1. If a person who doesn't go to university and isn't planning on going wanted to be a serial entrepreneur, do you think all the required information could be self taught? By watching academic earth/stanford e corner entrepreneurship videos, it seems they put lots of value in real world experience and just trying stuff.

2. Would it be better to be an expert in several fields and relatively ignorant in others(ie : very good at networking, programming, not much business background, or very good at networking, business, but only very basic programming knowledge), or to have a base understanding of lots of fields?

3. What different fields are the most important to have a good understanding of?

Assume the person was planning on learning as much as they could in a 3-5 year period without going to university, followed by moving to the valley.

Just wanted to say thanks a lot for doing this thread, it has been really interesting and your responses have been top notch. Next time you're in DC shoot me a PM if you want to grab a beer.

As with most things that people talk about as being important qualities, I don't think it's ever necessary exactly, but rather it's something that combined with enough other positive factors (market size, timing, etc) make people (investors, co-founders, acquitted, etc) interested.

Those same people may be just as happy to see you trying to create a new market in a different scenario. I guess I'd say ultimately it's more about how all the pieces fit together than about the presence/absence of any one piece.

Not yet... I did rent a Lamborghini Murcilegao for ten days when I was at home in DC for Xmas. That was a blast.

I'm considering a couple of cars... The top of my list right now is a Bentley GTC but I'm probably a couple of months off from making a purchase.

Right now I've hired a private wealth manager from UBS and we are in the planning stages of figuring out how to allocate everything but I'll probably end up buying a house here in CA, setting aisde some funds for me to dabble in the market with, a nice little poker bankroll and then put the rest into the market in some split of moderately aggressive and conservative funds.

I will probably take a more active role in managing my own money as time goes on but for now I just want to reduce the number of things I have to worry about while I'm taking some time to relax and enjoy the fruits of my labor

I don't know if I'm really any more qualified to answer this than the next guy, but I'll take a shot...

I think quora-like sites that create curated experiences are going to be big in the near term both because of quora's growing success and because they provide real value...

Other than that I've seen a lot of cool augmented reality stuff (I'm interested to see what comes out of Ben Newhouse's startup Aria Glassworks) and similar related things like wearable computers (curious to see what Pranav Mistry from MIT pulls off) etc but I don't know if people have really found a way to make this stuff appeal to the mass market yet.

Other than that green stuff seems hot right now and I think there will be sone interesting stuff in the bioinformatics space in the next few years.

I think just about any information can be self taught but there's obviously a lot of stuff where experience really helps. I don't care how smart you are if you're a self taught heart surgeon I don't want you operating on me.

Same goes with entrepreneurs but the big differences is that you don't need a patient to work on. You can teach yourself whatever it is you think you need to know and then just go do it. If you've got the right stuff you can definitely succeed without a degree.

E.g. If you sat down one day and made Twitter before it existed, and you managed to do enough of the same/similar things they did to get traction, you'd be CEO of Twitter right now. Of course the chances of doing something like that are pretty slim no matter what education you have, but there's no actual barriers preventing it.

FWIW there are still some people you will encounter that will probably consider your lack of degree a strike against you... and as I've said before you want to remove as many barriers as possible, so all things being equal I think you'd be better off getting a degree.... but, if you don't want to, you can certainly get by without one (in case you missed it, I never finished college).

In the general sense I think an entrepreneur is better off being a jack-of-all-trades/master-of-none than being highly specialized. Because you're going to have to wear all the hats for a while at least in the beginning and possibly well into your startup life cycle.

If you're already a master of some skill then it's probably best to do startups in that field since it will give you a leg up. Likewise if you are a master-of-none once you decide on the startup you are going to do, it's going to behoove you to become a master of the appropriate subject matter.

It really depends on exactly what you want to do, but I'll take a stab at a short list for a generic web-based startup, in no particular order:

* Leadership
* Marketing / distribution strategies
* Revenue models / sales / bizdev/relationship management
* Software/Web Development and related stuff (databases, general understanding of the internet and how most websites/businesses work)
* SEO / SEM
* Recruiting / team building
* Networking (in the win friends and influence people sense)
* Corporate structure (cap tables, financing, etc)
* Fund raising (angels, VCs, venture debt, etc)

Some of these you can get by without -- again, depending on what exactly you are doing. For example, in a lot of cases you don't really have to worry about sales until later in the company's life. Other stuff, like leadership, you need from day one. Either in yourself or a co-founder.

If I were in the position you describe (trying to learn as much as possible in 3-5 years then move to the valley) I would probably try to get a rudimentary knowledge of each of these, then dig deeper into each one over time, trying to keep my knowledge level of each roughly equal (as opposed to going really deep on one at a time)... though at some point you'll probably be more interested in some then others and you'll naturally dig deeper into those. As you figure out which ones really interest you that should give you some insight into what types of startups or ideas might be best for you to pursue.

Also, FWIW I specifically think recruiting is one of the most important aspects of a startup and one that I don't think gets enough attention from most entrepreneurs. I would go so far as to say that I think it might be the number one thing that determines the success or failure of most startups. If you can build a great team that really kicks ass in all of these areas then you don't need to be as strong personally in any one of them.

Glad you enjoyed it! I'll probably be in DC in mid-march and I'll definitely take you up on that.

this is a super dumb question, but anyway.
how much monies would you say person in his early/mid 20's would need to make to "retire" and live of that comfortably for the rest of life(assuming he dies at like 80).
look at that like on some sort of "life bankroll".. you would invest in future in something, but with as little risk of losing it all, as possible.
no presidential hotel suites, no 6 supercars in a garage(at most one nice car like porsche, and changing it every few years), 2-3 decent properties("lower rich", not super baller places), no yachts, planes etc., maybe sailboat, ok luxury stuff here and there but really not wasting money on crap. travelling like there's no tommorow, whenever you want and wherever you want, but as I said, more "backpacking" style than luxury tourism.
something like that, what would you say?

