GarageLabs Startup Insights - Working for a company of 400,000 to creating a company of 1

1. GarageLabs
Startup Insights
Working for a company of 400,000 to creating a company of 1
Ken Lin
October 23, 2014
ken@kenlin.com

2. Seeds
• 2008 CMU w/David
• Gates Center
• Planetary Robotics
• 2009 Lecture about The Last Lecture
• 2010 Phoenix Performance
• 2013 CMU w/Michael

3. General Direction
• Small, creative, local, technology company
• Closely align work with interests
• Work hard but flexibility
• Tolerate financial risk (thanks Barb)
• Established companies or startups

4. Technology Studies
• Courses - Stanford Startup Engineering; Marketing; Game Theory
• Cloud Providers - Amazon Web Services, Heroku
• Graph Databases
• RESTful Web Services
• Client-side Frameworks
• Responsive Libraries
• Visualization Libraries
• Full Stack
• Published on GitHub

5. Researching
Directions
• http://right.com
• http://linkedin.com
• http://twitter.com
• http://facebook.com
• http://indeed.com
• http://meetup.com

6. Micropreneur
• Self-funded versus venture-funded
• Organic growth
• Market comes first, marketing second,
aesthetic third, and functionality a distant
fourth
• Pick a niche market
• Market size: <$5000/month full page ad

7. P1IMSA Plan
• Professional Racing as niche
• Start software development
• Offer my services to Phoenix
• Gain experience building web apps
• Insider view of problems
• License software to another team
• Expand customer base
• Recurring software license revenue
• Next venture

8. Income
• Software contract work for IBM customer
• Race crew work for Phoenix team
• Pending exclusive software provider license to software
distributor
• Possible software contract for race teams

9. Expenses
• MacBook Pro
• AWS
• GitHub
• Quickbooks Online
• LegalZoom

10. What Worked for Me
• What do you love?
• Be inquisitive, be generous
• Engage with people
• Meetups
• Family and friends (especially lawyers and accountants)
• Engage with technology
• Build something substantial
• Invest in good tools and master them
• Stop reading, start doing, go forth

11. Resources
Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture
• http://thelastlecture.com
Stanford Startup Engineering
• https://www.coursera.org/course/startup
Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup, Robert Walling
• http://startupbook.net
Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and
Outmarketing Your Competition, Guy Kawasaki
My Sites
• http://kenlin.com
• http://p1software.com/category/engineering

13. (Demo slide intentionally removed)

14. RESTful Service Stack
• On-premise / AWS Cloud
• Apache Tomcat
• Java
• Apache Commons
• Spring Framework - Web Service
• KlassMaster

15. Web App Client Stack
• http://jquery.com
• http://getbootstrap.org
• http://datatables.net
• http://d3js.org

16. Tools, etc.
• Eclipse
• Maven
• http://github.com and git
• http://nodejs.org
• http://gulpjs.com