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The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator PDF

290 Pages·2013·3.568 MB·English
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The Launch Pad Randall Stross is the author of several acclaimed books, including eBoysy Planet Google and The Wizard of Menlo Par\. He has a PhD in history from Stanford University. THE LAUNCH PAD Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s Most Exclusive Sehool for Startups R A N D A L L STROSS / t PORTFOLIO PENGUIN PORTFOLIO PENGUIN Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London wc2R orl, England - Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - no 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, Block D, Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North, Gauteng 2193, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London wc2R orl, England www.penguin.com First published in the United States of America by Portfolio/Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2012 First published in Great Britain by Portfolio Penguin 2013 001 Copyright © Randall Stross, 2012 The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn: 978-0-670-92349-6 www.greenpenguin.co.uk For R ebecca, Martin, Jacob, and Alex CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1 YOUNGER 9 2 OLDER 22 3 GRAD SCHOOL 34 4 MALE 45 5 CRAZY BUT NORMAL 56 6 UNSEXY 67 GENIUS 77 8 ANGELS 86 9 ALWAYS BE CLOSING M 10 CLONE MYSELF 110 vii viii CONTENTS 11 WHAT'S UP? 118 12 HACKATHON 130 13 NEW IDEAS 140 14 RISK 150 15 MARRIED 161 16 FEARSOME 171 17 PAY ATTENTION 183 18 GROWTH 194 19 FINDADROPBOX 206 20 DON'T QUIT 218 21 SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD 227 Acknowledgments 241 Appendix: The Summer 2011 Batch 245 Notes 251 Index 269 INTRODUCTION San Francisco Gray Line is the largest sightseeing tour company in Northern California. It offers tours of San Francisco, of Muir Woods and Sausalito or the wine country north of the city, but it no longer offers a tour of Silicon Valley, immediately south. From a bus seat, there just isn’t much to be seen.1 Silicon Valley’s past is more accessible than its present. There’s the Computer History Museum, and Intel has a museum of its own. And there are the garages, of course, beginning with Hewlett and Packard’s, then Steve Jobs’s parents’, and then the rented garage that served as Google’s first off-campus office space. But these are ghostly places, the uninterest­ ing physical vestiges of startups that have long since departed. To glimpse what comes next in Silicon Valley, you need to see the most promising startups, not museums and historic garages. There are literally thousands of startups, dispersed along the sixty-mile corridor that extends between San Francisco and San Jose, but they all operate under secrecy un­ til they are ready to launch their first product. That’s why there can never be a Gray Line tour of Silicon Valley’s future. It’s a shame, because this place is creating everyone’s future. Software is eating the world—the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has come up with a rather catchy way of describing the disruption, under way or com­ ing soon, to industries seemingly distant from the tech world. Software- based startups will do much of the disrupting. They take advantage of 1

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