The Valley at SBS

User Experience
So, it seems it's all about user experience. Everything. At least, everything that is currently coming out of the Valley is concerned with the experience of the user. It reminds me of a book that I read some time ago called "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug. Make stuff easy for regular people to use. Not just for some techie with a pHD in Computer Science.

Tonight, Said Business School hosted a Silicon Valley Event at the business school and being an ex-techie and general tinker-er with all things web, I went along.

The lineup
Chris Sacca - Principle at Google was one of the masterclasses that I sat in on. His words of wisdom for MBAers:

1. So (he says "so" a lot) forget business plans -> Write a Manifesto (see Google's)

2. Forget thinking small (segmenting market) you may miss a great opportunity -> e.g. with Google's "Organise the world's information and make it universially useful" you can find out loads of cool stuff

3. So, forget Money First, user next -> start with the user experience! Google's top100 what do people want - search, find obtain, commerce, communicate

4. Forget Too much talking -> more doing! less meetings (amen)

5. Humility? -> there are smarter people than us out there, be humble. Not just as an individual, but as a company. The geeks will make it happen.

6. Talent is not headcount -> they don't forget about the people at Google, culture is important, food is important.

7. So, forget secrecy -> at google you have a duty to share everything. be a hub of information. there are wiki blogs all around google. be open

8. Top tip: underpromise and overdeliver.

Hmmm... what do I think?
I was a little surprised at the weight that Google seems to have in the Valley at the moment. I mean, everyone knows that there is a company called Google that does searching and some other stuff and that they had a weird IPO a few years ago. But I don't think that the scale of the Google phenomenon has really filtered through to the subconcious of the rest of the world.

Evan Williams, founder of Blogger.com and current CEO of Odeo Inc

He has set up a handful of companies in his time (I think he's early 30's) so he had a few start up tips:

1. your problem needs to be much smaller than you think

2. someone else is working on the same thing that you are (it's not a reason not
to do it, just be aware of it)

3. low costs = more competition -> reason to pick a smaller problem, reason to be more differentiated

4. user experience (again) - useability of the software, design, obviousness -> this is an underpracticed, underused area of the web

Thoughts?
I liked the guy. He kinda reminded me of many of my wonderful geek friends. The "Ok, so I made it big, but here is a piece of really cool technology that I'm really into right now..." attitude. My inner geek started to flex it's well hidden muscles a bit while chatting with him.

Others worth mentioning
Bob Young - Founder of Red Hat / Lulu
Spent the day wearing a black baseball hat. I'm not not a linux fan, I've just never got into it. Was impressed with his wisdom and down to earth-ness. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to speak with him.

Reid Hoffman - Founder of LinkedIn
Of which I am a part - send me an e-mail if you'd like to add me to your list.

Craig Newmark - Founder of Craiglist & Jim Buckmaster

Allen Morgan - a VC and Managing Director, Mayfield

As I type this all up and turn my mind, finaly, to my Decision Science (Stats) prep, I think that all in all, it has been a great birthday.