A founding father of the WWW, originator of the tag.
Talked about the wellspring of creativity that came out of the birth of the Internet, growing a company like Netscape, hiring, and how to build a company.
Regarding hiring and building a culture, it's like baking a cake you have to put in the right ingredients at the right time
"You can't just pour the sugar top top at the end."
He believes in the technical co-founder. The skill-set required to be an engineer that transforms into an entrepreneur, then into a CEO, is amazing - recipe for success.
Being CEO is a learnable skill, much more so than being a founder or an engineer. You can learn on the fly.
Heroku is Lindenbaum's sixth venture. Background in Rails consulting.
Building something for developers is harder than building consumer stuff.
Making software has gotten more awesome over time. Better developer ergonomics, but the ease of deployment has not gotten better.
Heroku stepped into decrease the "suckage" (the technical term).
A "poka-yoke" is any device or process that prevents you from making mistakes. Heroku tried to build this into everything they make. Infrastructure is behind the scenes.
"Heroku like git push deployment" was the pivot. Provide an API. Speak to the target user - they still have code on their front page today.
They started to see lots of decomposition. Rather than individual apps you have layers as services. Center is a runtime, then you connect to backend services like: DB, caching, logging, billing, etc...
EC2 has enabled a new kind of architecture - since the ping times between EC2 boxes are so low it's as if the different apps are in the same rack when in fact they might be across the country.
Heroku modularized the service integrations as Add-ons. One-click integration.
Use the right tool for the job. For each problem, use the right language. Most developers are comfortable with multiple languages, or learning them.
Are you going to do more languages or what?
Well, yeah we are.
Ok, we want to buy you.
Being made fun of by Larry Ellison at Open World is basically the
highest honor there is.
Start more cloud services, it's not easy but it's worth it.
- Founders
- Ideas
- Timing
Now, iconic brands, many legendary founders. Then, they started out as unknowns, underdogs.
Larry Page noticed that citations always pointed back to some seminal work. The idea for page rank, finding the relative importance and relevance documents through all the noise.
Recognized the need to connect networks.
Reid Hoffman, into social before Facebook. Hiring is incredibly important, and professional network can increase quality in hiring.
Omar Hamoui, failed twice and went back to business school to figure out why. Realized the lack of economy, the lack of way to acquire customers for developers. Premium was too hard, too much friction/infrastructure.
Energized, democratized entrepreneurship.
Unique and compelling. Pressure test the idea.
Obvious vs. Unique or Novel Lots of competitors vs. Handful of niche players Easy to build vs. Turing Award 50% improvement vs. 10x better Too Early vs. First Mover
Recession, is it too late, Internet has come and gone? Sequoia thinks it's an excellent time to start a company.
- Costs have dropped 90%
- Recession is a boon for recruiting
- Mobile will get to 1B in half the time of PCs and Internet
From such TV shows as "That 70's Show" and "Two and Half Men" AGrade, angel investing
Plays an idiot on TV but started as a mechanical engineer learning FORTRAN.
Dropped out of school and quit his job making Cheerios to become a model, got into TV, then went full circle and got interested in technology again to solve people's problems.
Don't lead with the problem and the way to solve it, monitization, jumping to the effect.
If you want to be a real entrepreneur don't be the effect, you have to be the cause.
Scientists find out about problems, engineers solve them.
If you want to be the next Mark Zuckerberg the best you'll ever be is second place.
Mark Zuckerberg will always be a better Mark Zuckerberg than you.
Entertaining story about Carl Fisher (Miami, Indy 500, etc...) - moral is don't try to be someone else, don't try to make a billion dollars - have vision, uncover something people need.
Ashton Kutcher is in the business of connecting people, sharing, helping good people succeed.
Automattic, WordPress
The first 100k are the hardest & the two times I saw PG speak
WordPress based on b2, PHP/MySQL, open-source.
Be your most passionate user. Be excited about what you make.
To make something great you either need to be or be sleeping with someone who uses your
product every day.
1.0 is the lonliest number - blog link.
Apostrophes and quotes vs. straight quotes.
The first version of something might be kinda lame. But ship it quick and iterate and you quickly get something awesome. It's important to get things out to real users.
Reduce the cognitive burden on your users. Provide good defaults and make changing them easy and relevant.
Consider your incentives and how they effect your product. Moveable type had no incentive to make install easy because they charged for it. WordPress just made it easy so people would stop bugging them.
If you can't describe what you do in five works, you need to simplify.
Part of being your own most passionate user is feeling other's pain in the product. Live feedback is invaluable.
Make support@foo.com an alias for everybody@foo.com.
The thing I learned at CNET is that I don't mind being on the Titanic, but I at
least wanted to be steering it.
...
Q: The early days of Zynga...
A: It's hard to really tell when your start up actually starts, it sort of grows organically. In the case of Zynga either acquiring or hiring games and developers.
Q: What/when did you start building?
A: Tribe did not fail fast. Stepped back and tried to figure out what to do. A love for creating consumer products and services. By the time you've built a product you're invested. Instead get a large captive audience, then figure out what the product is. Pincus spent a year trying to buy CNET.
Games are fun. Facebook announced the platform launch and Pincus had found his audience.
...Some ranting...
Q: Bringing it back to the poker game, how'd you get your users?
