Quit your day job

Posted: 2008-08-06

We were totally buzzed at Start - A Conference for Entrepreneurs held in the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. One of the main sponsors was Adaptive Path whose members gained notoriety by coining the term AJAX. Their latest media splashes include Aurora, a Mozilla Labs concept browser, and Subject To Change, a book on product marketing.

One of the things that impressed me most was the humility of most of the speakers. Founders for such high profile franchises as Twitter and WordPress basically told us that the secret to their success was to just keep trying until something worked.

Merlin Mann, from 43 Folders (efficient inbox habits), came off like he was just a simple blogger. Dave McClure, from 500 Hats, was a teacher at Stanford so he provided some precision to everyone else's passion. Check out his startonomics to see what he is doing now. Marc Hedland, from Wesabe, had a lot of great business advice for startups.

But speaking with the conference attendees left me just as impressed as what I heard from the speakers themselves. A successful start up is one where you position your company to catch the next big wave. You've got to try a lot of waves before you get to ride one in. As one attendee said, you've got to learn to fail fast. Another attendee said it this way. You've got to throw a lot of stuff against the wall to see what sticks. The audience had plenty of Random Twits from the Start Conference too.