garry’s posthaven

It was a pleasure and privilege to once again photograph Y Combinator's Startup School 2009 yesterday at UC Berkeley. An assemblage of several hundred awesome engineer/hackers and future founders got together to hear the most successful entrepreneurs of the computing and Internet revolution speak about what it takes and how to get there.

Funny story: I sat in the front row of SS08 last year. YC applications were due the following Monday (just as the latest application cycle is due this coming Monday). Was not a founder then, just a designer/engineer with a sparkle in my eye. I grabbed a seat in the front row and took photos of all the speakers from last year, (posted on my Posterous here). I posted my photos on Hacker News. YC partners Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston saw the photos... later they told me it played a part in helping us get selected for interviews out of the likely thousand or more apps for that batch! We accepted YC funding for Summer of 2008, launched 3 weeks into the program, raised an angel round in Oct 08, and so you're reading this now on a startup of our own.

I guess you have to give a little to get a little. We feel greatly appreciative of being a part of YC, so I couldn't think of a better thing to do than to take photos once again. If you were there at Berkeley yesterday, I was that guy with the white Canon L lens running around the stage. ;-)

The amazing speakers included...

Chris Anderson
Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine

Paul Buchheit
Founder, FriendFeed; Creator of GMail

Jason Fried
Founder, 37signals

Paul Graham
Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb

Tony Hsieh
CEO, Zappos; Founder, LinkExchange

Mitchell Kapor
Partner, Kapor Capital; Founder Lotus

Greg McAdoo
Partner, Sequoia Capital

Biz Stone
Founder, Twitter

Mark Pincus
Founder, Zynga; Founder, Tribe; Founder, SupportSoft; Founder Freeloader

Evan Williams
Founder, Blogger; Founder Twitter

Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Facebook

Want more photos? Check out the full 85 picture full gallery at my smugmug. That gallery includes full 12 megapixel images suitable for print. You may use these images with attribution link back to my blog. Thanks friends!

A dear friend Dan Haubert, cofounder at Ticketstumbler, passed away this week, and we are all left with questions and anguish. When we first met Dan, it was last summer during our Y Combinator experience. He was the awesomely friendly, hilarious guy who brought 6-packs of beer to our weekly dinners. He was quick to smile and share his deep insights into everything there was to know about business.

We made a lot of friends that summer in Cambridge, MA. Dan was a lynchpin of our motley band of entrepreneurs. He left his mark on all of us, and for that, we are grateful to have known him.

Dan and I would often talk about how awesome Mark Cuban was, and I remember thinking, given time, Dan may well eclipse him as a businessman. I am shattered to think this will never happen.

Dan, please find peace.

via The Startup Guru: Y Combinator's Paul Graham, Inc Magazine
(see infographic, The Family Graham)

It was a privilege and an honor to be included in the magazine, especially with so many great fellow YC alums.

A friend told me recently that it was somehow fitting that I get quoted in a business mag saying "Holy Crap!" *grin*

Full text of the article here and PDF (Thanks Zack!)

Y Combinator applications are due on March 18th (EDIT, was pushed back to 25th) for the latest funding class, and I figure better late then never to post some advice. It's been an incredible journey for us at Posterous. YC gave us an incredible push, and we're always looking for ways to give back to the community.

I thought I'd pull together six specific thoughts that would be helpful to startup teams applying for this or any future round of Y Combinator. Keep in mind I'm not affiliated with YC (just an alum) and the ideas below are merely my own suggestions. Here they are.

1) You are raising money.
YC teams span the gamut. Some people are just out of college, and others have a lot of experience. If you have less experience, take some time to really realize what you're doing when you're applying to YC. You are raising money for your startup. This isn't like applying for a summer program, or getting an internship. You're commiting yourself to building a serious business.

Part of raising money is realizing you're committing your life (or at least foreseeable future) to returning investors their money, plus a healthy return. That's the entire point -- it's not a grant. We do startups because we want to create massive value, reward ourselves and reward the people who help us create that value.

2) Solve a hair on fire problem, or do it better than someone else.