A: Value a single engineering day, don't build the wrong product. Keep your users interested in using your product.
After reading thousands of applications, it appears that for many the desire to start a startup precedes the idea.
Here's what you should do instead
The best ideas come from people trying to solve problems, the best thing is to find a problem that you yourself had.
Look for problems that need fixing
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Some confusing back-end analytics/metrics idea - it's not MixPanel because it is painful. Custom reporting platform.
How can you create an abstraction of something specific?
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Health records in the cloud, by reducing the cost of health records keeping you reduce the cost of health care
Who are you going to target? What are you going to do?
Is it easy to use?
It's going to be easy to use, does anyone ever make anything hard to use intentionally.
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Facebook pages for booking experiences (yoga classes, cooking classes, etc..)
Why would someone put their bookings on Facebook, social media?
How much would they pay?
PG seriously suggests doing something else.
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A dating website for setting up dates between friends.
This has been thought of before, why doesn't it exist?
The social graph wasn't accessible.
You know what you should do actually, here's how you beat the chicken and egg problem, just make a tool for matchmakers.
Q & A
Q: Where does the willingness to break things come from?
A: The biggest risk is not taking risks.
Q: Tell us about early on technical problem, bottleneck.
A: Biggest problem of early web content was scale, the same content to lots of people. For social networks the content is different for everyone. In a company where you have the same people thinking about technical and product challenges all the way down the stack is important.
(Idea: have a brown bag for mobile designers)
Never went into it to build a company.
A company is the best vehicle in the world to align people to make a change.
Q: What's the difference between running a company of 50 people and one of 3000?
A: You never do the same thing twice in Engineering, you abstract it. Once you abstract code, you abstract people into teams, and so on. Management is decomposition and abstraction.
This leads to clear definitions and clear distinctions. If you don't do this then you end up with confusion.
Q: What's so important about having a growth group, instead of it being implicit?
A: Don't leave it to chance to scale the company, make it explicit about how you are going to grow and scale the company. Do you centralize or decentralize? Does each group have a marketing department, or do you create a group with a core competency. In this case it's centralized.
Q: Once thing that was surprising about the growth department?
A: No good analytics about how to keep users engaged. They found a critical number of at least 10 friends. So the first part of the Facebook experience is to get at least 10 friends.
Q: How to turn down acquisition offers?
A: One main phase. If you don't want to sell your company don't get into a process where you start talking about selling your company. So Zuckerberg only kept people who were in it for the long term. It's not about waiting to become more valuable, it's about controlling the company.
Q: Raising money, how did you pitch Facebook?
A: Barely remembers, but agrees that it happened. VCs aren't necessarily bad, just make sure you have board members that are aligned with you.
Q: What surprised you?
A: Lots of surprises. There's a couple of things out of the thousands that you need to focus on. You can be bad at many things and learn along the way, but as long as you focus on providing value to your users you'll get along.
There will be someone bigger than you trying to build your product, but you have time. You don't really get judged by mistakes, you get judged by the good things.
Q: Why are you Mark Zuckerberg? Why are you so great?
A: I don't know lets go on to the next question.
Q: ...
A: I remember...it's worrisome there's a desire to start a company rather than build a product. Do stuff you are passionate about. The companies that work are the ones that people really care about.
Q: Was there a wow moment when you were working on Facebook?
A: No, it just kept going. But one of the big things was building out a developer platform. The story is the apps and things built on Facebook. The next five years of social networking are going to be what are all the things you can build now that people are connected.
It'll be a losing strategy to not build something on a social graph.
Q: Was there a major screw up you'd do differently?
A: You get a feeling from SV that you have to be out here. But it's not the only place to be.
2004: Help Government combat terrorism while protecting civil liberties
...
Some canned company story, amusing, but not great...
Serial entrepreneur, companies are made of their founders.
- Always look for a co-founder, it's lonely at the top. Paypal was successful with a co-founder, Slide a little less successful without one.
The job of a great co-founder is to tell you to be alright. Emotional and practical support, that's what's important. Not having that can be detrimental.
Counterpart: make sure you respect your co-founder and share the same values, even if they are impressive on paper.
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If you need to fire someone, just do it now. How: "I'd like to ask you to resign."
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Don't confuse hard and value, walking through walls is difficult but not valuable.
If you have a hard problem you want to solve, if it's not of value to anyone, don't do it.
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Don't let your office be a dump.
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Don't be be a underpants gnome. The middle part in the underpants model has to be tied together to become a business. Lack of clarity, inability to condense vision into a strategy.
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Nothing matters in running companies other than passion for the product. Don't let fear of failure, fear of judgment, or a desire to impress stop you or affect you.
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Ignore your mistakes, focus on the things you are good at.
Who, what how?
...
Everyone starts out clueless, lots of big companies started by young first-time entrepreneurs.
Think big, but these ideas and ambitions usually start out small.
Inexperience can provide a new perspective.
At MIT your files are on a central server. Drew graduates and now he's got to carry around a USB drive. Forgot his USB drive once, started writing some code to solve the problem.
This includes the non-technical stuff. You need to hire - this gets complicated. Fortunately it's much easier to be an engineer and learn the business stuff than the other way around.
Read books, learn design, read founder stories. Learn a little bit about a lot.