Check it out below:

(via The Digerati Tube @BlackDigerati)

The 2^nd annual Blogging While Brown Conference, held at the University Center in Chicago, IL, was an extraordinary gathering of participants from diverse backgrounds and a wide range of technological skill levels with many ideas. Though the participant’s backgrounds were diverse, they gathered with one common goal; to discuss the issues affecting bloggers of color. The event, founded by Gina McCauley the founder of What About our Daughters, and Michelle Obama Watch, brought together speakers with different levels of expertise to provide tips, tools and insight on a wide array of topics including branding, creative and design, monetization, and industry trends and research. Speakers included; Hajj E. Flemings, founder of Brand Camp, Angel Laws founder of Concreteloop.com, and Eric Easter, Chief of Digital Strategy for Johnson Publishing just to name a few.

New to this year’s conference was the Beginning Blogger Bootcamp (BBB); an intensive workshop for those who have a desire to blog, but don’t know how. The bootcamp, taught by McCauley, touched on a range of topics for beginners including; how to post text, links, images, audio, and video; to intermediate topics including; the use of widgets, and gadgets, search engine optimization, podcasting and social networking. “The bootcamp was modeled after a class I taught for the Red Cross NAACP, right after Hurricane Ike.”, said McCauley. “Each participant received course materials, and laptops were provided for those who did not bring their own; because I believe that in order for you to learn it you must do it.”

After monitoring the tweet stream it seemed like one of the most popular speakers was Hajj Flemings. Fleming’s session on branding introduced such terms as Grustling (Grinding + Hustling = Grustling), and a list of memorable one liners including:

• If you’re the smartest person in your group, then you’re in the wrong group.
• Create quality content that is credible & creating quality contacts is paramount.
• The best time to start something was a year ago. The next best time is right now.

Another notable speaker was Naoko McCracken of Wordpress. Naoko, introduced the audience to Buddy Press, a Word Press plug-in that allows users to add social networking features to their blog. Gina was particularly excited, “I was just researching using Ning to add social networking features to my blog. Now I am really excited about trying Buddy Press”.

I spoke with multiple attendees who had nothing but high praises for this years’ conference. “The conference was great! It was intimate enough to allow some real, meaningful conversations and diverse enough (in experience) to learn some things from a lot of angles.” , says Fredric Mitchell of Bright Plum. Mitchell, a panelist and first time participant says, “…in all honesty, the conference benefits immensely from Gina’s personality… her admittance that she is a ‘do-er’ helped keep the focus that this isn’t a conference about airing out grievances or what minorities aren’t doing or covering…it’s about learning tools so that u can tackle any problem and make it an opportunity”.

As for the future of Blogging While Brown; Gina announced the development of two small spin-offs of the conference; one on the west coast focused on Accessing Capital and one the east coast focused on Social Justice and Community Organizing. The courses, which she hopes to start in 2010, will accommodate approx 50 people,  and will focus on teaching the users the “hard-skills” necessary to move black and brown blogs to the next level. Locations and dates have not been finalized for these and future Blogging While Brown Events, though we will attempt to keep you posted as soon as plans are released. One thing’s for sure though, we can’t wait!

If you’re upset about missing this year’s BWB, don’t fret, the conference was recorded and is available at Next Generation Web.

Shout out to all the blogs represented at the conference:

• 5 and a Possible
• A Buzz in Your Ear
• Acts of Faith in Love and Life
• Afrobella
• All About Race
• Around Harlem
• Around NYC
• Awesomely Luvvie
• Beckie Has a Blog
• Beyond-isms
• Black Gyrl Cancer Slayer
• Black PR
• Blacks Gone Geek
• Blank Bare Clean
• Blog Not War
• blogHer
• Bronzeville Change
• Brother Bartell
• Brown and Bridal
• But You’re A Girl
• Carlos in DC
• Change You Can See
• Chartreuse
• Color of Change
• Concrete Loop
• Consumer Blast
• Cyber PR Urban
• D Jones Productions
• Dallas South Blog
• Dante Lee
• Dragon Fly
• Ebony Jet
• Flack Me
• Fresh Manna of the Day
• Global Wire
• Global Wire
• Goddess Intellect
• Hajj Flemings
• Harmonic Leadership
• Haute Muslim
• Have a Wonderful
• I Hate My Developer
• IT Empowers U
• Jack and Jill Politics
• Jamal Street Journal
• Kiamsha.com:That Which Awakens Me
• Listen to Leon
• Live Life Posh
• Locs and Dreams
• Love a Black Woman
• Marty Blogs
• Megans Minute
• Michelle Obama Watch
• Miss Theda
• Mocha Mom 365
• Monroe Anderson
• Naomi Christine
• Pams House Blend
• Peruanista
• Philena
• Photo Solitude
• Pocket Book Protest
• Project New Era
• Queen Tahj
• Save the Internet
• See Your Worth
• Small World View
• Social Media Socialite
• South Shore Chamber
• TATV
• The Joba Group
• The Smak
• The SuperSpade
• Theo Talks
• Urban Beauty
• Urban Science
• UWISHUNU
• We Are Black Women
• What About Our Daughters
• Woman Body and Soul
• YBP Guide