SXSW Interactive 2012 Parties
I started asking people on twitter about the best SXSW Interactive Parties coming up for March 2012. I’ll update this list as I hear of them.
- Friday, March 9th @ 8pm - Twilio, Startup Weekend, and Zaarly party - Contact @joeypomerenke for more info
- Saturday, March 10th @ 7pm - Foodspotting’s Night Market – Contact @yayfiona for more info
- Monday, March 12th @ 6pm – Silicon Valley Bank and NEA party (Private for SVB clients only) – Contact @shaig for more info
Tweet at me @mccannatron to include yours.
An Introduction to Synthetic Biology & Why it Could Become More Important than the Current IT Industry with Andrew Hessel
After attending a full day of Singularly University classes and having my mind completely blown with new ideas, I decided to watch all of the SU videos online. Here is the first one I watched on Synthetic Biology with Andrew Hessel.
I’ve actually heard Andrew speak before at TEDx Silicon Valley – which I helped start – but it was only for less than 10 minutes on a different subject. One of the big reasons why I love the Singularity University videos are all of the talks are 1 hour+ long. At 10 minutes its easy to get inspired by a message but at 1 hour its possible to get into the mind of each speaker and really see the full potential of each technology they work with.
Overview
Andrews talk at SU was about Synthetic Biology for the absolutely beginner with no previous knowledge on the subject. On a very basic level synthetic biology is the ability to write DNA from scratch and create living organisms from that translated & synthesized DNA. It has huge moral, economic, and political implications and its becoming a reality faster than we realize.
Synthetic biology got its name in 2003, so it’s very much a new and experimental field in the biology sciences. The big realization that Andrew had, which is the backbone of synthetic biology, is DNA is the programming language for cells that creates both the “software” and the “hardware” of living organisms.
Luckily for us much of synthetic biology & biological systems can be paralleled from the IT sector and much of the same technology and thinking that went into building information technology we are using for synthetic biology. As the quote goes with all of this new technology, “We are standing on the shoulders of giants“, not needing to create everything from scratch. Technology is a form of forward engineering where we can build on top of the previous generations and go through evolutionary cycles much faster than nature can.
History
It wasn’t that long ago, in 1870′s, that Darwin and the scientific community realized there were deep connections within species. Then in the 1950′s Watson and Crick discovered what this was and the form of DNA itself. It took another 10-15 years to figure out how this DNA was translated into amino acids. We began to be able to read this code in the 1970′s but the beginnings was very hard and cumbersome. In 1987 the first semi automated DNA machines started to appear and we got our next major breakthrough in 1998 with the first automated machines.
After the creation of the automated DNA readers we saw a huge explosion in the number of base-pairs we were able to sequence and store. Below is a picture of GenBank, an open access database of all nucleotide sequences and their protein translations, and the explosion of data after the invention of the automated systems.
Future
We now have 100′s of billions of base-pairs just sitting there open to all, but next we need to be able to comprehend it. Andrews view on this next step is we need to be able to write genetic code ourselves. It’s one thing to read and interpret it but we will never have a full understanding of life if we can write our own genetic code from scratch.
This is Andrew Hessel‘s mission.
Right now today we can write genetic code through the old “cut and paste” method, just taking out strands of DNA and inserting them where we want. This was how we did genetic engineering since the 1970′s.
But going forward with the invention of DNA printers were able to take code, send it to a machine, and get back a manufactured organism. Right now there are simple editors, starting to see a formation of a genetic programming language, and debugging via the editors.
The dream is to be able to have a full editor to create designs in and literally at the push of a button have that design translated into sequenced DNA and put to work in living cells. We’re getting close to the point of not how to engineer a living organism but what should we engineer?
There are programs like iGem, DIYbio, and huge companies like Amgen moving in this direction and the cost and time is falling dramatically due to economics.
Andrew’s believe synthetic biology will be the next IT industry (in terms of explosion of growth) but will be even more important because it literally affects life as we know it on a large-scale. Once we get to the point where we can design, compile, execute, and create any form of life we want, it will change the world as we know it today.
This has huge legal implications, moral questions, crime and terrorism issues, and much more that as a society we should be thinking about now rather than later. But as someone who is not involved in the biological industry at all, this is completely mind-blowing.
