Joe Kraus (Jotspot)

• Persistance Pays - (See Paul Graham below too)
• "No false positives" - Will reject a number of possibly good candidates in order to not hire taint employee pool.
• "You make what you measure" - Metrics pay off. The only goals you'll be able to make are those that you measure.
• "Better to be a (early) trend spotter than trend setter" - Position Jotspot as a wiki company (because people know what a wiki is), even though Jotspot does much more. Ride the buzz wave. (See Tim Oreilly below)
• "Put business model into 'beta' when you put product in 'beta'"
• Taking less funding allows for more exits options....

Page Mailliard (WSGR)

• Start company off on the right legal footing
• Incorporate in Delaware as a C Corporation
• Don't start a company with someone else while they are doing a internship at Microsoft. It's possible that MS owns anything they did.
• Best leverage for a term sheet (funding from VC) is another term sheet.

Mark Fletcher (Bloglines)

Started 2 companies, ONElist and Bloglines. ONElist raised $48 Mil in funding, Bloglines was self funded with 200K. Recommended no/low funding as possible.

• "Release Early/Often" - Product doesn't have to be perfect (See Paul Graham too below)
• Listen to users - They will give you good ideas that you never would've thought of. They will be loyal if they see that you are listening and implementing features for them. (See Paul Graham/Caterina Fake here too)
• Use Elance - Outsourced a small windows utility for $500, as well as translation and ppt creation.
• "Viral growth" - Make it easy for users to tell others about your service
• UI - see http://shufflebrain.com/etech06.htm
• Hardware - recommended renting machines instead of owning.

Ann Winblad (Winblad-Hummer Ventures)

• When pitching to VCs need to hook them in 15 minutes
• Admit your assumptions. "Know what you don't know"

George Willman (WSGR)

This talk seemed a little out of place, since most of the audience seem to be pretty much against patents. Especially after they were defined as a "right to exclude, not a right to practice".

Tim Oreilly

• "Watch the alpha geeks" - These are like the early adopters from crossing the chasm. They can indicate coming trends.
• "Find a parade and get in front of it" - Marketing

Paul Graham

Supposedly this talk will be part of a forthcoming book.

Caterina Fake (Flickr)

• Marketing through blogs and viral useage
• Online communities need a host, just like any other social gathering.
• The Flickr app as known today was one of many apps they were making. This one seemed to get the most traction. They listened to their users (were in the forums for "24x7") and were able to attract more users.

Om Malik (Business 2.0)

Successful apps/companies are those that cause behavior change:

• Flickr
• Delicious
• ipod

• "Web 2.0" seems to be catering to the "firefox folks" and ignoring the "ie folks"
• SIMPLIFY - Should be understandable very quickly.
• Time is the only finite thing. Every thing else is quickly becoming commodity. If it takes 15 minutes to understand it, it's going to fail.

Chris Sacca (Google)

• Google now has a bio-diesel bus, with wifi to San Fran. And is the largest single consumer of organic goods in California. They also have a cafeteria that only creates dishes with foods found within a 150 mile radius.
• Google has give some ~$80 Million in "founder awards" to internal employees who have created something worthy of being acquired.
• All Web2.0 companies are boring, and not doing anything innovative. They all look the same.
• Create something that normal people will find useful. (This includes people in 3rd world countries). Oh, by the way, Google donated some machines to a school in India
• Google.org is poised to help society more than Google.com
• Google doesn't provide breakfast, lunch and dinner to make you stay at work all day (as well as laundry, hair cutting, oil change, etc). They do it because people are creative/innovative during mealtime.
• Chris posits that people are only "in the zone" for 1-2 hours a day.