Here’s a summary of the more compelling tips given by several tech industry luminaries — including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, Sequoia Capital venture capitalist Greg McAdoo — at the Y Combinator Startup School event at Stanford this weekend.
The event attracted more than 650 aspiring entrepreneurs. Mark Coker, a VentureBeat contributing writer, was on hand and here are his notes.
FaceBook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Hire only young technical people
FaceBook’s founder and CEO, 22-year old Mark Zuckerberg, believes his social networking platform will push the world to be a more open place. Without doubt, FaceBook is a true phenomena. According to Zuckerberg, FaceBook has over 20 million registered users, serving 1.5 billion page views daily.
Judging from whispers among the audience, while people love the service and admire his accomplishments, many find Zuckerberg arrogant. A Google search on “mark zuckerberg” and “arrogant” yields about 675 results, but surely, there must be other Mark Zuckerbergs in the world. Or maybe not.
Maybe it’s part of his charm. He’s the cute boy-wonder robo-geek who is either oblivious to how he rubs people, or he doesn’t care because he’s smarter than us.
He stepped on the stage wearing his trademark Adidas sandals (he bought ten pairs before they were discontinued).
“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he stated. If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise.
“Young people are just smarter,” he said with a straight face. “Why are most chess masters under 30?” he asked. “I don’t know,” he answered. “Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family.” In the absence of those distractions, he says, you can focus on big ideologies. He added, “I only own a mattress.” Later: “Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what’s important.”
He said it’s important to hire mostly coders, even in the marketing department, so if they want to change something on the web site all they have to do is log into the back-end and change copy on the fly.
The value of having coders on staff, he elaborated, is that technology is highly leveraged. “You can create an app once and people can continue to use it.”
Zuckerberg stressed the importance of rapid application development and iterations. FaceBook ships new code every night, he says.
Several more times during the talk, he spoke of how an important part of his job was thinking about philosophies.
Someone in the audience asked how Zuckerberg balances the whole work and family thing. He answered that he works all the time, and besides, he said, his girlfriend is still in school at Harvard so he’s apparently not distracted by her too much. “But now she’s moving out here so we’ll see,” he added. Presumably, this the same girlfriend Zuckerberg was with when he reportedly shut off his cell phone, delaying acquisition talks with Yahoo for a week.
Paul Buchheit: Gmail’s creator shares startup advice
As Google’s 23rd employee, Paul Buchheit was the creator and mastermind behind Gmail, arguably one of Web 2.0’s first killer apps.
His advice to entrepreneurs was to redefine their measures of success. While financial reward is nice, aspiring entrepreneurs should first and foremost seek out risk-taking opportunities where they can learn. He said startups allow employees to take on projects for which they have no qualifications. He referenced his own multi-year assignment to Gmail as a perfect example.
Buchheit, no longer employed by Google, encouraged entrepreneurs to innovate where tech giants like Google are afraid to. He cited the enormous success of YouTube. Even though YouTube launched after Google Video, he said Google Video was a bad product because Google was politically afraid to offend its media partners.
Paul Graham Asks: What’s stopping you from starting a startup?
Paul Graham made his fortune selling his ecommerce platform Viaweb to Yahoo for $49 million in 1998.
More recently, he has become something of a 21st century messiah for tech company founders. His numerous essays about tech startup strategy, along with his work as a founding partner of Y Combinator, have allowed him to influence a new post-bubble generation of software programmers. Some entrepreneurs are said to listen to recorded copies of his speeches over and over again in an attempt to internalize his gift.
Over the last few years, Graham has encountered a few prospective founders who were unwilling to accept his teachings.
His Startup School presentation answered those objections (VentureBeat has paraphrased):
Concern: Am I too young?
Answer: Don’t worry.
Concern: I’m too inexperienced.
Answer: Do it anyway.
Concern: I’m not sure I’m smart enough.
Answer: If you’re smart enough to worry about that, you’re smart enough to start a successful startup.
Concern: I appreciate the predictability of a regular job.
Answer: Envision yourself as a medieval serf who will till the same soil for the rest of your life. Mind numbing, right?
PayPal Founder Max Levchin: Imagine him as a 15-year old girl
Max Levchin was a co-founder of PayPal, which was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Today, he’s founder and CEO of Slide.com, a service that reaches 50 million people per day with its hosted images and slideshows.
Levchin offered attendees a crash course in product management. Product management, he says, is 85% user interface and 15% channeling the user.
For user interface, Levchin told the audience to measure how their visitors interact with the sites. Slide.com tracks mouse clicks, mouse overs, abandonment rates, the funnel, and more. Levchin and his team mine the data for intelligence that helps guide future iterations of the site.
