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Slide 1: Lessons Learned Birthing and Building Web Start­Ups Mark Fletcher http://www.wingedpig.com May 15, 2006  
Slide 2: One Nerd, Two Startups • • Launched 1998 Acquired by Yahoo 2000 (as eGroups) • •   Launched 2003 Acquired by Ask Jeeves 2005
Slide 3: Garage Philosophy • • • • • Solve a Pain Point Have Passion for the Idea Be Cheap!! Release Early/Release Often (3 Month Rule) – Doesn’ t Have to be Perfect Involve Your Users  
Slide 4: Garage Philosophy • • • • • Moonlighting limits risk Friends/Family funds Free services = less pressure Hire a lawyer Outsource to eLance/Rent A Coder  
Slide 5: Garage Marketing Philosophy • • • • • Wonders of viral growth Users are all that matters PR is cheapest marketing you can do Don’ t worry about biz dev Pay attention to and leverage blogs  
Slide 6: Design Philosophy • Amy Jo Kim’ s presentation at Etech Putting the Fun in Functional: http://shufflebrain.com/etech06  
Slide 7: On Raising Money • • • • • • How Much? Raising Money Takes Time Friends and Family Angel VC Debt Financing  
Slide 8: On Being A Sellout • • • eGroups vs Bloglines Don’ t sell – be bought Investment Bankers – – – What they are Finding/Interviewing them Negotiating with them  
Slide 9: Software Choices • • • Linux/Apache C/C++/bash/python DJB (http://cr.yp.to) – – – qmail DJBDNS Daemontools • • • • • ClearSilver (http://www.clearsilver.net) Berkeley DB (http://www.sleepycat.com) Memcached Avoid NFS Avoid table-level locking in MySQL  
Slide 10: Hardware Choices • • • • • • • Dedicated servers vs. Buying/Hosting Design for cheap hardware eBay! APC PDUs for remote power cycling HP ProCurve Avoid Seagate Ultra-SCSI drives Good phone for SSH  
Slide 11: Architecture Choices • • • Copying files vs. Client/Server – – – Bloglines News RSS Feed Subscriber counts Notifications Calculate on the fly vs. Cache Memory vs. Disk  
Slide 12: Storage Choices • • • Relational DB vs. Flat Files RAID vs. Redundant – – ONElist/eGroups with hardware RAID Bloglines without hardware RAID Linux Software RAID 1  
Slide 13: SysAdmin Choices • • • • DNS round robin for web servers Hot back-ups for off-line processing Worry about cooling in the co-lo Avoid using swap  
Slide 14: Avoid Making Stupid Bets…  
Slide 15: Avoid Making Stupid Bets…  
Slide 16: Questions?