Rough Draft

Startup School 2006

Josh was out here this past weekend to attend Startup School. We went to a reception on Friday evening at the Y Combinator offices in Mountain View. Talked to quite a few interesting people there, including the founders of Reddit. Also saw a demo of a couple robots these two guys have been working on for the past 5 years. The one robot was self balancing, i.e. you could push it with quite a bit of force and it would roll/lean back and then return to its initial position. It also had a functional hand that could be controller with something similar to a PowerGlove connected to a computer. This capability was demonstrated by taking bottles out of people's hands. Pretty cool stuff.

Saturday was the actual "school" at Stanford. This was the first time I'd been to the Stanford campus and while I didn't really see very much of it, it seemed like a really nice campus. The stand out talks for me were Paul Graham, Tim O'Reilly, and Chris Sacca. I also enjoyed listening to a variety of founders of some pretty big websites including Joe Kraus (founder of Excite and JotSpot), Joshua Schachter (founder of del.icio.us), and Caterina Fake (co-founder of Flickr). Probably the most inspirational aspect of the day was at the very end when a bunch of the members of the Y Combinator Winter Founder's Program took the stage to answer questions. I recognized several of them from the Startup School in Boston, and there was just something very real and inspirational about seeing people that not more than a few months ago made the leap and actually made the whole startup thing a reality.

Needless to say, I left feeling quite inspired. I still don't see myself leaving my current job for a least a year or two, but the idea of doing a startup with a couple friends at some point in the future is growing ever more appealing.