Singularity University: Cyber Crime and Terrorism
Update: Found this video online of Marc Goodman speaking about future crimes. >
This morning I attended my first full session of Singularity University. I had always about SU and I even applied to attend their first class ever but was rejected (probably because I was hugely naive and still in undergrad at the time 
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Luckily this year though my friend Vivek Wadhwa – who’s been a professor at every top school, writers for the Washington Post, and recently took the VP of Academics position at SU – invited me to the executive program going on this week.
I was super excited to attend a full day of classes, I even woke up early for it and class started at 8:45am sharp. First up was an hour on neuroscience by Chris deCharms, next was an hour on our Energy infrastructure primarily about Electricity by Gregg Maryniak, followed by some medicine startup demos led by Daniel Kraft, then finally the talk that blew my mind – Policy, Law, and Ethics by Marc Goodman.
I’ll be honest going into the last talk titled “Policy, Law, and Ethics” after being mentally drained by multidisciplinary thinking, I wasn’t expecting much. But WOW was I wrong.
The ethics portion of Marc’s talk was interesting but I had heard much of the debate over a TED talk by Paul Root Wolphe “It’s time to question bio-engineering” (highly recommended). But the second part of his talk about what criminal, terrorism, governments, and interest groups are doing with exponential technology was extremely eye-opening.
We as entrepreneurs, inventors, and creators typically think of the positive implications of new technology but it’s critically important to also realize what the “bad” groups are doing with these technologies as well. During Marc’s talk he gives eye-opening after eye-opening example of what is already happening out in the world right now. Here are some of the examples he gave during his talk:
- Organized crime and theft used to be a non-scaleable activity but now organized crime can steal 100′s of millions of bank account information at a single time. A recent example of this was the theft of the Playstation’s Network information.
- There are now literally Crime as a Service (CaaS) services that you can purchase to do your maleware service for you. You even get volume discounts based on how much you purchase.
- Programmed military robots have had a few instances where they have “malfunctioned” and went on a shooting spree on their own.
- A man was caught with a DIY remote control drone strapped with C-4 planning to fly it into the White House.
- Metadata can be extracted from pictures to pinpoint your location from services like Facebook, Flicker, Twitter, etc. This has given rise to sites like ICanStalkU and PleaseRob.me
- Criminals can now use 3D scanners to scan ATM’s & quickly create thin plastic covers that go over the card reader. So when ever goes to use the ATM normally they are storing all of your ATM and credit card information.
- There’s crimesourcing, using the power of the crowd for criminal activity: Flash robberies, hiring decoys on craigslist for bank robbery, and crowdsourcing the solving of CAPTCHA’s for phishing scams.
- Gangs using twitter and facebook to “communicate, recruit, issue threats, traffic narcotics, promote violence and expand their criminal activities.“
- The laundering of virtual currency & exchanging it to paper money.
- OccupyWallstreet is now using remote helicopters to spy on and track the police forces surrounding them.
The main takeaway for me was the lines between governments, interest groups, criminal groups, and terrorist groups is blurring. What used to be available only for the FBI and CIA are now being put to individual group use and we are going to have to deal with the consequences of this.
As Marc Goodman said at the end of his talk at Singularity University, “The internet was originally created with just a few nodes mostly by Universities and there was no need to build security into the system.” But now we must take responsibility for our current realities.
Making Tough Choices
You’ve probably heard the saying before – startups are all about focus. Focus, focus, focus means picking the right things to work on and blocking everything else out.
But what people never talk about is focus also means knowing when to cut out all of the things which aren’t within that focus. Saying no and killing whole products is the hardest but probably most important thing for focus.
This probably the hardest to do because of the psychology principal of commitment. We as humans want to honor our commitments and be consistant with our beliefs. It’s very hard to internally justify to yourself that you were wrong because you are then telling yourself that you made a bad decision in the first place.
My hypothesis is this manifests in companies through feature and product creep. No one wants to be the one person to tell the group they have been wrong and they should kill that feature or product. Even if its just mediocre, it’s always easiest to say “well someone like it, therefore we should keep it”.
A good thing to ask yourself is, would you have made that same decision knowing everything you know now? Really focus (for lack of a better work) on the gut feeling you get as you ask that question to yourself.
If the answer is no, then kill it and don’t fall into the commitment trap.
