StartUpSchool - Mark Fletcher
Lessons learned birthing & building web startups.
Founder of ONElist and BlogLines.
ONELIST sold out to egroups which later sold out to yahoo.
Bloglines
— 200,000$
— one salaried employee
— 4 employees working for stock
— acquired by ask
Garage Philosophy
- passion for idea
- Focus on solving a need you have rather than technological problem.
- cheap technology
- doesn’t have to be perfect
- Release early/release often(web2)
- Involve your users (web2)
- lot of customer support emails are suggestions.
- Moonlighting limits risk
- Friends/Family Funds
- Free Services = less pressure
- Hire a lawyer
- Outsource to elance or Rent A coder
- windows program for bloglines alerts
- 500$, kazhakstan, 2days
- 3500 translated to 6 languages.
- PR is the cheapest marketing you can do
Use stock for PR person
- Dont worry about biz dev
- Focus on viral aspects
- Focus on user growth
Design philosophy
Amy Jo Kim - www.shufflebrain.com/etech06
Software choices
* Linux/apache
* c/c++/bash/python
* DJB
* Berkeley DB
* Memcached
* Avoid NFS
* Avoid Table Locking in MySQL
Better performance results in greater usage
Hardware choices
- Dediated Servers vs buying/hosting (dn.net)
- design for cheap hardware
- ebay!
- APC PDUs for remote power cycling
- HP ProCurve
- Avoid Seagate Ultra-SCSI Drives
- Good Phone for SSH
Architecture Choices
* Copying fils vs client/server
- copying files scales better
* Calculate on the fly vs cache
* Memory vs Disk
Storage Choices
- Relational DB vs flat files
- RAID vs redundant
- Linux software RAID 1
SysAdmin Choices
- DNS Roundrobin for webservers
- Hot back-ups for off-line processing
- Worry about cooling the co-lo
AVOID MAKING STUPID BETS
