Keynote Panel: Humble Beginnings

The inaugural TechCrunch40 Keynote panel gets underway with a great panel of industry veterans:

Michael Moritz interviews Marc Andreesen (founder of Netscape & Opsware, co-founder of Ning), David Filo (co-founder Yahoo) and Chad Hurley (co-founder YouTube).

Michael asks Chad to give some background on his first business – which was a flywood poster business! David came out to California to go to Stanford grad school – didn’t hear what his first business was. Marc’s first business was a lemonade stand in kindergarten! By contrast, mine was selling Thundercat stickers at age 7!

Marc graduated out of the mid-west, and headed out to west coast of the USA for his first job. These questions are really more background questions – nothing too insightful yet. It appears that Marc helped out David in the early days with Yahoo.

Marc says that startups need to have crazy ideas, because big companies don’t chase crazy ideas! The problem is that out of every 1000 crazy ideas, 999 are exactly that and they don’t work!

Chad gives some early backgound on YouTube – Chad did the front end and UI, while the other two co-founders did the backend. Marc describes the CEO role in any company as a constant stream of bad news and having to deal with it! Now that’s pretty insightful! He also goes on to say that every company is different, so try not to base new decisions based on old information. Direction of causality is often misunderstood, vis a vis, why things go right or wrong. He also says that serial entrepreneurs need to try and build new cultures, instead of just drawing on people who previously joined other companies.

Chad said that one of YouTube’s biggest challenges was scaling the architecture, and building out their own data centers. This is very painful to blog as Marc speaks at the speed of light – just a little slower than myself , so I’m going to just post this as is… keep reading for the next session after lunch.

Here are some Startup Tips from the panel:

Marc Andreesen :

Try to ensure that one of the founders is capable of being a CEO

Don’t hire too many people too soon.

Chad Hurley :

Small teams move faster, keep it tight!

David Filo:

Find people who are passionate about what they do, not about the money.

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