MPD

So far, this week has been one of the best of the summer. On Wednesday, FindLaw held their annual company picnic. We had a lot of food, then played volleyball, basketball, baseball, and poker. I mainly played volleyball and poker, though I shot a few hoops with Matt as well. We played poker without any real money, so people were pretty loose with their bets; it was really hard to bluff anyone out in this game. I stayed in for a while, but finally lost it all when Gloria got a three of a kind on the river… She went on to win the game.

So, not only was the picnic fun, but it meant that we really only had to work three hours for the day, and we got home early. Even though we basically just relaxed, it’s always a good feeling to come home early. I tried to see if Carter was up for anything, but he already had plans with other people. I’ll just have to see him back at MIT this fall (he’s leaving the bay area this weekend).

Thursday was another good day (though I only logged six hours at work…). For Lunch, Matt and I visited the PSO team at Google. Sanjukta, an MIT student interning with them, invited the other MIT interns in the area over for lunch to check out the Google lifestyle. The people there seemed pretty smart; mostly young, as well. I’m not sure I have a really good idea of what exactly the PSO team does on a day to day basis, but the description I got is that they work with Google partners to support and develop services. For example, they may work with AOL to ensure that there are no problems with the search results that AOL buys from Google. However, they also do more than just support; some of the people I talked to developed internal software tools for CRM and other types of knowledge management.

Lunch ended up taking two hours – the drive there and back wasn’t too bad, but we also spent at least an hour and a half in the cafeteria. What really made the day short, though, is the fact that Matt and I left at 5:15 for the Churchill Club event at the Palo Alto Hills Country Club. The event was scheduled to begin at 6:00, but it’s sort of out of the way, so we left early. Not too many people were there when we first arrived, so we were able to get really good seats right in the middle of the room. After picking out our seats, we got drinks at the bar (I had a Coke with lime, and I mean a real lime, not artificial flavoring), went outside to check out the golf course, and came back just in time for dinner.

Dinner was a little disappointing, I must admit. Of course, had I actually paid the $70 entrance fee, it would have been a lot worse to find out that all they had were two salads and two types of pasta with a choice of sauces. I love pasta, but I would have expected some sort of meat as well, chicken probably. Still, the food was definitely not the reason people attended Startup Success 2006…

I enjoyed talking to the people at our table during dinner, because they all had interesting and varied experiences. There was a young guy from Microsoft, a guy who had just spent three years running a security startup, a manager at SAP, a lady who introduced herself as a “headhunter”, another guy who has done some startups and currently lives in AZ, and three people who didn’t talk to the rest of the table much. The guy who did the security startup (I wish I could remember his name) sat on my left, so I talked to him for quite a while about his experiences and the panel of speakers. He is really into blogging, and seemed to know who nearly everyone was. When I mentioned that I went to MIT, he suggested that I check out a blog by Brad Feld, Feld Thoughts. Brad is an alumnus of MIT who works for Mobias venture capital, and his blog covers topics relevant to today’s startups. I checked out the site and have been pretty impressed.

The panel discussion actually started at 7:00, so dinner continued for about an hour. Guy Kawasaki was the moderator, and the five speakers were Lauren Elliott (founder of Third Rock Mining and creater of the Carmen Sandiego series), Reid Hoffman (co-founder and CEO of LinkedIn), Joe Kraus (co-founder and CEO of JotSpot, better known for Excite.com), Daniel Mattes (co-founder and CTO, Jajah), and Alex Welch (co-founder and CEO of Photobucket). Guy led a fairly relaxed conversation about the thoughts that these five entrepreneurs had about what a successful start up will go through these days.

The two panellists with whom I was most impressed were Reid Hoffman and Joe Kraus. I could tell that Reid is very smart and had thought a lot about consumer internet companies. He made one comment in particular about the importance of a distribution plan for startups that I hadn’t thought too much about before and I think a lot of people overlook. He’s right that if your product needs 10 million users to begin to be useful it will never be successful unless you have a plan for how to get 10 million people to sign up without any immediate benefit. My reaction to this would be that, should I start a company, I need to make sure that there is value at any level of participation. It’s great if the value perhaps goes up tremendously at 10 million users, but I really need to concentrate on the initial benefits as well.

Another comment made by Joe Kraus (but related to something Keith said earlier) was also something I had never considered before. Joe explained that there are lots of buyers for companies in the $1-50 million range, and extremely few past $50 million, but VCs would much prefer that a company hold off for a payout in the $50-250 million range, where it can be extremely hard to find a buyer. Therefore, founders should realize that VC money doesn’t come without costs, and they should think seriously before accepting VC money to ensure they know what they are getting into. I haven’t thought extremely seriously about a startup before, but I guess I always assumed it would be a good thing to get VC money, without thinking too much about the sacrifices in control that a founder would have to give up.

There were many more interesting discussions by the panel, about how many hours per week to work (Keith thought 100 was too much and you’ll burn out, but at the same time, if you’re only doing 60, you should be doing more), how to pay employees in stock/salary, and how soon to release a product (another good quote from Keith: “If you aren’t embarrassed by your initial release, you’re too late to market.”).

Another result of the Startup Success event is that I learned about a few new products to try. I signed up for LinkedIn a few years ago at Simon’s urging, but didn’t find it that interesting at the time (maybe because I was only a sophomore in college and didn’t have many people in my network), but I think I’m going to give it another shot. When asked who was a member, nearly every person in the room raised their hand.

The other one I’ve already recommended to people is Jajah. My family has an exchange student from South Korea living with them this year, and if Jajah works as promised, it could provide a way for her to call home for free. I don’t think they’ve tried it yet; she only arrived Wednesday, and I didn’t tell them about the service until this afternoon, but I’ll be interested to see how it works out.

I’m pretty sure I’m not going to use any of the other three startups. I’m already a member of Flickr and run my own server during the school year, so I don’t have much need for Photobucket. Jotspot seems targetted mainly at corporate customers (plus, MediaWiki is so easy to use, I don’t see why I would want another wiki that I had to pay for). Finally, I didn’t quite understand Lauren Elliott’s new business. It sounds like he’s creating a desktop application for publishing and gathering news, but it’s not RSS, and it’s for people who aren’t too comfortable with the internet. He also mentioned that he thought it would take a long time to develop, so it probably won’t be ready for a few years. I have my doubts about whether he’ll succeed, because the way I see it, he’s entering a diminishing market. Sure there’s no one else in that space, but it doesn’t mean the market isn’t dimishing. More and more people are becoming comfortable with blogs, the internet, and RSS. If he’s planning to wait two to three years, even fewer people will find his product worthwhile than would right now. Perhaps I misunderstand, though, so hopefully he’ll do really well. I even tried going to his website, but I couldn’t find a simple explanation there, either.

Friday marked the beginning of the San Jose Jazz Festival. Luckily, my friend Jaime was in town for the week, so we met down by the Tech Museum to listen to music and get dinner together. Jaime has spent his summer at MIT working with Prof. Earnst extending Java 6′s annotation system. This week, however, he was called back home for jury duty. Apparently he didn’t have to go in a single day all week, so he just had the time off. We talked for a while and agreed to get together more often once I get back to school.