Startup School

I attended this crazy one-day Startup School event organized by YCombinator guys at Stanford today. It was fun. Lot of different views. It is always nice to see 300 geeks in a single room.

Here are my notes :

Mark Fletcher of bloglines fame mentioned that they keep a lot of stuff as flat files. Everyone wants to provide google like quick response. Memcached is good but it doesn't work and scale for new Web 2.0 based solutions. So cache the flat file and dispatch it ASAP is the new trick. Replication is also easy with flat files. Databases are good if data is huge and only a subset is required at the client but for new use-cases like CMS, Wikis and Blogs flat files are better.

Ann Winblad mentioned that the point to consider while going for the kill is to decide
whether your technology is a pain killer or a vitamin.

Caterina Fake described the story behind Flickr. Caterina and others were trying to create a multi-player game under the ludicorp banner and the backend team was slow to match the front end development speed. The front end team had a lot of extra cycles so they went ahead and created Flickr. Flickr turned out to be a hit so they decided to pursue it full time. Talk about clear ideas !

Om Malik said people in the tech community should thank the cubicle culture. Companies like youtube are getting extra traffic during the after lunch (1:00 - 2:30) hours because people don't like to work after lunch.

Chris Sacca used the opportunity for another google recruiting pitch.
Yes we know that free food fosters creativity. People can have food and discuss new ideas.
I wish he had touched the Google float controversy !

The moment of Zen was a new founders answer to the question
"What would you like to correct if you get to start again"
He said : "I would like to use LISP"

30% of the crowd got the joke. This can only happen in Silicon Valley !