How to recruit early employee’s in a tech startup
I saw this post come up in the 500 Startups email list and had to share it. The question posed to the group was help deciding what equity percentage to give to early employees of a startup and how to convince them to join their team.
Here is my friends response, who will stay nameless, which captures the essence of recruiting so perfectly:
#4 You’re recruiting them to join an adventure, to get on the fucking pirate ship. They should not be treated as reluctant pencildick investors that need tons of coaxing and graphs and McKinsey market research reports. Instead, take them out. Get them drunk. Treat each one like a woman you’re trying to seduce, that you want to to drop everything, quit her job and road trip across the world with you, having crazy hot sex on the hood of your car every 5 hours. This isn’t a financial transaction––this is creation! You’re going down the rabbit hole with these people. Make them love you. Make them love the idea of being with you, of creating this thing with you.
This is what recruiting is all about.
Mental Model for Minimal Viable Products
Last week I gave a talk at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (my alma mater) about multidisciplinary learning and minimal viable products.
One of the mental models I came up with was a theoretical framework for a “Minimal Viable Product” or MVP for short. In the post I want to put my idea out there for further refinement and get some feedback on it (in MVP style )
Lets start with some basic definitions.
I like to define a minimal viable product as the quickest and simplest way to test a product idea in the open market. The MVP can be as simple as a signup form, or first prototype, or screenshots. The most important thing about MVP’s is how quickly you can put it out there to start getting feedback from your potential customers or whom you think your customers might be.
The reason why MVP’s exist at all is because it is much easier to test your MVP to see if people want your product rather then to build a fully functional product and figure out no one really wants what you made. An MVP is a quick way to test your initial concept before starting the product process.
The mental model I came up with for a MVP is inside a “while loop” a concept from computer science. A simple definition of a while loop is a “statement of code that can repeat given a boolean statement (true or false). If this is your first time ever seeing this concept I’d also suggest checking out Khan Academy’s talk on while loops.
With the basic definitions out of the way here is my mental model for a MVP:
while Traction is not True:
Idea = Hypothesis
Experiment = Market
Traction = True or False
Idea + Experiment = Traction
If Traction = True
Return Idea, go Build_Product
Else:
Traction = False
Lets break this function down and then also explore some interesting observations that come from this function.
The main premise of a MVP is you are trying to test for “traction” which I will explain in a bit. Inside the while loop your business idea is the hypothesis you want to test and you want to test this against the market. Said another way you want to put your idea in front of who you think your customers for the idea would be.
Once you run this experiment against your idea you will see if your idea generations traction or not. The True or False inside the while loop is a Boolean statement, which means you are either going to get traction or not.
One of the most difficult parts of this function is defining what “traction” means. It’s hard because there is no exact answer, e.g. if 10 people sign up for the beta release of your product that isn’t necessarily traction. Traction is much more of a gut instinct you feel when there is genuine interest, demand, or buying intent for your idea. E.g. If you’re creating a enterprise application and a large corporation wants to sign an Letter of Intent (LOI) as soon as they see your MVP that might quality as traction.
The best definition of traction I could think of is: if the reaction from your potential is significant enough for you to be excited and motivated enough to take the next step of building the first version of the product itself. The answer will either be yes or no (True or False).
If your MVP delivers traction then you are done and you move onto the build product stage, but if your MVP does not deliver traction then you need to iterate (change) your idea and try the while loop until you find traction.
Now for 2 interesting aspects of the MVP function.
Idea vs. Market:
The reason why you need to iterate your idea and not the market is because it’s really hard to change the market conditions during a short time period. It’s much easier to change your idea and try the process again.
But if the market you’re in is rising rapidly in your favor, your idea doesn’t need to be that good and it can still pick up traction quickly. These conditions probably lead to the “Powder Keg” startups Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, was referring to in his recent blog post. This is also probably why you see a lot of variation of startups around fast-growing markets all during a short time period e.g. all of the Groupon clones, social gaming startups, and startups in the social/local/mobile space.
All this variation, a concept from Biology, is probably a key factor in producing companies that survive in the long term (also related to survival of the fittest). This could be a whole post in itself, which I might come back to on a later day.
The Initial Idea:
I suspect the idea which gets traction and the entrepreneur decides to go forward with would follow the Physics principal of Chaos Theory. Chaos Theory is a theory in which the initial state of a system drastically affects the result in a chaotic system. You might have heard the phrase “A butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause hurricanes in Asia”, this is a hypothetical example from Chaos Theory.
Just like weather systems, the market is a chaotic system and your initial idea will matter a lot in determining the final outcome. This is why I believe an idea matters a lot but only in the initial state of your company. Right after the initial state other things like building product and execution matter much more than the idea itself.
Addendum:
Whenever I talk about MVP’s I always the same question asked repeatedly so I will answer it now rather than later.
An MVP is NOT a startup; it is Step 0 on your path to creating a startup. There are many more aspects to starting a company that I could not possibly cover in one post nor do I know them all myself. An MVP is only a tool to test the need in the marketplace before you do the hard work of building a product behind your idea.
*Also for any engineers reading this my while loop probably has some syntax errors in it. It’s not like you could ever run this function so I use the while loop mostly for conceptual purposes.
Worldly Wisdom
I haven’t written here in a VERY long time, but I wanted to come back to writing after I finished reading “Charlie Munger Almanack” a beefy 600+ page book about worldly wisdom. (Charlie was Warren Buffets silent partner where their ideas took Berkshire Hathaway a small million dollar investment fund to now being worth well over $150 billion dollars)
The basic very high level overview of the book is: Multidisciplinary learning and synthesizing all of that knowledge is essential for life and being successful. Charlie developed 100 mental models from all different intellectual disciplines in which he used to view the world and make decisions.
I was trying to convince my sister, who just started her first year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, why taking classes from different disciplines is very important so I want to use this post for myself to lay out my reasoning and the broad categories of mental models that are important to know.
What is multidisciplinary learning
First lets define what multidisciplinary learning is. Multidisciplinary learning is the act of learning the fundamentals and details from completely different disciplines. For example if you learned topics in physics, math, psychology, and business the synthesis of all that learning would be multidisciplinary.
Synthesis is another word we should define before we get started. Synthesis is about internalizing the concepts you learn, not just remembering facts and spitting them back out. We’ll get this more below.
How we are taught in school today
In todays education system we are taught new concepts in an isolated fashion and through fact based tests.
For example in Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the college I went to, when you signed up for a major you had to take classes basically only within that major. So if you a computer science student you could only take computer science classes. If you deviated at all from this narrow focus the “educational advisors” would yell at you and put you on warning unless you kept the progression.
Secondly our education system is very much based on remembering and spitting back facts. This was most prominently observed during my high school education. My junior and senior year I worked 35+ hours a week at Trader Joes and basically used class to catch-up on my sleep cycle. To pass my tests all I needed to do was remember all the facts the teacher told us during the quarter (I got my friends to let me borrow there notes ) and fill those out on a punch card. There was no incentive for real learning.
Learning is all about taking the concepts and examples and being able to apply them to real life or in new situations.
The biggest problem with specialized learning
This is one of Charlie’s favorite quotes: If you have a hammer everything will start to look like a nail.
Translated to english: If you learn only one specific discipline very deep, every problem will look like it can be solved by the one discipline you know. e.g. If you only study mathematics classes in college, everything will look like a math problem to you.
If you want to make a big impact on the world you need to be able to look at problems from all disciplines and have all of the mental models (the learnings from a discipline) in your head.
Now you know what multidisciplinary learning is and why it’s important. Now lets broadly lay out the topics you need to learn:
Mathematics
Normal Distributions, Power Laws, Regression to the Mean, Combinations, Permutations, Time Value of Money, Compound Interest, Decision Trees, Limits, Probability
Accounting
Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Cash Flow Statement, P&L, All the basic concepts of accounting
Engineering
Redundancy, Backup Systems, Breakpoints
Physics
Motion, Inertia, Thermodynamics, Equilibrium, Conservation of Energy, Entropy, Electromagnetism, Critical Mass, Feedback Loops (+ and -), Chaos Theory
Computer Science
Abstractions, Recursions, If-Statements, For Loops, While Loops, Boolean Logic, Algorithms
Economics
Tradeoffs, Opportunity Costs, Margins, Incentives, Trade, Supply and Demand, Markets, Substitution, Scarcity, Elasticity, Economy of Scale, Game Theory, Pareto Principal, Competitive Destruction
Psychology
Classic Conditioning, Operant Conditioning, Instrumental Conditioning, Bias from Contrast, Liking/Loving, Reward and Punishment, Envy, Denial, Social Proof, Denial, Consistency, Inconsistency, Loss Aversion, Scarcity, Cognitive Dissonance
Chemistry
Autocatalysis
Biology
Natural Selection, Sexual Selection, Survival of the Fittest
Miscellaneous
Always invert, The Five W’s,
In the next post I’ll go over what I have learned so far in each of these topics. The best way to start is to get just a general high level overview of each of these topics off wikipedia then do a deep dive of the topics that interest you the most using Khan Academy, watching documentaries about the history and people behind the topic, and open course videos from Stanford or MIT.
