Monday: The Day of Lectures

Monday kicked off with Professor Tom Kosnik’s talk about Steve Blank’s model and Eric Ries’ Lean Startup methodology. To top it, he said that delight was an important part of doing business. It was a model I have not heard of so far. I wish I took a photo of it, and will share it if I see it.

Next, Harry George Harris, President of HealthCare California who has worked for numerous companies including the White House gave us his 12 tips of entrepreneurial success. His 12 tips are:

• Know the marketplace
• Know the competition
• Know the company finances
• Know the importance of cash flow
• Have firm control
• Have inner confidence and take charge of your thoughts
• Plan and execute plans, planning is keynote to success
• Inject reality into plans for action
• Hire smart
• Hit the ground hard
• Make it fun
• Keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive

Tuesday: Interesting People

We are listening to a talk by Evan from Circle-App. He’s attracted 2 top engineers from India to work with him. He’s backed by angel investors and VCs. The app does a very simple premise: find friends or mutual friends via Facebook who are in your location. But this app is stellar in a few ways:

• Great design
• Solve one problem – niche and well
• Listen to feedback
• Showcases what IOS does best

Wednesday: Raising Money and What Mentors Mean

We had Alex Haislip, a prominent author and someone who has done a lot of research on VC and how things work within the VC industry talk about how to raise funding from these institutions. Among the things that he said that stood out the most to me were:

• Pitch well – be very clear
• Go read all about the partners, where they are from, what is their background, how much is their typical investment, what sort of companies do they invest in, what sort of interests they have… and that would provide you the easiest way in
• He also cautioned a lot against VC because while they grow the company with money and connections, things sometimes get messy (CEOs have been displaced in favour of someone else with more “managerial experience”)

Thursday: Learnings from New Tech and Slideshare

In the morning, we had a couple of people come over to speak about new tech and the one that stood out most to me was a 3D printer. I really believe that 3D printers will one day come to your house. I guess that does not sound amazing, but imagine this, from plastic, wood, metal etc, you can print your own CUP. You can print your own Screwdriver. You can print your own TABLE. You can print a HOUSE from a printer!!

That technology already exists although it is obviously a very expensive technology. It is expected that this is to be made available. So go on, guys, Google 3D printer and figure out what’s the future you can create.

At the end of the day, I got introduced to Sylvain, a back end systems ops guy from Slideshare, one of the companies I admire and recently got acquired by LinkedIn for more than $140 million. This company established itself as the YOUTUBE for presentations and it was so great to learn from Sylvain. I understood from him that although some startups are super profitable and rich, e.g. $30 million per year, they are content having a small office. They are very thrifty, they do not spend a lot on apps on management (analytics etc). It might not be a coincidence that Rashmi Sinha is female and an Indian and is therefore very smart about her finances! I have also long admired Rashmi for the work that she encourages within the female entrepreneurship cycle.

Friday: Mind Blowing Analytics

We met 3 important companies today (arranged our own meetups except for Udemy) and all 3 coincidentally had to do with either data or analytics but they were all 3 mind blowing people to meet.

First up was Jeremy Howard from Kaggle. Then Archie from Udemy. Third guys were almost the entire Kissmetrics team in SF (btw, the story is that I went on Quora and looked for Kissmetrics’ office address and self-invited myself to go to their office, which they accepted! Since they just moved in). Some highlights although I really do not know where to begin because this was the single MOST important talk/lecture I have ever heard about analytics:

Udemy

• Builds their own analytics infrastructure to track everything. They can track from the first button that the visitor clicks on, from where they come from, how many days later do they pay, how many friends they refer, technically Everything. Because of that, Udemy really rocks. It is a HUGE competitive advantage because they know how to spend their marketing budget to bring users in
• They test and test and test, and use data to the max. They track what are the sign up rates for free courses, paid courses, how many clicks, how many stay back etc from each vertical. In other words, it’s almost as if they know which keywords on Google bring them the most paying customers, they can even track them long enough to find out what is their average lifetime value (how much a typical customer spends with the company until the day they drop out)
• Archie was so amazing-  he even showed us the back end architecture which is usually super top secret and was so genuine about how they made things work.
• His tip for small startups – Find the email list with the biggest number of subscribers (e.g. AppSumo, Amazon) and get some new users in so that you can see how things work, what attracts them to stay etc. Even if it may not be profitable.