I attended a panel at a University of Illinois alumni dinner the other night and had the fortune of seeing Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) interview Max Levchin (Slide), Jawed Karim (YouTube) and Scott Banister (Zivity) about various entrepreneurial topics. I recorded about 30 minutes of it, but here are the first two questions summarized and the first 10 minutes of video:
Summary - not direct quotes:
Reid: What are the challenges of being an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley?
Max: Silicon Valley is still the best place to start a company in the world. Biggest challenge? Most people start companies based on products that they like, but because they live in a bubble and aren’t faced with the reality of most of the world, these ideas often fail.
Jawed: If I had to pick a place, it would definitely be here. There’s so much activity in this area. Can be difficult to stand out in all that activity. The bar here is very high.
Scott: By far the best place to start a company.
Reid: Who thinks it is not a good place?
Scott: Core competition are the other entrepreneurs. You are not competing for capital, there’s plenty of that. What you are competing for - talent. Talent with engineers and your executive team. Only so many smart people we can cram into the Bay Area.
Reid: What are the top three things to being a successful entrepreneur here?
Jawed: Difficult to pick three things, but really one thing is the value of your personal networking. Nobody can be an expert in everything. Find experts that can help. The greatest thing about Silicon Valley, is that all these talented people are concentrated in one area. People from previous companies move together into new ventures.
Reid: One thing that ties us all together is PayPal.
Scott: Figure out quickly in your career what your own strengths and weaknesses are. Put together that Tetris puzzle when putting together that initial founding team. Most of the companies we’ve started are not four engineers in a garage or four business guys in a garage, it is a design, engineer, business and marketing guy or gal.
Max: Consistent fashion sense. (Scott and Max are both wearing a Slide t-shirt) This was completely uncoordinated. You will never see me without a Slide shirt, but other than fashion sense of course, one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that being an entrepreneur isn’t about starting a company with a vision, it is about starting and running a company. Being able to be flexible with changing your plan allows you to be an entrepreneur and change your business strategy wildly. Sometimes you are heading north when you should be heading south. This is the single most important thing I’ve learned.
Scott: Max’s company PayPal was started as a Palm Pilot app and eventually became PayPal after several iterations.
Max: That’s nothing compared to what Slide has gone through so far.