For channeling the user, Levchin says founders must step inside the minds of their target customers. In Levchin’s case, he says he must imagine himself as a 15-year-old girl with attention deficit disorder who’s looking for digital bling to dress up her MySpace or Zanga web page, while at the same time she’s chewing gum, talking on the phone, instant messaging with five friends, listening to music, and twirling her fingers through her hair.
Levchin cautioned his techie audience to keep their customers in mind and not go overboard with technology for technology’s sake. He pointed to the early social networking site, Friendster, which lost critical momentum when it ran into scaling problems because of a “cool” feature that calculated friend trees, and caused page load times of up to a minute. MySpace.com, by contrast, was successful because it cared less about technology and more about the user experience.
As a final word of product development advice, Levchin encouraged founders to think about the Bible’s seven deadly sins - especially greed, sloth, envy, pride and gluttony. These characteristics, he said, describe many of the primal motivations for users.
Ali and Hadi Partovi: Brotherly super duo provide tips
For those who say lightning never strikes twice, they haven’t met the Partovi twins. Ali founded LinkExchage, which was acquired in 1998 by Microsoft for $250 million. Hadi founded TellMe, recently acquired by Microsoft for a rumored $800 million. The brothers now jointly run the music discovery service iLike, and its popular independent music web site, GarageBand.
The Partovi brothers’ presentation focused on the do’s and don’ts of startup success.
They said the best businesses are easily scalable, so that a doubling of revenues won’t require a doubling of expenses.
Founders should create naturally viral businesses, like the invitation automation service eVite.com, in which one user’s use of the service causes others to use it.
The sites should also exhibit network effects, so as the number of customers increases, the overall value to all customers increases.
The brothers encouraged founders to listen closely to their customers, and cited online shoe seller Zappos.com, as a strong example of a company which cares about customer experience. Zappos requires all new employees, even senior executives, to man customer service phones for at least four weeks as part of their training.
The brothers warned founders to maintain a razor sharp focus on their company’s primary purpose. Ideas are a dime a dozen, they said. Founders should pick one thing and do it well. They cited eBay’s acquisition of Skype as an endeavor that could spread the company too thin, and distract it from its main auction business.
They said companies must make hiring a top priority, and should cultivate and protect their company culture. Perhaps just as important, founders should learn to quickly fire bad hires, because a single bad hire can poison morale.
Lotus Founder Mitch Kapor: Don’t forget culture and diversity
Over his 30+ year career, Mitch Kapor has shown an uncanny knack for identifying disruptive waves of technology innovation early.
He created Lotus Development, one of the first spreadsheet companies. He was an early investor in UUNet, one of the first Internet service providers, as well as in Real Networks and Linden Lab, operator of Second Life.
Kapor also stressed the importance of creating a great company culture. He said founders set the culture, and it’s important to understand every action or inaction of the founders sends a message to employees. Hire great people, embrace diversity and resist trying to fit every employee into the same cookie-cutter mold, he said.
Kapor, who once worked at Valley VC firm, Accel Partners, advised entrepreneurs to tread cautiously with venture capitalists, and to understand where their interests are aligned and where they diverge.
Venture funds typically invest in a portfolio of 30 companies. They expect one or two big winners to supply the majority of the portfolio’s returns. Kapor says this can lead VCs to pressure their portfolio companies to go for the home run and risk striking out completely, when more sensible logic might dictate swinging for a single or a double instead.
Sequoia Capital’s Greg McAdoo: What VCs want in a start-up
Sequoia Capital is one of Silicon Valley’s oldest and most respected venture firms, investing in 550 companies, including Google, Yahoo, and Cisco.
McAdoo stressed the importance of clarity of purpose. Founders should articulate their vision for the company in a single sentence. When Cisco approached Sequoia, for example, they didn’t say, “We build routers.” Instead, they said, “Cisco Systems networks networks.”
McAdoo underscored the importance of the founders understanding their audience. He said good founders also exhibit intellectual honesty about the strengths and limitations of their technology, their management team and their competitors.
McAdoo said it’s impossible for a single company to create major waves of technology disruption, but stressed founders’ businesses should be built to ride the waves. Founders should also identify the trajectories of other trends that will impact the business, whether technology or political (such as likely changes to copyright law).
McAdoo says Sequoia prefers to invest in companies whose target customers have their “hair on fire,” meaning they’re desperate for an immediate solution, and don’t care if the fire hose comes in red or purple.
