I applied and was accepted to attend YCombinator’s “Startup School” at the Kresge auditorium on the Stanford campus today. I’ll have some more information about the events at the end of the day.

Mike Maples’ recent discussion on startups was my morning listening as I churned through weekend email stack and I came away with the following notes. Maples chases Thunder Lizards Godzillas They start from atomic eggs Disrupt their ecosystem (fishing boat) Disrupt the embeddeds (storm into Tokyo) Devour the embeddeds (eat the power lines and the trains) Rare: Cisco, Intel They take all the Oxygen out of the room, high tech has little room for also-rans #1 takes the glory #2 takes some pittance #3 == who? The business of a startup is to validate ab usiness model It must present how their business creates, stores, and delivers value You should do something like the above that brings in money more than you spend it Upon finding a successful one of these, maximize the delta (duh) Pivoting You must be able to throw away a really good business model * iPhone games * Charge $10.

https://medium.com/tech-talk/4cb2dbd21185 I think back to the women I worked with at Shop It to Me and they were all so smart, so funny, so ambitious, so great. I wasn’t looking at the time, but I get what this writer is suggesting.