Paul Graham, one of the founders of the startup incubator  Y-Combinator,  is undoubtedly among the key persons of Silicon Valley. Described as the hatchery for hackers and the American Idol of Silicon Valley, Y-Combinator aims at helping early-stage startups succeed. The idea is not only about investment: the main focus has always been in helping to develop the initial idea into a real business. Y-Combinator accepts also foreign startups and the application rounds are held twice a year. For our startups, we recommend browsing through the impressive Y-Combinator library list at http://ycombinator.com/lib.html

 Visit the School for Startups

 Ever wondered how Zynga founder Mark Pincus would guide you in choosing a board or how Gmail got started? What advice could Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson give to your company? Y-Combinator hosts every year a one-day Startup School with proclaimed speakers. All the speeches of Startup School 2009 can be found at http://www.justin.tv/startupschool, including speeches from for example Jason Fried (37signals), Biz Stone (Twitter) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Aaltoes recommends:

Aaltoes interviewing Paul Graham
Paul Graham A Student’s Guide to Startups
Paul Graham How to Survive Fundraising
Paul Graham The Hacker’s Guide to Investors

Have a personal favourite or something to add? Please share in the comment section!

This is the first post of our Global Entrepreneurship Week Five Favourites -series, exploring some the entrepreneurial inspiration available on the Internet.

There’s one thing that is really pulling me to come live and develop my startup in the valley. It’s the way of working that is so efficient. This is real-time work.

Today we’ve had 6 meetings, none of which we knew about two days before. Most of the meetings we didn’t know about a couple of hours before the meetings. So, the pace of change is really fast, and there’s the possibility that your schedule changes any minute. It allows you to actually work on what’s the most important thing at any point in time, without any unnecessary meetings. If someone gives you a really great introduction and you have the chance to do an important meeting you can do it right away. Some meetings are done, some are lost. I guess you could calculate how much more efficient this makes everything. It gives you real freedom in work when you don’t have to schedule forward more than a couple of hours.

I really like it and it’s the way I want to work. Of course it’s a managers schedule and probably not suitable for developers.

I think we should try it in Aalto, at least we can start in Aaltoes…

We had to wake up at 6 o’clock this morning to attend Startup School. The day has been full of great experiences on the amazing startup culture here in the Valley.

The valley culture truly supports entrepreneurship. Having a bunch of people around you that want to do the same thing is a real boost. Also the amazing events are such an important part of it all. Getting to meet people, give them your input and get feedback on what you’re doing. You definitely don’t feel alone as an entrepreneur here, you’re one of the team.

We’ve been listening to the founders of Facebook and Twitter and everyone had the chance to ask them questions. They’re just guys like us who have had the tenacity to build something valuable. Some things work, some don’t, but in the end everyone is better off if we all try.

At Startup School, We listened to the talks in a room where everyone naturally started to discuss their startups and exchange business cards. Some startups found beta customers and we discussed what we wanted to do at the event… Everyone is working on their own startup or trying to find something they want to work on. Still, everyone’s on the same line. It feels that everybody’s in the same boat and everyone wants to help each other. The viewpoint is really that success breeds success. It’s super easy to find people here that can become valuable members of your team or your first beta customers.

The focus is also on having fun, we build to do something meaningful and to be able to work on something we’re passionate about.

This is the culture we want to create in Finland as well: Get people to support each other in creating something valuable. Meeting a lot of people that want to do the same thing. When there’s a lot of people who want to do something important it becomes a lot easier.

By the way, you can see all the talks from Startup School at www.justin.tv

Stay tuned for more posts from the Aaltoes trip to the Valley.

Forget what you’ve read, entrepreneurship is not about getting a great idea and then working very hard. It’s a dangerous simplification of entrepreneurship, and actually very few successful companies are created that way.

In this post I’ll describe 3 of the more common paths to successful entrepreneurship that we have identified in Aaltoes. The goal is to be able to provide some guidance on what to concentrate on in case you are a student and interested in becoming an entrepreneur.

3 Paths:

1. Be at the forefront of technological development

Some of the more known entrepreneurial success stories are based on a group of students that have acquired specific technological knowledge and gone on to create great companies. Stories such as Microsoft, Apple, Oracle and F-Secure have been created in this way. So if you’re very good in a field which is not very developed yet, and few people are very good at, you have a good chance of creating something that is possible to commercialize. I think IT is already too big and developed, but you never know. The problem is that you can’t really focus on bio- or nanotech in your own backyard because you’ll probably need a cleanroom and some pretty expensive equipment…

2. Find a problem and be able to create the solution.

A lot of web startups are being formed these days, and the ones that survive are the ones that fulfill a market need. In case you do identify a market need, you also need to be able to create the solution. And market it. The reality is that any web startup that wants to get traction these days needs to have a massive marketing budget to be able to break into the market. That of course requires investment, and unless you’ve already created a company as described above, or worked as a director for a big company, you will not get it. Not for a web startup.

Web startups are good examples of companies that are created to solve a problem, but they’re not really difficult to create or duplicate and the Intellectual Property (IP) is difficult to protect. There is a huge number of developers around the world capable of doing the same thing. And there will be someone solving the exact same problem that you are. The one with the best connections and best knowledge will win, which is probably the one with the biggest marketing budget as well.

There have also been examples of teams that have identified a problem, for example mobile email (back in the days…) or created an application for an industry in which they got experience from during a summer job. In these cases, the difficulty becomes finding a great team which is committed to creating the product. It can be a good opportunity while you are studying since you might not need any income from the project. So focus on solving problems and creating the team that can solve it.

3. Be a researcher or connect with research

If you’re a researcher, you will get paid and have resources to be at the forefront of technological development. It is probably easier to become a researcher and create something new than to be at the forefront of development yourself. For business students, the real opportunity is to network with researchers and find an interesting technology to commercialize or jump on board early in the companies development.

How do I get there?

These are the entrepreneurial paths I think are the most realistic for students to become entrepreneurs. It’s a lot about being active in the entrepreneurship community and networking and creating a great team. You also need to know where you stand. If you’re not developing new technologies yourself and  don’t have a lot of experience in an industry you have very little possibilities of developing your own idea into a startup.

Aaltoes was created to help you start in one of these paths:

1. Attend our networking events and connect with other students that are interested in solving problems. Maybe you can find someone with great technological skill or the business visionary you need to commercialize your skills. Getting a committed team before you even now what to work on can also be valuable.

2. Attend our Technology Safaris and connect with research that you can commercialize as part of a team.

3. If you already have a solution to a problem but lack the skills to make it happen, join our Pitching Evenings and get your project jump started.

One of the points I want to make is that companies are not created by a group of business students thinking about different ideas. They might come up with a new sort of consulting company or a new way of distributing school books, but the ideas will be constrained by their experiences and knowledge. In addition, even if they can identify a good problem to solve, it will most likely require more financing and resources than they will be able to gather.

Anyways, probably the most important thing to do is to create a great team which has the required technical skills to pull something off.

“entrepreneurship is not about getting a great idea and then working very hard”

Entrepreneurship is about solving problems or using new technology to solve problems and having a great team that can execute.

Riku