This past weekend was Startup School. The actual session was on Saturday, but the entire weekend was dedicated to the ideas and people behind startups. It was an invaluable experience; the rooms I’ve stood in had some of the highest concentrations of interesting ideas from around the world.

We’re going to be submitting our Y Combinator application soon (probably today) and I noticed neither of us had blogged about what we’re working on. That one deserves its own entry and will be coming soon. I’ll also expand on my experiences and what I learned from this past weekend. Until then, check out others’ photos from flickr. The above photo is courtesy of Trevor Blackwell. Check out the other ones in his set, including one of me listening intently to someone.

It’s funny how much an idea can change over time. If you examine a few companies, you’ll discover how different their initial business idea is from what they’re currently doing. Microsoft, Google, PayPal, Apple — for some, their ideas evolve, while for others, it changes dramatically.

We started our project a couple months ago with one idea. Since then, we have gone through about a half dozen iterative changes. I say iterative because we didn’t go through drafts of ideas, but rather continually evolve our current one. Once we felt we had something, we started work on implementing it. (That’s a key point. If you don’t make something of your concepts, you’ll never truly realize its shortcomings.) Along the way, other issues arose that made us think, How do we address this? Or even, Wouldn’t it be better if we concentrated on this?

Our ideas are never truly discarded. Having them in the first place must give them some merit, right? Instead, we have just refined our focus and we are much better for it. One of the coolest things about this is that a single evening with our laptops and a couple beers will produce some of our best brainstorming sessions. Substitute those casual nights for completely focused work weeks and I’m excited about where else we can take this. Our objective has always stayed the same (create something of value), and that’s why our ideas are always evolving. As long as we maintain focus (i.e. no scattered, swiss-army-knife products), there’s nothing wrong with an idea in flux.

Preface

A couple of months ago, Daniel and I began drafting ideas for a new website. When it came down to choosing a language to begin our work, we had a tough decision to make. We both traditionally stuck to PHP for web development in the past, but we wanted to use a web framework for rapid development. The decision to use Django came from three things: it’s written in Python, there are proven real world examples of large-scale websites using Django (the developers kept performance in mind and implemented a nice caching framework), and the documentation is good.

While this primer will mainly aim at those with no Django experience (or experience with a web framework at all), I am assuming that you have some understanding of Python. I will go over the details for creating a simple blog application. While Django is still not at 1.0 yet (as of this writing), there are things which may change. I will do my best to make sure to this information stays up to date. I am also assuming you are using the latest development version (0.96-dev as of this writing). Installation of the development version will require Subversion and is documented on the official Django project website here.

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Yesterday, we had the opportunity to meet three-quarters of Y Combinator: Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell. Jessica was presenting her book, Founders at Work, at Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley. Congratulations to Jessica on a terrific work. I’m nowhere close to completing it yet, but I look forward to reading some more. For those that are unfamiliar with the title, Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with the founders of numerous startups. It gives a pretty personal glimpse at what went on behind the scenes and makes these entrepreneurs absolutely relatable. It’s insightful and hilarious so I definitely recommend it.

We also met Sam and Andres from Octopart, and Adam from Xobni – all great guys and very bright. What struck me about everyone we met that day was how approachable and genuine they all were. It was great just chatting with such smart and influential folks. Hopefully we’ll see more of them once Startup School rolls around.

Afterwards, we had dinner with Kenneth and Connie at Triple Rock Brewery & Ale House. Not a bad place at all. The Stonehenge Stout is quite yum — it’s a bit like Guiness with a chocolate and caramel aroma/aftertaste to it. But now we’re both back in Davis, and it’s time to get back to work.

Jason and I have just received replies from Startup School indicating that we’ve been accepted to attend. Startup School is a one day session, held at Stanford, organized by the folks at Y Combinator. A good mix of speakers, from Chris Anderson to Mark Zuckerberg, will be presenting tips on pursuing a startup.

This is a great opportunity to learn from a lot of the industry veterans, including YC’s founder himself, Paul Graham. We’re both pretty excited to hear from the greats and meet a whole bunch of potential greats. It’s on the 24th of this month, so we’ll both be just about done with finals.

Palo Alto (about an hour away), here we come!

In its initial stages, a startup is faced with two choices to make regarding its future:

1. Materialize a business model with a valid plan for monetization or revenue.
2. Pursue acquisition of your company or product.

Option 2 is still the prevailing choice for most. And it’s easy to see why. But is it wrong for a company to be formed purely with the goal of being acquired? If this is the ultimate objective, does it mean that the startup company values itself so little as to not continue building independently? And how about those that stay sovereign – were they just not promising enough to be scooped up?

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