Startup

Startup school '08

Via Presentation Zen I recently found out that videos from Startup school '08 are now available at Omnisio. If you like to hear smart people talking about interesting ideas then you should probably check them out. So far I've watched David Heinemeier Hansson's presentation and Paul Graham's one and I should say I like what I see. Tim Bauer has published his notes from these presentations. You may also find them useful:

And, by the way, I agree with Paul that you should not drop out of college in order to just start making money.

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Erosion of ideas

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I recently subscribed to TechCrunch and so far I noticed 2 things:

  • This blog literally chocks up my RSS aggregator (which happens to be Google Reader) so that I have to modify my reading habits not to miss posts from others feeds. Near dozen posts a day may be not that big number, but it definitely outperforms my other subscriptions.
  • Every once in a while TechCrunch posts really touch my soul and make me stop to think.

One of such posts was What To Do With Failed Startup IP? It was always sad for me to see humans' ideas, aspirations, accomplishments becoming thrash. Be it physical objects or results of intellectual effort.

I do not remember where but once I've read or heard that less than 10% of Earth population contribute to development of mankind civilization and this percentage is decreasing all the time. I think this "total productivity" can be greatly improved if we figure out a way not to let priceless man-hours of mental and other efforts be thrown to trash cans of oblivion and natural erosion.