Facebook and Twitter stars on Saturday shared lessons learned with young entrepreneurs aspiring to be the next hot technology firm.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone were among speakers at a daylong Startup School conducted by Y Combinator.
“It’s really awesome to be here,” Zuckerberg said as he joined Combinator’s Jessica Livingston on stage in a packed auditorium at the University of California, Berkeley.
“This is, like, my people. One of the things cool about the Y Combinator program is you have these T-shirts that say ‘Build something people want.’ I think that is right on,” he said.
Y Combinator, established in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View in 2005, takes small stakes in startups in exchange for grooming them and exposing them to investors.
“We prefer groups with a lot of technical depth,” Y Combinator says on its Web site.
“We care more about how smart you are than how old you are and more about the quality of your ideas than whether you have a formal business plan,” it says.
More than 1,600 aspiring entrepreneurs applied to be in the class on Saturday at Startup School, which is held once a year.
A nearly 800-seat auditorium was filled to capacity.
Twitter sprang from a “two-week hack day” at Odeo, a podcasting company that Williams took part in starting after leaving a job at Google in 2004, the founders said in an on-stage chat with Livingston.
“I remember early on someone saying Twitter is fun but it isn’t useful and Ev said ‘So what? So is ice cream,’” Stone said while warning to be wary of skeptics. “We liked it. So we kept working on it.”
Since Twitter was entering new terrain with a microblogging service, Stone and Williams had faith in their idea, but little market data.
“One thing I’ve always admired about Google is they are good at saying this thing is huge and we are going to kick ass and do it better than anyone else; they did it with search and advertising,” Williams said.
“With Twitter, there was no market; no possible way to justify an investment other than it made us laugh and it’s really cool,” Williams said.
Twitter was able to incubate in Odeo, sparing its creators from pitching what “sounded like a stupid idea” to investors, the founders said.
Among the questions dogging Twitter today is how it is going to cash in on its global popularity.
“We’ve never had any doubt that if you create something popular you can make money,” Williams said.
Twitter’s biggest challenge is capitalizing on its position before a competing technology firm tries to commandeer the microblogging market,” Williams said.
“Things are going well and the stakes are really high,” Williams said. “We are going to face serious competition.”
Another challenge facing Twitter is preserving the company’s culture of doing social and environmental good woven as the small firm grows, Stone said.
“Twitter is two years old and in the global spotlight,” Stone said.
“We don’t want to be like the child actor that found fame early and grew up all funky and freaky. Part of working at Twitter is giving back to the world,” he said.
Stone said it is possible Twitter could go public with an offering of stock, but that he is hoping the company will find more creative ways to fund its growth.
“It sounds silly, with no revenue, to talk about going public, but I wouldn’t say that is ridiculous anymore,” Stone said.
“Our goal is to change the world. The needs of the platform mean growing bigger. At some point going public may make the most sense,” he said.
Zuckerberg said the creation of Facebook boiled down to a Harvard University student with hacker tendencies starting a company with smart friends.
“By the time I got around to building Facebook, I did it in two weeks,” Zuckerberg said. “Launch early and iterate; Facebook is a really good story of that.”
The evolution of Facebook has been driven by what members of the online social networking community do at the Web site and their feedback, Zuckerberg said.
“We pride ourselves on building stuff quickly,” Zuckerberg said. “We have this technology company that is really like a hacker company. My friends are people who really like building cool stuff.”
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained