RoadsAfar

It’s Monday morning and the startup weekend buzz is starting to wear off. I actually got more than three hours of sleep and a home cooked meal. It’s really amazing to check out idre.am and see what we were able to build in only a weekend. I have to thank Peter, Oscar, Daniel, Don, Chris, Sudarshan, and Joe for helping to build a kick-butt site in so little time. Those folks are great.

This was my first StartupWeekend, but I’ve been following it since the first Boulder weekend and have really wanted to attend one. It was even more fun than I expected. I met some great people, learned a ton, and got a great thrill out of collaborative work. And that was really the best part of startup weekend for me: the people. I’ve said it before, but it’s really becoming a mantra for me: you build a company around good people, not good ideas.

The other intriguing part of StartupWeekend is the social experiment of self-organizing groups. Conflict happens. Put hard-working people in a small room together and throw in some profit incentive and conflict is bound to happen even more. Peter, Erica and I discussed group organization as the weekend wound down and I realized my inclination is to shepherd, to guide with a firmer hand. But I don’t think that’s a good solution. I think the “teach a man to fish” cliche applies here. If you lead too actively, you destroy the chance for spontaneity and lucky surprises. Plus, maybe the that conflict arises is also useful.

It’s possible that StartupWeekend (and other self-organizing conferences) reveals who you really are. If you have a tendency to sit back and let others do all the work, that’s probably what you’ll do at StartupWeekend. If you’re a control freak that can stand to share the glory or let others have input on an idea, you’ll probably alienate everyone in your group. If your only interested in profit, you’re probably severely misguided because I won’t even begin to discuss the odds of building a profitable business in a weekend: that’s missing the point. But if you favor collaborative work, are eager to encourage others, enjoy sharing of yourself and your ideas, and like getting things done, you’ll have ample opportunity at a StartupWeekend.

If that’s really true, if StartupWeekend reveals how you relate to others, then maybe the purpose of StartupWeekend is not to start a company, but to learn about yourself. And that’s something all of us could learn more about.

I picked up Jessica Livingston’s book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days the other day and started reading through it for inspiration. I had always noticed Jessica’s name at the bottom of Paul Graham’s essays in the acknowledgements section. Paul’s essays have been like a shot of startup adrenaline: whenever I need a little bit of entrepreneurial fuel, I read (or reread) one of the essays to get pumped up. I suppose it’s kind of like listening to Metallica before a football game or something. Anyways, The book contains a series of interviews with startup founders. The first one is an interview with Max Levchin, cofounder and CTO at PayPal. A couple of things jumped out while reading the interview with Max that I wanted to touch on.

1. Startups are about people. Finding good cofounders really matters. Finding good employees at the start really matters. “If you have a good team, you are halfway there.”
2. Determination matters. Max was absolutely determined to get his technology to work. He pulled all-nighters. He coded until it got done. 
3. Naivete can be a strength. Max wasn’t aware of the technical challenges they were going to come up against in dealing with fraud, but was confident they would solve the problems as they came up. “People like Citibank and other large financial institutions that also competed with us that understood the fraud thing very well–they knew from years of practice that this was going to become a huge problem–didn’t really approach it with the same happy abandon that we did. … We thought, ‘we don’t know how to do this; let’s just invent it.’” Sometimes not knowing how hard a problem is can be a blessing. You may approach the solution from a different angle or try something that others had been unwilling to try because it appeared to daunting.
4. Entrepreneurs just want to start something. Perhaps my favorite quote was about his drive to start a company: “I think the hallmark of a really good entrepreneur is … you realize one day that you can’t really work for anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn’t matter what that thing is.” I know exactly the feeling. There is something empowering about working at the startup level. It’s like programming in assembly–you have access to the bare metal, no abstractions or obstructions.

Max has continued to show his drive for starting something as he has moved on to work on Slide and Yelp.