What I've Learned Founding 3 Tech Companies | betashop

As the co-founder of a conference related startup ( http://lanyrd.com/ ) I'm very obviously biased here, but I've found conferences incredibly valuable in my career to date. What you get out of them depends very much on how you approach them.

Unless you live in the bay area, conferences are going to be the highest concentration of smart, informed peers you'll be exposed to for the whole year. Talk to people! Don't think of it as "networking" - think of it as an opportunity to learn from others (and to share your own knowledge). At most conferences, the hallway track is by far the most valuable.

And if you really want to get the most out of conferences, speak at them. Preparing a talk forces you to learn a great deal more about your subject, and presenting guarantees you some excellent conversations afterwards.

It's just been my experience that drinking on airplanes has an adverse effect on productivity in the air and then once on the ground. Let's say you take a flight from SF to Chicago or NYC. You have a couple of drinks on the plane so then you end up getting no real work done on the plane and not even thinking clear enough to get head-work done on the plane. Then when you land, you don't go workout nor do you do any work, so the night is basically shot. And you are more prone to also say, ok i had a couple already today so let's have another one, and then the next morning might even be a rough one.

I've also found this especially true for flights from NYC to London. There's nothing worse than landing after a red-eye and a few drinks. It makes the red-eye jetlag so much wose. The best way for me to hop across the pond is to immediately hit the gym upon arrival.

This is a tough one. On Jobster I made 2 big mistakes with regard to this. (1) I gave up the chief product role too early in terms of getting too busy with other aspects of running the business to really guide and impact the product. (2) I made the mistake of thinking i could still guide the product when i was actually too busy doing other stuff, and then I failed to give full day-to-day control of the product to Ethan Lowry when he volunteered to help with it. I was too foolish to realize that i had already given up product control but yet unwilling to allow someone else to help me with it. Ethan went on to be the founder of Urban Spoon.

are there such people? j/k.

We started with facebook only as a way to help ensure that our users are real people with real names, real pictures, and real friends. This was especially important in building a gay website so that we could set the right tone and not quickly become a porn/hookup/sex site.