a conversation with top italian students - la strada del futuro
DESCRIPTION
On August 23rd I went to the Italian Consulate in San Francisco to meet some of the top Italian students. Paolo Marengo, president of La Strada del Futuro, asked me to tell them my story and how to talk about my experience in the Silicon Valley.TRANSCRIPT
Italian Consulate8/23/2013
Friday, August 30, 13
• Laurea in applied physics
• just 6 months...
• 1.5 year traveling around the world
• Shipped about 10 products at Stanford, Microsoft, Twitter, The School Circle, Paperlit, ...
• Now at mightybell.com
Friday, August 30, 13
Friday, August 30, 13
TINKER!
Friday, August 30, 13
• "A me pare che quelle scienze sieno vane e piene di errori le quali non sono nate dall'esperienza, madre di ogni certezza"
Friday, August 30, 13
Let’s Play!
Friday, August 30, 13
• What can you build in 48 hours?
Friday, August 30, 13
Mightybell• Tumblr for community
• 5 people + CTO + CEO
• $4M in funding
Friday, August 30, 13
• PostgreSQL, Redis, Elastisearch, S3
• Memcached
• Rails
• Nginx, Haproxy
• EC2
• Coffescript/Backbone/Marionette
Software Stack we use
Friday, August 30, 13
• Learn several programming languages
• Never, never optimize it unless you have to
• Re-code it absolutely when you have to
• Small is beautiful
• Technology must enable fast iteration.
• Add by subtracting
Lessons Learned - ‘Technical’
Friday, August 30, 13
• tinker as much as you can
• do something that you love
• a good idea is important and “easy”, execution is crucial and very hard(http://cdixon.org/2013/08/04/the-idea-maze/)
• the startup life is harder than you think
• you have to be comfortable being wrong most of the time
• you work hard and make less money than in big c
• you will fail over and over again
• you do not start a company you build it
• think carefully before taking money
• in life and business choose your partners very carefully
• take care of yourself
• find a mentor
• do not trust a man that does not have any skin in the game
Lessons Learned - ‘Start up life’
Friday, August 30, 13
Friday, August 30, 13
Startup Corp.
generalistno-place to hide
everything is changing, fast!
big impact$
huge opportunityhigh risks
specialistyou can hidevery stablelow-impact
better work-life$$$$
some opportunitypolitics
low risks
Friday, August 30, 13
• IoT
• Web/Mobile Technology
• DIY Drone
• 3D Printing
Technology I find interesting
Friday, August 30, 13
• http://s3.amazonaws.com/37assets/svn/1281-Startup+school+-+The+secret+to+making+money+online.pdf
• http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas
• http://ruby.railstutorial.org/
• http://www.kickstarter.com/
• http://www.edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility
• @harper, @elonmusk, @ev, @nntaleb, @dhh, @sgblank, @pualg
Some Resources
Friday, August 30, 13