GarageLabsStartup Insights Working for a company of 400,000 to creating a company of 1

Ken LinOctober 23, 2014

ken@kenlin.com

Seeds

• 2008 CMU w/David• Gates Center• Planetary Robotics

• 2009 Lecture about The Last Lecture• 2010 Phoenix Performance• 2013 CMU w/Michael

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

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

Researching Directions• http://right.com

• http://linkedin.com

• http://twitter.com

• http://facebook.com

• http://indeed.com

• http://meetup.com

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

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

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

Expenses• MacBook Pro

• AWS

• GitHub

• Quickbooks Online

• LegalZoom

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

ResourcesRandy 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

(Demo slide intentionally removed)

RESTful Service Stack• On-premise / AWS Cloud

• Apache Tomcat

• Java

• Apache Commons

• Spring Framework - Web Service

• KlassMaster

Web App Client Stack• http://jquery.com

• http://getbootstrap.org

• http://datatables.net

• http://d3js.org

Tools, etc.• Eclipse

• Maven

• http://github.com and git

• http://nodejs.org

• http://gulpjs.com