the onda

The first tech conference I ever attended where there were other entrepreneurs around was PC Forum a dozen years ago. It cost about $5,000 to walk in the door, and most of the entrepreneurs there were well packaged and keenly aware of how much they had to make every minute count. Contrast that to all of the great resources available online for free today; from honestly penned blogs on dos and don'ts, to sample termsheets, to the wealth of videos available from all of the keynotes given throughout the conferences that have replaced PC Forum.

This weekend I ran across two great videos worth watching. The first is Evan Williams's interview with John at Web 2.0. In it, he flat out states that he had no idea of just what Twitter would become when they launched it. The humility of getting up on stage an admitting that is great, especially because this is coming one of the first guys who pioneered blogging a decade ago. It would have been so easy for him to "connect the dots looking backwards" about how micro-messaging was just the natural extension of what they were trying to do in blogging. Kudos to him that he didn't.

The other piece of media worth watching is the Zuckerberg interview at Startup School (an event which looks amazing to anyone interested in startups). Though I read the transcript here instead of watching the video (Zuckerberg's awkward stage presence generally leaves me cringing), the content is fantastic: the only real risk is not taking risk, especially as you begin to succeed. Oh yeah, and if you are a "tech company," make sure you have technical people actually doing technical work, and not just cranking Powerpoint. And as with Ev, he's really open about just how unexpected and organic Facebook's success has been.

I am really looking forward to seeing what happens when a whole generation of kids comes of age with role models like these two. Combined with the increasing democratization of everything, and the major way in which big corporations and other "too big to fail" institutions have let us down, this ought to provide for a very interesting cocktail indeed.