A conversation with top Italian students - La Strada Del Futuro

@[email protected]

Italian Consulate8/23/2013

Friday, August 30, 13

• Laurea in applied physics

• just 6 months...

• 1.5 year traveling around the world

• Shipped about 10 products at Stanford, Microsoft, Twitter, The School Circle, Paperlit, ...

• Now at mightybell.com

Friday, August 30, 13

Friday, August 30, 13

TINKER!

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• "A me pare che quelle scienze sieno vane e piene di errori le quali non sono nate dall'esperienza, madre di ogni certezza"

Friday, August 30, 13

Let’s Play!

Friday, August 30, 13

• What can you build in 48 hours?

Friday, August 30, 13

Mightybell• Tumblr for community

• 5 people + CTO + CEO

• $4M in funding

Friday, August 30, 13

• PostgreSQL, Redis, Elastisearch, S3

• Memcached

• Rails

• Nginx, Haproxy

• EC2

• Coffescript/Backbone/Marionette

Software Stack we use

Friday, August 30, 13

• Learn several programming languages

• Never, never optimize it unless you have to

• Re-code it absolutely when you have to

• Small is beautiful

• Technology must enable fast iteration.

• Add by subtracting

Lessons Learned - ‘Technical’

Friday, August 30, 13

• tinker as much as you can

• do something that you love

• a good idea is important and “easy”, execution is crucial and very hard(http://cdixon.org/2013/08/04/the-idea-maze/)

• the startup life is harder than you think

• you have to be comfortable being wrong most of the time

• you work hard and make less money than in big c

• you will fail over and over again

• you do not start a company you build it

• think carefully before taking money

• in life and business choose your partners very carefully

• take care of yourself

• find a mentor

• do not trust a man that does not have any skin in the game

Lessons Learned - ‘Start up life’

Friday, August 30, 13

Friday, August 30, 13

Startup Corp.

generalistno-place to hide

everything is changing, fast!

big impact$

huge opportunityhigh risks

specialistyou can hidevery stablelow-impact

better work-life$$$$

some opportunitypolitics

low risks

Friday, August 30, 13

• IoT

• Web/Mobile Technology

• DIY Drone

• 3D Printing

Technology I find interesting

Friday, August 30, 13

• http://s3.amazonaws.com/37assets/svn/1281-Startup+school+-+The+secret+to+making+money+online.pdf

• http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/canvas

• http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

• http://www.kickstarter.com/

• http://www.edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility

• @harper, @elonmusk, @ev, @nntaleb, @dhh, @sgblank, @pualg

Some Resources

Friday, August 30, 13