Loic Le Meur and Robert Scoble are invading my twitter I guess no one else is online at 11pm on a Saturday evening.

I like how Dave drops in too.

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As I’m about to graduate from college, I’m feeling more and more behind in this whole Silicon Valley startup rush. It seems like every other entrepreneur are in their 20s nowadays. A good number of them are also dropouts of college or grad school. Ever wonder what the real numbers and statistics are? Kauffman Foundation just released its findings on technology startup founders and their backgrounds.

Below is a graph depicting the age at which people started their first company.

The median age is at 39. It does seem older than most people thought. Also, I expect that journalists are more likely to report on startups that have young founders. Moreover, the survey is not limited to just internet entrepreneurs. It is a lot more difficult start a company in other engineering disciplines, where the initial infrastructure cost is higher.

I’m also surprised at percentage of business-major founders.

We, engineers, always make fun of business majors for a number of reasons. They take easy common-sense classes, have no technical skills, and go around just looking for engineers all day, giving them 0.01% equity stake. However, the truth is that they push themselves out there. Starting up is more than just programming all day. Communication, believe it or not, is the most important skill you need. 

 
And for me and all other young people who are so eager in starting up, this graph might calm you down a bit. The average time lag between founding and a bachelor’s degree is 17 years. This might also indicate that it is becoming more popular to step away from a long-term career to start your own company. I’ve heard it’s hard to take such risks once you’ve family responsibilities and greater financial obligations. It might be becoming easier.

The research was interesting, but I’m now interested in any findings that report on internet companies only. More coverage from Paul and Matthew.

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I wonder which stealth company around now will be the next big thing 10 years from now. Gotta start scanning that craigslist

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The thing that excites me about the startup world is that you know never know what’s around the corner. One day, it seems like everything is going great; the next day, your world is falling apart. You are on your own. You must make every decision on your own.

No one knows the right answer at first. It seems like everyone is trying to give advice about what makes a startup. Sure, there are some general tips that can be applied to any business, but each startup is in a different context. The strange thing is that even with all the best advice in the world, you can still fail. However, you can’t be scared. You just have to do, execute, and iterate.

In this strange world, nothing is as structured as it seems. Every time I listen to founders talk about how their company got started, the story always starts off by saying they really didn’t know what they were doing at the beginning. At the end the speech, you don’t still don’t know why some ideas work and some don’t. In a sense, they feel the same way. For example, YouTube went through mainly iterations before they got something right. Paypal went through many models before hitting it big. And Facebook, well, it just worked. The stories all seem strange and not very structured.

If you have an idea that solves a legitimate problem, just run with it. This first iteration probably won’t work, but the second or third might. You never know until you try!

I think this song applies well. And yes, this is also the Macbook Air commercial song.

“I’m a new soul I came to this strange world hoping I could learn a bit about how to give and take. But since I came here, Felt the joy and the fear, Finding myself making every possible mistake.”

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Back when Digg’s focus was technology, it used to be my favorite site. When it started to mainstream, I still liked it. The geek community was not as tight, but new audiences added extra value. I enjoy reading about politics, business and odd news, and Digg kept me well-rounded. But for the past couple of the days, I’ve just been seeing the content deteriorating.

For example, just yesterday, it seemed like every other article was about pot.

How did this get so many diggs?

There needs to be some smarter way of categorizing or viewing the content on Digg. I don’t think a simple list view will work for so much different material. Also, it takes so long to submit something now! I understand that the database must be huge, but please make it faster! Ok, this needs my Sunday rant.

I must admit though I still go there everyday. There aren’t many other alternatives to interesting news. Also, I like the team behind the product. Kevin and Alex make a great show on diggnation. I hope they continue to grow it out and not get bought out as the rumors say.

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I can’t decide whether or not to just go with Ruby on Rails, or stick with CakePHP. Working off a framework is important nowadays. It is very hard to maintain a large project at startup without a proper Model View Controller (MVC) setup.

Here are some of my quick thoughts:

• I like PHP because I am more familiar with it, and don’t have the time learn a completely new language.
• Many libraries I use are written in PHP; it would seem like a big hassle to find all the tools again for Ruby.
• It does seem like the MVC setup in RoR is a bit more solid a well built.
• I am not sure whether to tie the current engineering problems at Twitter to RoR.
• CakePHP has less documentation than RoR.
• Ruby has been debated to be slow.
• PHP might be a better solution for you if you are limited by a shared host or cost.

I’ll keep you updated on what I choose in the future. Any inputs? Django?

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I’ve recently changed back to FireFox to my default browser preference because of its invaluable extensions (sorry Safari). One extension that I use is an SEO tool. One of the features of this extension is that it highlights in red the a href links that have the nofollow attribute defined. Setting a nofollow tag basically tells a Google crawlers to not crawl through pass credit through that link. One specific use case is in Wordpress comments, where nofollow tags are set to the commentator’s url. This prevents spammers from simply commenting for PageRank.

Installing this SEO tool gives me a fun perspective of how websites work. YCombinator’s Hacker News is my favorite reads of the day. The audience is a relatively young crowded dedicated to startups and programming. It’s a great source for technology news as Digg and Reddit are mainstreaming. In the mages, the red highlights been nofollow links. As articles get more points, they become legit.

Below is a screenshot of the the top posts.

Here is what the up and coming posts look like.

Update: The SEO for Firefox tool I use can be found here.

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Thinking of an idea is the first step and also the one of the hardest parts of a startup. I was lucky enough to talk to Steve Wozniak after his talk about idea generation. One of the inspiring things that he said to me was to think limitlessly. In other words, do not care what is possible and what is not possible.

Many times, I get trapped thinking inside the box of what web applications can do. I have a good sense of what you can do with PHP/MySQL, and have also revolved all my thinking about code. Rather than thinking about what is not possible, I think what about is possible. There are more things you don’t know! As a result, I get caught up with basing my ideas on what is already out there. This could be a reason why we see so many social-media-networking sites out there.

PicLens is an example of a product that I think is really innovative. It is just a FireFox extension that changes the way we view pictures. PicLens loads all the pictures on a page into a fluid gallery. Because I am not very familiar with FireFox extensions, I would have never thought that you could do something like this.

Think of the problem first, then think of what tools are available.

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Steve Wozniak is coming to UC Berkeley today to speak about his journey in the world of technology, entrepreneurship and the early days of Apple. I will for sure be this event and live-casting, using Justin.tv.

Watch live video from Sproutly on Justin.tv

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I’m attending the Startup 101 Metrics at Web 2.0 Expo right now. Dave McClure and Hiten Shah are giving at talk about at Web 2.0 about Startup 101 Metrics. They break down the key points in online marketing: (1) Acquisition, (2) Activation (3) Retention (4) Referral, and (5) Revenue. You can remember as AARRR, like a pirate Below are the slides.

As you guys probably realized, I was able to get into Web 2.0.  Can’t exactly say what happened, but am lucky to know some people. The atmosphere was definitely different from that of Startup School. I felt young again as everyone was older than me. I’ve learned a lot from this workshop and attached my own key notes below:

Read the rest of this entry »

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