*This will seem like a huge list but general curiosity and doing a little bit everyday will greatly alleviate the time needed to learn these concepts.
**Personally I was never formally trained in any of these topics so theres a big chance they could be mis-categorized
***If you want to suggest additional mental models leave a comment below.
Attn: Startup Founders, You Need a Hobby
Running a startup is hard. I say that even though my own startup, StartupDigest, has been kicking ass growing from 22 to 42,000 subscribers in less than 28 weeks. It’s grown from a small side project to a serious media company & great community service to the startup ecosystem. I can’t even imagine the stresses of running a startup that’s not growing or stuck in the trough of sorrow.
Much of the difficulties actually doesn’t come from the business or product itself, but from the psychological stresses and relationship issues of co-founders. If you haven’t read this Paul Graham essay about the reality of startups, I would read it now.
To cope with this extreme uncertainty and stress, you need a hobby outside of work. This can be anything you enjoy: swimming, reading, yoga, meditation, ultimate Frisbee, or any activity you enjoy for the activity itself. You need a hobby to get your mind off of startup life and for mental clarity.
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But what if you don’t have a hobby? I was in this exact same position a week ago. I was having a beer with my friends Abraham, Krutal, and Brendan and I asked “what are your hobbies?” hoping to get some ideas of activities I could take up for myself. Instead everyone around the table sat with a puzzled stare, and the best we could come up with is partying. At this point I realized neither I, or most of my founder friends actually had a hobby they cared about.
That weekend after a talk I gave at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo I had dinner with some close friends outside of the startup world who were telling me about some of the activities and adventures they had been on. I started writing down some of the adventures they had been talking about on my notepad and getting more ideas as the time progressed, shortly I had a notepad of 25+ adventures I had always wanted go on but never had enough time to do.
This list quickly turned into my new hobby, I want to go on each of these adventures I had wrote down before a conclusion of StartupDigest has been reached. Below are my adventures:
Update 1: Based on some of the comments I’ve received so far I agree that the list below aren’t open-ended hobbies I could do in a lifetime. Rather my “hobby” or what I enjoy doing is going on adventures & having experiences with close friends. Some of these I intend to do more than once while others I would be comfortable accomplishing them once.
Update 2: John Knox wrote an awesome blog post in response to this one detailing why it is important have multiple hobbies and bulding a diverse portfolio of non-occupational experience. He explains what I was trying to get across much better than I could, read the full post here.
- Indoor Skydiving at iFly -
- Four Wheeling in the Sand Dunes
- Ice blocking
- Skydiving
- Snorkeling
- Air ballooning
- Ghost hunting
- Make fire
- River rafting
- Trampoline world
- City pillow fight in SF
- Full moon party in Thailand
- Track driving in a Ferrari
- Sing I’m on a boat while on a boat
- Meditation weekend
- Machu pichu – inca ruins
- Diving scuba with sharks
- See a coral reef
- Visit Galapagos island
- Spelunking in new Zealand
- Go on zipline through downtown SF
- Hang gliding
- Fly in a Wingsuit
- Snowmobiling
- Watching the Northern Lights
- Visit and active volcano
- Rock Climbing
If you have any additional adventures you would like to suggest or if you want to do any of these with my, leave me a comment below!
The Co-Founder Matching Problem
Without fail week after week events having to do with co-founder matching or co-founder dating are consistantly the most highest clicked events on [Startup Digest]. Also privately I get asked at least 5-10 weeks for personal introductions to co-founders. Clearly this is a very underserved problem in the Startup Ecosystem and events like FounderDating and Startup Weekend are playing big roles in alleviating this. I’ve been looking more intro the co-founder matching problem myself and wanted to share some good articles I’ve found on the topic.