Asked if Sequoia funds companies outside of major tech regions, such as the Midwest, McAdoo said yes, but the firm prefers its funded companies locate in either Silicon Valley or Boston’s 128 corridor. Hiring is easier in the tech hot spots, and the support ecosystems are better adapted to meet the unique needs of tech startups.
Mark Coker is a contributing writer for VentureBeat. He’s founder of Dovetail Public Relations, a Silicon Valley technology marketing firm. He has no clients among the companies mentioned in the story, nor among their competitors. More on Mark at http://www.linkedin.com/in/markcoker
Tags: Ali-Partovi, Facebook, Garageband, Google, Hadi-Partovi, Ilike, Mark-Zuckerberg, Max-Levchin, Mitch-Kapor, Paul-Buchheit, Paul-Graham, Sequoia-Capital, Slide.com, startups, Y-Combinator33 Comments
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Joe said:
“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,†he stated. If you want to found a successful company, you should only hire young people with technical expertise.”
Bizarre. Mr. Zuckerberg is advocating that companies practice ageism. Anyone 40 years or older who has been turned down for a job at FaceBook now has cause for a lawsuit claiming age discrimination.
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jc said:
>>Young people are just smarter..
ok, this cat is in for a fall. mentally, he probably needs to be medicated, and who, besides college cranks, he was an idiot for not selling out.>>he said Google Video was a bad product…
ok, gmail is an fpos, gmail cluster is an fpos. beta for how long?>>tread cautiously with venture capitalists… saved 2500 bucks here by not going (yes I was invited), that is all I needed to hear.
Ho hum…
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Mike said:
My jaw dropped when I read the Mark Zuckerberg “tips”. Blatant, blatant age discrimination.
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Bill said:
It was patently obivous that Zuckerberg was an idiot who confuses correlation with causation. EG: he gets lots of hits and he thinks its all due to his shear genius. I expect he is a bear to work for, and that this company is in for a huge fall.
I would say he should have learned something last time around in the late 1990s, but then I realize he was *12* at the time.
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Yan said:
These are very good tips, thanks a lot!
This resonates the best with my own approach to startup: “Founders should create naturally viral businesses” -
Yakito said:
Thanks for sharing this article!The story about Ali and Hadi Partovi is amazing
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Rockwell said:
“Bizarre. Mr. Zuckerberg is advocating that companies practice ageism. Anyone 40 years or older who has been turned down for a job at FaceBook now has cause for a lawsuit claiming age discrimination.”
It has nothing to do with age and everything to do with cost and desire to work hard. OK Mr. 45-Year-Old with a wife and three kids, are you interested in coding at the office until 11 pm on a Wednesday hopped up on Mountain Dew for $60k a year? No? AGE DISCRIMINATION!!!
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ron said:
My generation came up with the same silly mantra-don’t trust anyone over thirty. becomes a bit uncomfortable though when you hit thirty. the knucklehead may realize when he grows up it’s not about appearance or age or anything other than desire, brains and creativity.
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Tad Askew said:
Here’s my theory on age vs coding ability… I believe that coders start demonstrating meaningful competence around the age of 30 and sliding when they hit 40, so you can get about 10 productive years, peaking at 35 or so.
The advent of IDEs and Open Source has enabled the IROoC punk squad to generate reams of “code”, of largely questionable quality, often characterized by a ham-handed assembly of open source fragments.
A lot of these defects are forgiven or masked by high-performing hardware and large bandwidth. This is irksome to us Fossilized Coots who had to perform intellectual calisthenics and have an intimate understanding of the quirks of the underlying compiler to be able to run our code in RAM the size of a matchbox.
Young coders are productive in the sense that they make mistakes with stupefying speed and regularity and can generate multiple iterations of slop while laboring under delusions of mastery. Statistically speaking though, the little macaques do occasionally churn out Shakespeare.
8-)
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Alexander Muse said:
I cannot imagine how the organizers of Startup School can stand behind Mark’s statements. Typically a ’school’ whose ‘teachers’ suggest that their students violate the law can be taken to task. Perhaps it would be smart for the Startup School to require their ‘teachers’ to limit their teachings to legal activities. I know I am ranting, but literally, my jaw dropped when I heard Mark suggest that founders should violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967…
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Steve Morsa said:
Sorry Marky (I’d call you Mr. Zukerberg, but you clearly and obviously haven’t earned it and don’t deserve it), but the large majority of chess masters (the top players are actually called Grandmasters, but you’re too young–and preoccupied–to know that) don’t reach the top of their games until they’re at least 30; most at 40+, some 50+ years young.