From my perspective there are some internal contradictions in your criteria -- e.g. living comfortably doesn't require 2-3 properties, etc. And also I'm probably not the best person to ask because until recently I was pretty poor, but to take a crack at it...

I'd say you would need about $2m to begin to get into the "live comfortably for the rest of your life without working" territory and maybe $4-6m to be where you are talking about with travelling a lot and having a sailboat, etc.

You could probably go lower if you were willing to e.g. move to thailand permanently or only travel 8 weeks a year, etc.

One of the interesting things I've noticed about having money is that the more money you have the more you worry about losing it. So really I'd probably want double those numbers to be able to sleep at night and not worry that a market downturn or some other random event isn't going to put me right back into the rat race.

This topic was discussed at lenght a short while ago (I think it went 30 pages long or something) and got quite heated. I would use the search engine to find it - a lot of people disagree on the "number"

IIRC the number most people agreed on was $8M.

Just wanted to say great thread. Lgas, if you're ever in LA, you got some beers on me

Thanks for this thread lgas!

If your ever in Toronto let me know and I'll gladly take you out for a few drinks.

Great thread! If you ever find yourself in dayton, ohio let me know and I'll tell you the quickest way to get out

If I ever find myself in Dayton, OH I will definitely take you up on this

...and for everyone else offering beers in different parts of the world... I'll make a list and take you up on it when you least expect it

Thank you very much for the in depth response to my questions. I have one more question, and I know there is a term for what I'm asking about, but can't remember it right now.

Do you think its feasible to create a startup while the team lives in different locations? I've seen lots of different opinions on this subject, and whenever I see big names answer(conway etc), they generally seem to think its very important that you live in the valley and spend face to face time with each other. I have also seen people say that they think the future is in startups with the team members coming from all over the world. What do you think about this now? 3 years from now? 5? 10? .

It seems like with existing things such as skype, and newer ones like Asana, it wouldn't be that hard to do, but I really dont know. What do you think?

Assuming you're in the U.S., did you think about moving to a state with lower taxes (or even different country, like Monaco) to reduce your taxes? I own a successful Internet business where almost everyone works remotely and I'm considering this.

Any PR firm you'd recommend? Was it worth it hiring one? Any other PR-related advice?

Any advice on finding good sales, marketing and business development people? I think we have finding very good technical people down to a science, but we could use some improvement in other categories.

taxes and PR are pretty low on the list for an entrepreneur. once either of those becomes an issue, you're already successful.

Man you weren't lying, Jack truly is a beast http://wesleyzhao.com/2011/02/17/ins...k-abraham-pdf/

Could you go into more detail about what that 2 hour convo with the VC was like ?

If you ever come to Raleigh North Carolina, I will def. buy you some beer.

this thread rules, thanks a lot for posting it, and a beer or five on me any time you find yourself in Pittsburgh.

Hey,
awesome thread thanks a lot for doing this.

I have a question about a side-project I'm working on with a friend. (I asked Arturius if it's ok to post the link )
It's a music notification service where you can subscribe to your favorit artists/bands and get an email whenever they have a new release. Income would be generated through affiliate links for new releases in the emails.

You said that SEO was key for Milo's success, so my question is about SEO vs. social media. For a project like ours I would think that focusing on social media seems more promising. I would imagine that our service is something that you might find useful if you stumble upon it, but where you are much less likely to search for words related to it, in contrast to a service like Milo. Or in other words I would think that a higher percentage of people who might find Milo useful would search for words related to it than for our website.

But since I have close to zero experience in both I can easily be wrong and it would be great to get your opinion and of course the opinion of anybody else who has experience in the SEO-social media area.

While our site is already fully functional, as far as marketing experience is concerned we are as green as one can be.

Cheers

It occured to me -- primarily when there was speculation that the reason Michael Arrington moved to Seattle was tax-oriented. At the time though until the moment the deal was done, as LozColbert suggested, it just seemed like it was not nearly important enough of a detail to spend time or energy on... and of course by the time the deal was done it was too late.

I will probably put considerable thought into this type of thing before getting underway with my next venture though.

I haven't been too directly involved with our PR efforts but I know we've had a great experience working with Martha Shaughnessy at Atomic PR.

I think it largely comes down to the same things -- I think almost all of our business hires have been through existing people's personal networks. I'm somewhat hesitant to say this but I suspect that perhaps on the business side degrees do matter more and on balance you're going to end up with a better quality candidate if you filter for the ivy leaguer's and other good business schools and/or former employers.

On the sales/marketing side results might speak a little more. With all of them I would try to get them talking about successful projects or accomplishments in the past and try to make sure they are passionate and that their descriptions of the projects and how they accomplished them etc make them sound like the type of person you want to work with.

One specific thing I will say is that people from McKinsey sure can crush PowerPoint.

Definitely true on the tax side. And PR definitely shouldn't come into play too soon but it can certainly be a factor in the success of a startup. I think it was critical to our success as well as several other startups I can think of, e.g. mint.com (who incidentally also used Atomic).

I only heard one side of it. We probably talked a lot about it after it happened but it's been so long now that all that kind of stuff from the early days is just a big blur.

It was basically what you would probably imagine it would be like. Basically this guyasking you tough questions about your startup/business model/etc.



I didn't hear that side of the conversation but I'm sure it was stuff like:

Whats your plan for getting distribution?
Why won't google put you out of business overnight?
What's the lifetime value of a customer?
How can you increase that?
What are the biggest risks?
What if there's backlash from merchants?
How are you going to get meetings with big merchants given that you're nobody right now?
etc. etc.