larry kubin

I just filled out an application for Startup School, a free one day conference held at Stanford University. It’s organized by BASES and YCombinator, the venture firm run by Paul Graham and company. The speaker list is solid. I went last year and it was a great experience. It was refreshing to meet a bunch of like-minded folks who were all about quitting their day jobs and starting their own companies. The people I talked to didn’t have a “What if it doesn’t work? Aren’t you afraid?” attitude towards starting a business. They had a nothing-to-lose attitude that was more like “What’s so bad about failing? If it doesn’t work, I’ll just do something else”. Everyone I met was extremely talented, outgoing, and passionate. I even got to have a few drinks with some of them at the Stanford bars, which was very fun.

The event is being held on April 19th this year. This is good because the Web 2.0 Expo is being held from April 22 - 25, and I got a coupon to attend that for free recently, thanks to SXSW. So it appears as though I have some great excuses to go to San Francisco again. I’ve done some research and it looks like it will be fun and cheap to stay at the Pacific Tradewinds Hostel. It was voted the best hostel in North America and it only costs around 20 bucks a night to stay there, so I’ll probably go that route. Should be a blast.

I actually took a video of Paul Graham’s talk last year using my digital camera. The video isn’t worth very much since you can’t see the slides (you mainly see the back of some guy’s head). However, you can hear the audio, which is the most important part. He basically tries to answer the question “Why don’t more people start startups?”. Check it out.