…and let’s be honest here, shall we? Your success is due to a good idea, timing, and hard work…none of which has anything to do with age.
Hire only young coders? Reminds me of that car sticker I’ve seen on the back of RVs that reads, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m making great time!”
Nuff said.
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Smiley said:
Mark you need to think before making some silly statements aiight?
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Jaan Orvet said:
I won’t comment on what Zukerberg said about age, I find some of the other comments much more interesting.
McAdoo’s tip of defining your business in one sentence is something every start-up needs to take to heart. Over at Nearbie http://www.nearbie.com we use “History connects you” to explain the idea behind our start-up, and to some degree how it works.
Buchheit’s ‘experience matters more than money’ idea is true, but only in the very few instances when who ever puts up the money doesn’t care about the return. And while working outside of the context of reality can be beneficial for certain areas of a start up’s life span (say a very unusual UI, or even a bold pricing strategy), being to far out there won’t help young entrepreneurs to learn what they need to know in order to build a business.
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Chris said:
Marketers need to know how to code do they? Jesus, now I’ve heard it all.
Coders need to develop easy-to-use platforms that marketers can use, to make their own lives easier.
Marketers need to understand marketing. Coders need to understand code.
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Keith said:
If you would like to read an excellent articulation of the theory underlying Mark’s views, I would start with Paul Graham’s blog essay, “Hiring is Obsolete,”
http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html. -
Pitcher said:
Concern: Am I too young?
Answer: Don’t worry.That’s not my concern. I’m worried I’m too old. Ironcally, PG’s words gave me reason to not worry anyway.
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kK said:
young people may not be “smarter” but they are in touch with the zeitgeist and are typically more adaptable to new trends. how do you expect a company who’s only users are college kids to be run by baby boomers, it makes no sense. So calm down all you over 40 techies, there are much better avenues of employment for you.
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blats said:
Being someone who not so long ago “only owned a mattress” and now has two daughters, a wife, and a car payment I can say without a doubt that the latter motivates me more then the former ever did. I struggle to balance my drive to create with my need to support, but in that struggle I am better. Mark Zuckerberg has alot to learn about what it takes to “maintain”. Without my family I could just walk away, i could be arrogant, i could shut off my phone for a week when Yahoo is trying to call and buy me. I cannot do those things because in the end I answer to a higher power, my kids. My family grounds me and that is better then any mattress can do.
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Nathan said:
Great post, with some of the simplest advice being “just do it”. The costs are so low to starting a company, that the opportunity cost is huge if you don’t create it. However, as more and more people jump into entrepreneurship, it will be harder and harder to spread the message!
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Phil said:
I have to stand up for Zuckerberg here. The man is a genius, but maybe not the most politically savvy one. I think that what he means to emphasize is not age, but product dedication. Sure, there may be 45 year olds that work all nighters- but do they use facebook? Zuckerberg rightly requires employees to pursue their work as a hobby, and vice-versa. I think age discrimination is built into the company’s audience, at least until the demographic ages.
And as far as Startup School’s ethics go- I don’t think you have to worry about a huge moral conflict. Y Combinator is a sweatshop that cheats companies out of significant portions of their ownership. They don’t mind a harmless remark about target hires.
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Mike Church said:
A few points on the Zuckerberg controversy:
I don’t think young people are smarter than older people. In math, there’s a legend that a mathematician’s best work is behind him at 30; false, in most cases. What happens, in creative disciplines, is that people become more risk-averse as they get older– especially those with astounding success early on. (They become “insiders”.) Those who are able to avoid this generally don’t decay unless they become inactive. Most startups are launched by young people due to risk attitudes, not some sort of superior intelligence.
Mark Zuckerberg’s talk was pretty offensive on the age issue, but he is half-right. I don’t think a 40-year-old with a family would be a fit for his company, and surely he realizes this. In fact, I realize this is an abrasive assertion, but I think the set of people who would consider working for facebook at age 40 probably isn’t as good within its age group as the set of young people who would apply. Young people don’t like hiring older people as employees– advisory and independnt consulting roles are different– not because of some universal defect that sets in with age, but because the Paul Grahams and Mitch Kapors of the world are not looking to work for Mark Zuckerberg.
Paul Graham’s argument in “Hiring is Obsolete” isn’t that younger people are smarter than older people, but that age and effectiveness are only loosely correlated, while most 20th-century style corporations tend to overemphasize age/experience and downplay talent.