If you have any additional articles or resources to share leave a comment!
http://venturehacks.com/articles/pick-cofounder via Venture Hacks
“The ideal founding team is two individuals, with a history of working together, of similar age and financial standing, with mutual respect. One is good at building products and the other is good at selling them.”
“If it doesn’t feel right, keep looking. If you’re compromising, keep looking. A company’s DNA is set by the founders, and its culture is an extension of the founders’ personalities.”
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=159648 via Hacker News
“You don’t ‘find’ a cofounder, just like you don’t ‘find’ a wife. It’s a relationship with someone else that evolves over time and then someday, someone pops the question.”
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html via Paul Graham
“Most successful startups have more than one founder, and usually the founders seem to have been friends for at least a year before starting the company. The best way to meet co-founders is to go to school with them, so recent grads have a big advantage there. You can also meet co-founders at work, but be careful not to violate whatever noncompete you signed. In the old days, co-founders often met through user groups, but this seems less common now.”
http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/11/finding-your-co-founders/ via Seth Sternberg
“And therein lies the problem in finding co-founders for that startup you’re dying to launch. It’s most comfortable to hang out with people like ourselves, but those are exactly the folks you probably don’t want to co-found a startup with. Seems a bit unintuitive, right?”
http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/11/04/finding-the-right-business-partner/ via Neil Patel
“Not only does it take time to find the right business partner, but also you’ll pick a few bad ones along the way. Don’t get discouraged by this because it happens to the best of us.”
http://blog.apprabbit.com/whos-got-your-back-7 via AppRabbit
“It’s been said many times and by many people that startups should have multiple founders, and there are plenty of existing blog posts about why, but for some of us that isn’t the way things are working out. If you’re going at it alone like me, it’s important that you establish a solid support network, even if they aren’t there by your side coding.”
“Friends, parents, siblings, whatever you’ve got, try to tap into people who can get excited about what you’re doing and give you a platform to bounce ideas off of, or lift you up when you’re feeling down or things start to get rough.”
Traveling Lessons Learned: Palm Springs, DC, NYC, Dubai, Austin
I’ve been doing a ton of traveling lately, feels like I’ve been living in a suitcase and random airports around the world. I haven’t even had a second to stop and gather all of my thoughts so this is an attempt to start.
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Palm Springs & TED – The human capability is amazing. If you think for a second that you can’t or you don’t have the knowledge/skills to do something just check out the bio’s of some TED speakers. I listened to people abolishing slavery, creating death lasers for mosquitoes, dancing skills that are un-human, to Ukulele virtuoso’s. All of them started with just the first step so when you are feeling down watch a TED talk and be inspired.
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DC - Real entrepreneurs don’t go to Washington and get involved with politics. People like Dave McClure and Eric Ries are changing that with initiatives like Startup Visas’ but by and large entrepreneurs are not getting involved with politics. We need to get involved more and get our voices out their, governments really want to support us because we are the ones creating real economic value in this country.
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New York City – If you want to see a newly emerged startup hub go visit NYC. They have all the ingredients: repeat entrepreneurs to mentor the next generation, early stage capital, University involvement, media attention, etc. Sure it is not perfect in NYC either but on the ground floor we felt excitement, especially in places like Dumbo. Also I learned attitude is everything. If NYC needs to change one thing it’s their attitude: learn to pay it forward, stop criticizing, give back, and stop trying to act so macho and overprotective.
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Dubai - The number one lesson learned here was people from around the world have a very different definition of “startup” than we do at Silicon Valley. I went to Dubai for the global entrepreneurship world congress by the Kauffman Foundation and there were representatives from over 60 countries all at this one event. And when talking about startups at the conference some people thought a startup was a person who started a food cart, to a small family own business, to a high growth manufacturing company, or to a tech company. My new definition of a “startup” (at least from [Startup Digest]‘s perspective) is a high growth company built under extreme uncertainty with a bit of a high technology slant. Its important now for us to get real specific on what kind of events we will be featuring in the digests.
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Austin – Startup founders need to have more fun! It was awesome to party with many of my friends in Austin and to finally get away from the non-stop business talk. Loosen up, have fun, and get out their every once in awhile. Letting loose is good for the soul and were going to start throwing more fun events here in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t only have to happen once a year.
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If you were in Dubai, TED, SXSW, or any of these places with me would love to hear some of things you learned!
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