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Startup School 2017 First Lecture

startupschool.org

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Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#31

Post by Alex3917 »

jaredklewis wrote: post #27
nhorob67 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a startup is defined as a company aiming to be a unicorn. I simply consider it a new, for-profit business

Sure, it's not a well defined term with a universally agreed upon definition, but now we're just arguing semantics. You like to define it as a new, for-profit business. Seems reasonable. However, I found that many others use the term to specifically refer to the kind of high risk, high growth company that meet the investment profile of typical venture capitalists. It seems obvious that the good people of startup scho…

> Sure, it's not a well defined term with a universally agreed upon definition, but now we're just arguing semantics.

The definition is pretty well agreed on. The version I like best is that a startup is a new business that's designed to arbitrage a temporary disequilibrium to produce extraordinary returns.

Other people phrase it differently, but claiming that, for example, your typical restaurant is a startup is unequivocally wrong.

Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#32

Post by xiaoma »

I see there's now an update form in the MOOC now. It has four fields—metric, value, growth and notes. Are there any pages on the site offering guidance on how to get the most out of the MOOC?

In what cases should the primary metric be "other"?

Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#33

Post by searchhn »

Teams actively pursuing a startup and who have been chosen for founders track get split into groups, with a group advisor and a Mattermost room.

It will be of great help for the folks who applied and did not get selected to have access to an official 'Mattermost' room to build a community of like minded individuals keen on entrepreneurship to share information and motivate ourselves.

Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#34

Post by compumike »

xiaoma wrote: post #32

I see there's now an update form in the MOOC now. It has four fields—metric, value, growth and notes. Are there any pages on the site offering guidance on how to get the most out of the MOOC? In what cases should the primary metric be "other"?

(Advisor for #group87 here!)

You should talk to your advisor (possibly one-on-one) about selecting the right metrics. Many groups are not focused on the right things at the moment, and that's OK but something we should talk about and fix!

If you have revenue>0, you probably want it to be revenue. Similarly, if you have revenue==0 && users>0, you probably want it to be active users. (Not cumulative registered users, but daily or weekly actives, for example.) You should probably only be using "other" if those two don't apply.

Think of it this way: at the end of the 10 weeks, what metric will you really care about showing 10 weeks of growth in? For example, having 10X-ed your revenue is much more impressive than 10X daily active users, which itself is much more impressive than 10X people manually seeing a demo of your prototype!

Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#35

Post by xiaoma »

I was wondering what the acceptance rates were for this MOOC. I understand it's difficult to deal with large numbers of applicants and that it's just not feasible to give every single applicant personalized feedback.

From the other side, I've been working on my goal for much of the past year and a half if I include collaboration attempts with offline businesses in my market that ended with job offers but no collab. I understand the long time span looks bad. I understand that it's minus that I'm a solo founder. It's just that I've gone a long time without a real salary or even insurance, I deeply believe in the value of what I'm working on and am beginning to have an idea of how much longer and harder the path is without mentorship from people who have done it before.

I see a tremendous value in YC and have already benefited from its free content. That said, estimating the EV of applying, has to include an assessment of likelihood and the costs of time and distraction as well as the tremendous upside.

Knowing the acceptance rate would be helpful in calibrating how to approach future applications, both for me and others who weren't selected.

Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#36

Post by rahimnathwani »

bootload wrote: post #11
inputcoffee wrote: post #2

This is an interesting talk, but it is substantially similar to the previous one that was already out there. Which makes me think: it would be interesting to have a diff tool for videos, but it diffs a representation of the content not specific video frames. Customers might include all the students of Udacity, Coursera, EdX and Startupschool.

" it would be interesting to have a diff tool for videos" videoA -> transcriptionA | V videoB -> transcriptionB | V diff

That seems too granular, as an additional 'uh' or 'and' would cause a sentence to be seen as different.

It might work well if you can first pair up the similar sentences from A and B, using word-level edit distance, or mapping to a lower-dimensional space using sentence embedding?

Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#37

Post by xiaoma »

compumike wrote: post #34
xiaoma wrote: post #32

I see there's now an update form in the MOOC now. It has four fields—metric, value, growth and notes. Are there any pages on the site offering guidance on how to get the most out of the MOOC? In what cases should the primary metric be "other"?

(Advisor for #group87 here!) You should talk to your advisor (possibly one-on-one) about selecting the right metrics. Many groups are not focused on the right things at the moment, and that's OK but something we should talk about and fix! If you have revenue>0, you probably want it to be revenue. Similarly, if you have revenue==0 && users>0, you probably want it to be active users. (Not cumulative registered users, b…

Unfortunately I wasn't selected, which is why I've asked here. I know I had some poor focuses in the past (e.g. trying to do a collaboration with an offline business in my industry to bootstrap an online one) and I'm trying to get some advice here on HN.

I have a free product launched (and then pulled because my API provider dramatically increased prices). I'm about 3/4 of the way to building a paid content-based product to ideally fund development of the free one.

So basically my most promising avenues I see are to

    1) focus 100% on the paid product
    2) eliminate the API provider as a dependency and go all out on the primary free product (risking running out of cash in a couple of months)
    3) try to raise 12k in funding so the runway extends to the end of the year.
My current choice is to focus 100% on the paid product. It's not clear how to put that into a growth goal though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14048063

Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#38

Post by Muuuchem »

jaredklewis wrote: post #27
nhorob67 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a startup is defined as a company aiming to be a unicorn. I simply consider it a new, for-profit business

Sure, it's not a well defined term with a universally agreed upon definition, but now we're just arguing semantics. You like to define it as a new, for-profit business. Seems reasonable. However, I found that many others use the term to specifically refer to the kind of high risk, high growth company that meet the investment profile of typical venture capitalists. It seems obvious that the good people of startup scho…

Just FYI I listen to a lot of popular startup podcasts and oftentimes the guests are asked if they recieved VC or if they are bootstrapping.

Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#39

Post by searchhn »

xiaoma wrote: post #35

I was wondering what the acceptance rates were for this MOOC. I understand it's difficult to deal with large numbers of applicants and that it's just not feasible to give every single applicant personalized feedback. From the other side, I've been working on my goal for much of the past year and a half if I include collaboration attempts with offline businesses in my market that ended with job offers but no collab. I…

Totally agree and I personally am interested in this too. I understand it is difficult to mentor everybody but an official 'Mattermost' room or better a discourse community will be very helpful too.

Re: Startup School 2017 First Lecture

#40

Post by technics256 »

Muuuchem wrote: post #38
jaredklewis wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's not a well defined term with a universally agreed upon definition, but now we're just arguing semantics. You like to define it as a new, for-profit business. Seems reasonable. However, I found that many others use the term to specifically refer to the kind of high risk, high growth company that meet the investment profile of typical venture capitalists. It seems obvious that the good people of startup scho…

Just FYI I listen to a lot of popular startup podcasts and oftentimes the guests are asked if they recieved VC or if they are bootstrapping.

As an aside, what are your recommendations for the best startup podcasts to listen to?
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