Great hackers get caught up in technology, but technology doesn't create value in and of itself. Technology is only useful for solving people's problems.

This is the basis for why Paul Buchheit's oft-quoted line is true: Startups can often just add "done right" to any other business and have it work out fine. "Done right" means you're making something better/cheaper/faster than something else out there that already creates value.

The best startups don't just make something right -- they solve a hair-on-fire problem. Avid Technologies, founded by Bill Warner (one of our investors), is an example of a hair-on-fire problem. Prior to nonlinear editing software, editing videos was such an error prone and difficult process that when Avid was released, a billion dollar industry was born.

If your startup doesn't quite fall under the "hair on fire" or "done right" categories, then you're going to have that much harder a time explaining to investors and customers why you're important, or even surviving. Yes, the idea matters.

3) Have a capable team
The ideal startup team (regardless of YC) requires the following trinity of skills:

• Great Coders. You just need to be able to create it on your own.
• Great Designers. You have to be able to make it solve user problems, and make it look damn good too.
• Great Hustlers. You have to be able to get the product out there and in front of people.

Throughout your team, you should have each of these important aspects locked up. Be realistic with yourself about what you and your teammates are good at. You are getting married to your cofounders -- you're literally getting out onto a life raft in the ocean with them, and you're going to need to work with them (and well) to survive.

Doing a startup without a kickass team who can really clean up on each of the three skills is going to war without guns, ammo, training, or all of the above. 

4) Write well.

This should be obvious, but PG's essays are an indication of what you should be striving to do in your application. It should be crisp and articulate, and to the point.

One way to do this is to actually write every last idea down -- write copiously. Then edit. Edit mercilessly until there is not a single word you could remove without losing significant meaning.

5) A little help from friends.
You've got mentors, right? Get as many trustworthy and intelligent eyeballs on your written application as you can. This goes for any application for anything, really. More eyeballs will always help you flesh out your concepts, spot weak links and strengthen your case.

Email founders of YC companies, or founders of any company, to get feedback. We're here to help -- someone helped us.

6) What are you going to do if you don't get in?
You've got to keep working on the startup no matter what. Realize that you don't need anyone to give you a permission slip to create your own startup.

Good luck to all the applicants, and I can't wait to see/hear about your future successes.

I met Brian, Joe, and Nathan, the founders behind airbnb.com recently through the YC grapevine. They are total user experience/design badasses. And they also help people find cheap places to crash with locals all over the world. Hosts get to rent out a spare bedroom or a couch and get spare cash, and travelers get a great deal, safe place to stay, and often times an awesome local to show them around town.

Check this out. This afternoon, I was looking for a place to crash in Austin for SXSW and actually almost booked this place near downtown. Great deal, and a great location. But I got distracted and didn't book it, even though I did make it to the booking screen.

Just now, I received an email from them...

I can click on "continue the booking process" to jump right into the same flow I was in before. Brilliant! Why doesn't Orbitz or Travelocity or even Kayak.com hook me up with a) history, and b) email reminders, and c) total extreme convenience of jumping back to where I was? Because they don't hustle. AirBed & Breakfast hustles.

They're the guys behind Obama O's and Cap'n McCains, which incidentally helped them bootstrap and self-fund their venture... which by the way, actually makes money, and has made money from Day One.

Hustle + great design + great business model makes airbnb.com destined for some incredible success. I know I probably won't be booking a hotel again anytime soon, especially when traveling for fun.

Ivan Kirigin (founder of Tipjoy) recently posted his rescuetime graph. 1,600 hours logged -- now that is a lot of work being done. I can attest as well -- the Y Combinator 3 month session is a time of incredible productivity.  Also, I can't believe I spent 21 hours straight in front of a computer at some point this summer. That's like mad crazy "in the zone" coding. Oh, to be in the zone more often... I hope to be back there soon.

Everyone should go download RescueTime ASAP. It gives you cool graphs of how productive you are. (And signup for a Tipjoy while you're at it.)

Hat tip to Ivan