2010 Startup School Lessons And Notes

Startup School 2010 was organized by YCombinator The speakers included Ron Conway, Brian Chesky, Paul Graham Andrew Mason, Tom Preston-Werner and Mark Zuckerberg. These lessons were shares by speakers at this year’s startup school.

1. Team is more important and the best asset for the startup
2. Execution and product is the next step to a big company
3. Innovation is the never ending search for better solutions
4. Music startups are basically unacquirable due to the specifics of their deals with the labels.
5. If You Can’t Sell the Shirt, Don’t Give It Away.
6. Competition between super angels and VCs is good for startups.
7. Take one feature/use case and make a new business out of it when you fail.
8. You always have a choice, do the stuff at your own pace, if you can
9. Join Somebody Else’s Startup
10. You’re not building a piece of art; it’s a tool,
11. You need to solve your own problems.
12. Before you can go to the market, you need to get into distribution and engagement of the users.
13. Really, anybody can do it. Everybody started small and mostly as a 2 or 3 person team.
14. Recognize and embrace your constraints
15. Bootstrapping is a way to do something about the problems you have without letting someone else give you permission to do them.
16. Do things that allow you to win and that allow someone else to win. It is not a zero-sum game.
17. Do things that won’t scale; it will teach you
18. You don’t need a business plan. You don’t need to have an MBA. All you need is a great idea.
19. If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out
20. The best tools aren’t always that cool
21. Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible