Best RonCo quote: "you're going to make money while this guy fights with the record labels" -- why you should do a technology and maybe b2b startup rather than a music (or maybe even consumer generally) startup.
Its funny, everyone says not to do a music startup but there is so much potential there. Maybe I'm crazy to pursue it, but it seems that from history, innovation happens when everyone is looking the other way.
Seeing the brick wall in front of your face is not looking the other way. However, there is only a brick wall if you want to raise money, want an exit, or care if you get sued. I'm actually not being sarcastic here; there's something to be said for building a law firm in the shape of a music startup.
It is funny, and I do think it reflects a lack of imagination. I attended Startup School yesterday and one of my main goals for the day was to find reasons to invalidate the music-site/service/etc. idea I've been working on for the last couple of years. I couldn't find any, so today I'm putting efforts into not pissing it away and launching it this week (or next).
Depending on who you mean by the "everyone" who is looking the other way, we may be thinking in similar directions.
Lots of VCs/investors say not to do anything that touches music, specifically major label content. Dalton's big talk at Startup School is an example of the (reasonable) position against doing music startups. I've heard it from lots of people who I have talked to anecdotally.
I guess I was thinking of all the cool things bandcamp (which I love) and soundcloud are doing for indies, not to mention Spotify, rdio, grooveshark, itunes, amazon music, and google play.
I've been looking at the space and don't really know what I could add. It looks really crowded with innovators to me. If I read you right, you're just saying that there's still room for something better?
I would assume the material wasn't itself sensitive so much as the tone of the presentation -- for a VC, you presumably don't want to be too edgy/raw in video recorded content which might get viewed by a very conservative LP (the investors in the VC funds -- pensions, universities, etc.).
If this is the case, it makes a lot of sense. He was dressed like the lead singer of a band, cussed a lot and was very candid. None of those are a knock on him, he's awesome and it was definitely one of the best talks.
His slides were marked with "confidential, do not distribute". That may have something to do with it. It's unfortunate, his talk was excellent, though he didn't divulge any secrets as far as I could tell.
At first I was disappointed about this too. And then I remembered that Andreeseen also had his talk not televised at Intuit a year back (even though it was broadcast live -- just no recording).
And then I remembered: those guys ball so hard, people want to fine them.
thanks.. i am sure there is some kind of agreement to not give out information on what he is talking because the liveblog is also not updating anything.
I had thought this was the case, but all the restricted zones I saw were open, so I thought it might be for a reason. But after going up 4 floors I decided to ponder instead the effects of herd mentality. As it turns out, you exit through the top anyway :)
Small sample size but I have a feeling they take it easy on tickets on days like today. Stanford isn't some broke municipality looking to maximize ticket revenue.
seriously, this is what pissed me off most about the talk. He talks in detail about the straight up and down in user signups after Time, Newsweek, and TC features, but when he shows the graph of up and to the right, he just said it was "word of mouth" and nothing else, it seemed like he acquired his users through magic.
Did users just start to get it? What changed to make it hockey stick growth? It just seemed like it was a lame pitch to work for his company because he has a ping pong table and a room that can be opened with a book.
Weebly was YC Winter 07, which roughly coincides with his "18 month" milestone, no? I don't recall him offering much data in the YC realm, so that could have been an overall force.
It seemed like there was when Jessica Livingston was on. Her slides were showing to the right of the video. When Patrick came on it just showed his name and title there the whole time instead.
I don't remember Patrick having any slides. Only half of the speakers made any use of slides, with Jessica the most effective (to me) and Weebly/Pinterest/Spolsky tied for distant 2nd.
This was useful content that was published. No doubt that this was an Ad. but that was gorilla advertising, providing useful resource. Please explain how to better communicate the fact of: "OK, true. This is advertisement, it's rare that an ad will fall in the 0.01% of useful. I wish to send a message of positive feedback to encourage such behaviour."
Isn´t that channel curated? I don´t understand why other´s people highlight are the first thing I see(first I thought that the videos where broken). Also lots of videos don´t have title, nor you know who is the speaker!. I had never used justin.tv before but I am not impressed at all.
Depends entirely on the market, although it's often more likely in tech because of the global reach of companies, positive network externalities, and other factors like that, that make it a very different sector, than, say "small Italian restaurants".
Awesome, though I wish they would write the name of the person/company actually speaking, since I don't know what some of these (http://startupschool.org/speakers.html) people look like
