
My Startup School experience. - sahillavingia
http://sahillavingia.com/blog/?p=49&preview=true
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jsherwani
> Join a startup

I liked how Adam D'Angelo suggested that people should join a startup that a)
has a great team that is still small, and b) has traction, and c) lets you
learn a ton of stuff.

We're in exactly that situation. Our startup, iTeleport, makes the top
grossing VNC-based remote desktop client on the iPhone / iPad.

a) We're a team of two people -- myself (I did my CS PhD from CMU) and Vishal
Kapur (BS/MS from MIT, and has worked at a large company and a successful
startup over the past few years) -- and we're having a lot of fun doing what
we're doing.

b) We've got traction -- more than 100,000 paying customers @$25 a pop, and
growing -- we've even been featured on 37signals' Profitable and Proud blog
series.

c) Finally, we're working on some incredibly challenging problems all the way
from redesigning the user experience (we applied for a patent on our interface
hack, which was recently approved) to squeezing every bit of performance juice
out of memory and CPU constrained devices when transferring large amounts of
graphical data. We're working on a p2p network stack that enables any endpoint
to speak directly with any other endpoint without requiring any servers of our
own to manage (and pay for (and worry about)). Most importantly, we're in
touch with our users, we know what they want, and we want to learn how we can
continue making something they want and like. We're making more than $1m in
revenues a year, but we feel we've only scratched the surface, and people who
join us now are going to really learn an incredible amount about every single
aspect of how to build and grow a startup.

We're a team of two, and we're looking for a third. We're very picky, but for
the right person, this could be the opportunity of a lifetime. If anyone's
interested, go to iTeleportMobile.com, see what we're all about, and email us
from the jobs page.

~~~
stevenp
> Join a startup

"I liked how Adam D'Angelo suggested that people should join a startup that a)
has a great team that is still small, and b) has traction, and c) lets you
learn a ton of stuff."

This is a really big challenge for me. The decision to join a really young
team versus running off and doing your own thing is really hard, especially
when you see lots of awesome startups that actually have a lot going for them.
For instance, if I wasn't so caught up in my own world, I would instantly want
to join airbnb. I'm sure they're going to be huge.

The question is: Does being a founder outweigh the opportunity of being an
early employee at someone else's startup?

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damncabbage
> Join a startup

I'd love to do this, but there are so few late-stage startups in Australia
that I'm finding doing this rather tough.

Heck, finding companies that are product-focused shops (instead of consulting
shops, like design agencies) is really tough as well.

I'd love to get involved with building an awesome product. I'm going to keep
looking, but if anyone is here in Oz and has some pointers as to how to find
these people, I'd be very grateful.

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zebseven
Wasn't accepted this time around. I'll definitely try again next time though,
sounds awesome.

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astrofinch
I'm sure Startup School was great, but much of this is advice I've already
read through various blog posts on HN and elsewhere. Does anyone else think
they're reached the point of diminishing marginal returns on startup advice?

~~~
coffee
Hmmmm...

On the drive back home after attending startup school I was thinking about
what advice I had heard/read before and what I had not.

I came to the conclusion that it didn't matter...

I realized, there's a huge difference between attending the concert of your
favorite band, compared to watching that same concert on DVD.

That's why I was driving home feeling so much more informed attending Startup
School this year, rather than watching it via Justin.tv like I did last year.

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rphlx
Dude, you don't have to move to SF. LA has a good startup scene and high-end
engineering talent pool from Caltech/USC/UCLA, plus design/marketing/UX/etc
people from the entertainment industry. There are no serious hurdles to
founding a consumer internet startup here.

At startupschool, I met a bunch of people from the bay area, but none of them
were interested in founding a new company. They were either already founders
(looking for employees/funding/revenue), or, pretty happily working for a
large company like GOOG/NVDA/AAPL/etc and not quite ready to leave. The people
I found most interesting as future potential cofounders, were from other
cities with "weaker" tech/startup scenes.