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Jana said:
Mark’s comments are reflective of his age and lack of experience. The Silicon Valley if rife with people of all ages who believe they’re smarter, better and more profound when in fact they work in a high risk, high reward vocation and very likely got lucky. The best of the best usually don’t have to let others know about it, the best don’t fit into categories; age, gender, race. They are avatars, leaders, they make great things and we respect them for those accomplishments. How they do it, how long it takes, how much risk was involved is irrelevant. Greatness is evident, not self-evident. I recommend Mark spend some time with a philosophy web site.
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Robert Shedd said:
For those of you who are interested in hearing the presentations for yourself, I placed my audio recordings online at
http://www.robert.shedd.us/content/2007/03/26/startup-school-2007-2/
The audio quality isn’t amazing, but it seems to get the point across. Anyone, hope this is of interest to those who couldn’t make it, or those who want to relive parts!
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Thomas said:
Mark’s success can’t be due to the fact that he was at the right place at the right time…could it? Nah. He clearly is smarter than everyone else that is over 40. He just told us so. All the geniuses (genii?) tell me so all the time.
Clearly we’re not in bubble 2.0. Young arrogant CEO’s are clearly not a sign of irrational markets. Never. Seriously.
Signed,
CEO of Kibu.com -
Alex said:
You can find more photos and notes from the event at http://www.bosstalks.com/topic/52
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RM said:
Although I am not sure that age is the determining factor, employees without family or other responsibilities have more time to dedicate work. Whether or not that time is productive or makes the younger worker more valuable is debatable.
But clearly anyone willing to sacrifice their free time, health, family, or dreams for the dreams and goals of a CEO/company is a valuable resource. As some of us mature, realizing the things that are really important in life and seeing a much bigger picture, we often find less value in coding 80hrs a week on a products with very little or questionable social return.
I am not certain that I would classify someone willing to sacrifice their health, social life, and dreams for the dreams of someone else intelligent.
In my experience, I have found the person who must keep their job at all costs because of too many outside responsibilities, to be the least valuable and the least trustworthy. I prefer a company of well balanced workers who posses a wealth of experiences beyond the cubicle.
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Shawn Ward said:
I have a recommendation… Some of these “teachers”at Startup School - should be those who have started companies and failed - they can provide awareness and insight into the decisions they faced - and what they could have done differently.
You learn much more from failures than you do successes. Often times HUGE successes can be attributed to non-repeatable factors (explosion of internet, real estate market boom, etc) where most failures are caused by decisions that could and should have been done differently (related to product, partnerships, employee, monetization plan, etc).
Having MZ providing insight on how to run a successful company is the same as asking an wildly successful investor (circa 2000) how to make money in the stock market. That advice would probably have been something like: “leverage to the gills and invest entirely in CMGI, CSCO, redhat, net2phone, blah, blah blah… -These are the companies of the future…” 2 years later you would have lost 75% of your investment.
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JTreiber said:
I completely agree Shawn. As for MZ, I think everybody is dwelling way too much on his quips. I won’t defend his remarks, whether or not they were purposefully hurtful. The bottom line is that he was probably aware of what he was saying. He’s achieved his goal of stirring the pot, and you’ve all played right into it. He’s gotten his desired response (thousands of pissed of 30+ year olds blogging about what a prick he is). He would care way more if nobody responded…
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Min Liu said:
For more insight on Max, check out this awesome interview done by two Stanford business school students:
http://iinnovate.blogspot.com/2007/05/max-levchin-founder-of-slide-and-co.html
Max gave some interesting insight on Paypal alums.
Min, on behalf of iinnovate
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Jakob said:
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title Start-up advice for entrepreneurs, from Y Combinator Startup School. Thanks for informative article
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austen said:
young people are smarter. The older people get the more their brains rot.
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Jim said:
Interesting reading, in my opion Matt is really inmature to take this to the audience, he actually defeated himself in with his own words. He and his followers belives they are doing the best to make this world a more open place.
WAIT HERE, young people are utilizing facebook for better communication, for sharing their interests, finding friends,…one word, for better social life.
While at the same time Mark also believe in “I have only a mattress and my job no social life, nothing else” style of life.
He has no clue as what makes a happy life. Hopefully he is still 22 and he is interested in Philosophy, so maybe he can fix his view of world later in his life.
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kate said:
I’ve been working in Silcon Valley since the height of the dot com boom and the young grads out of Ivy League schools, etc., with a year or two of corporate experience, were getting millions in venture capital funding because they were so bright and “on the cutting edge.” Big mistake. While a few did well, time tells. I saw far more of these immature, inexperienced, TACTLESS youths blow through up to 50 million in a couple years. BTW, the tension in his company must be awful; probably like Lord of the Flies in the there.
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