amandalim89

love it!!! brilliant idea!i usually 'stumble upon' videos via facebook when my friends post anything interesting.

I am experiencing booking dates errors, my host's emails to my airbnb inbox was not forwarded to me, my host is trying to get in touch with support on live chat but they are not answering, plus the website is down now too. what's happening over there? I wonder.

google was offering much less than what Microsoft was bringing to the table ($700M) - and they turned that down too. I think if Google up their bid (at least trying to match Microsoft's) Yelp might have gone for it just because it was Google. http://news.accuracast.com/internet-7471/yelp-turned-down-mi...

I think Google should have just paid more and buy Yelp rather than Zagat.

This is great! :) thanks!

I think most entrepreneurship events will consist of majority HN users so maybe they are already meeting each other at some many other events that no one has saw a need to create an official HN one (I have not heard of one yet). But I think it's a great idea :) and I would love to attend it! Maybe there should be a HN pre-meeting before each entrepreneurship event since we're all most likely to be there already! Speaking if event, if any of you are interested in meeting me (I'll wear my HN username for easy identification), a fellow HN user, I will be at this entrepreneurship event on Nov 11 :) http://rainmakers3.eventbrite.com/

I think the failure of ipad killers can be attributed to them "having NO humanities and liberal arts in their DNA." as Jobs once said about Microsoft and Google. "They just didn't get it. Even when they saw the it they couldn't even copy it well." I think for that reason no ipad-wannabe-killers (present or future) will come close to displacing the ipad unless they manage to trump it in design/UX/UI. Currently, their only strategy seems to be waging a price war in hopes of covering their cost price(at the very least) and gaining some market share (at best).

Looks like NYC is soon becoming a tech hot spot with Google setting up an office and Stanford (maybe setting up)... lol. I can almost hear the West Coast VCs rejoicing across the country.

I heard that the Chromebooks are really slow though - http://www.chromeoslounge.com/cr-48-chrome-notebook/1101-cr-...

No doubt Peter Thiel means well. Thiel Foundation is a non-profit organization. Today it announced Breakout Labs which aims to fund very nascent research proposals — opportunities that are too early stage or radical to attract dollars from VCs or government grants.

Only time will tell if the gamble pays off. Like when Amazon started spending heaps of money building warehouses and people thought they were crazy. It paid off in the end. Efficient shipping attracted customers.

99 designs is a good place to start if you need a quick, simple fix. http://99designs.com/

They should use a Facebook api to power their facial recognition search with the social information behind each face. Wouldn't that be powerful?

I disagree. I think selling your company doesn't make you any less of an entrepreneur (btw jobs did sell his companies NeXT to Apple in 1997 and Pixar to Disney in 2006). The Paypal founders sold to Ebay for 1.5B and many of them went on to do other great and innovative things with that capital. I think being entrepreneurial means having the passion to start new things and sometimes that requires you to sell your old company/ies to fund it. I admire the courage to sell a successful/profitable company in order to built something from scratch again. Elon Musk said: I think it's better to try doing something which requires low capital as kind of your first company. With the success of that, then take capital from that and plow it into your second company. That's what I did, basically. http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/14/elon-musk-starting-a-compan...

Peter Thiel doesn't seem to think dropping out is such a bad idea. He set up The Thiel Fellowship to give 20 students Under 20 $100,000 to get their business ideas off the ground and quit school.

http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/25/peter-thiel-pays-kids-100k...

I wonder what "confidential trade secrets" they took along with them considering that Groupon's product is more of a market risk than a tech risk and so easily cloned. I don't think that Groupon is going to win this one because the Valley's laws has very favorable towards employee mobility. Many engineers here have Google, Facebook etc on their resumes hiring is so competitive here and Groupon better get it and focus their energy on employee retention schemes instead of futile law suits.

This shows that when consumers band together they can make a difference in corporate America. I wish we were more united in standing up against other products that are, 1.environmentally unfriendly (petrol) 2.abusive (child labor in Nike Sweatshops) 3.cruelty to animals (chicken farms) Sadly, I think most consumers only united when it's hurting their pockets. Otherwise, they turn a blind eye.

Groupon is a classic example: they have over 1,600 salespeople in the company. This number represents 75% of the total Groupon staff (http://www.centernetworks.com/groupon-roundup) I don't think they are particularly innovative. Low barriers of entry. It's just about how fast you can scale and yet it made it to the IPO stage. Few startups ever get to see that. Thus (with all do respect) I disagree with Jobs that a tech startup run by a salesman is doomed (although some might argue groupon is not really considered "techy"). I think a startup needs a good mix of a hacker, a hustler and a designer. Jobs was all 3 and that's what made Apple work.

Very true but I think perhaps people are conditioned to think that they can replicate the success if they learn from successful people first hand. But I think people who have failed have a lot to teach us as well. As Edison once said,"I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb." :)

So true. The hardest part is taking away features from your own product. We need to learn to let go of non-crucial features. built. launch fast. iterate faster.

tks!

I took ETL last semester and loved it! My favorite speaker was Aaron Levie. He was the prototype of the typical silicon valley startup story. built/launched his product from his dorm room in 2005. dropped out of school. created a company worth millions of dollars... etc. I think the reason my peers and I look up to entrepreneurs is because they are (as the article says) "living examples of the exceptional untapped potential within each of us". Success stories like Aaron's makes us believe that we can change the world. Sadly, for every successful entrepreneur that gets invited to speak at Stanford there are a thousand others who have failed. If it were up to me I think we should have another seminar to counter balance ETL, an antithesis of ETL, where unknown entrepreneurs can come to speak about their failures. so that students can see the other less glamorous side of entrepreneurship. In fact, David Friedberg, who spoke at ETL a few weeks back and his advice was why you should not do a startup. There's an article, from an ETL student's perspective on David's speech here - http://rainmakerslive.com/startup-thoughts/why-you-shouldnt-....

I love the quote: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It embodies the crux of human psychology. You can try to force a hand to do what you want but unless you convince the mind the precipitated action will never be sustainable.

Cool! do you guys make schwag? send me a link to your website :)

you mentioned posting on a weekend is a gd strategy to get traffic. yet now you posted on a weekday morning. why did you switch your strategy? just curious.

I totally agree. Advisers should be more like Asian parents. "Western" parents (much like "Western" advisers) start with the premisse that their children's self-esteem is fragile and therefore constantly try to reassure their children about how good they are. While Asian parents start with the premisse that their children's self-esteem will build up with improving performance hence are consistently critical and pushing their kids to improve. here's a link to different parenting styles - http://proto-knowledge.blogspot.com/2011/01/asian-vs-western.... I think advisers might learn a thing or two about "parenting" startups from it

Airbnb applied late too but they got in. They might have been an exception though. Here's the video where Brian talks about his story. Truly inspiring. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOytubycHOg Can't wait for the next Startup School at Stanford :)

#5 definitely!!! I think the ladies working in startups will definitely appreciate it! Startup schwag rarely fit me properly :( and most of them are just a logo slapped onto a T-shirt. Would be great for team morale! Plus, nice swag like rovio's angry birds plush toys, t-shirts etc are selling like hotcakes http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/SF2011/2011/09/12/angry-birds-... there's definitely market validation for that idea! I definitely believe in investing in gd schwag and who knows that might even become a source of income for a bootstrapping startup :)

Stanford has a lot of free courses too (Eg: this one about databases: http://www.db-class.org/course/auth/welcome ) and I think if one really wants to learn for the sake of learning and enrichment rather than having an official Stanford cert than these classes are good enough and you would not have to spend a fortune.