Paul Graham Eats Breakfast, Afterall!

Yes I am an eye witness to that but before I could whip my camera out, he sat down with his bagel and a cup of, I guess, coffee. So, here is the truth ppl - Paul Graham eats his breakfast, even in auditoriums that say “NO FOOD OR DRINK” on every wall.

I attended Startup School today, with my friends Lax & Arun. It was worth every cent of what I payed to fly down from Seattle (no, I don’t work for Microsoft). That reminds me of a guy who was sitting behind me today. I over heard another person asking him where he was from and he said “Seattle”. Then he hesitantly said “Well, actually, I work for Microsoft” and got a “oh okay” as response as if he had said he is a contract killer or something. Considering the crowd cheered enthusiastically with audible giggles, much to the surprise of the speaker Ann Winblad, when she said that Microsoft’s share price dropped by large percentage few days ago, he was probably right in being hesitant. (Ann, I think, was trying to show how tough it is in software business now - with the ‘consolidation’… her shoulders jerked in surprise when the audiance clapped)

The Google guy Chris did a wonderful job. I follow Google and anything Google with fervor like most of you do, but his speech did make Google’s image go way up in my mind. Since he raved about Google the whole time, audience punished him by asking the equivalent of the toughest interview question ‘whats the worst thing about you?’…ie.‘whats the worst thing about Google?’. His eyes popped a little bit but he did field that very well by sorta beginning to complain about the enormous size and ending up bragging anyway about how well they are doing despite. Hmmm. A tip that might come handy in my job interview.

Flickr co-founder made the crowd crack up by referring to the conference as PG as Paul Graham apologized for saying ‘hell’. So she only said fu* :-) I hope she was also punning on the abbreviation of Paul Graham’s name. May be not.

Needless to say, Paul Graham was amazing.

Do hear all the podcasts of this day. It will be very instructive as it was for me. I am not going to give you the gist of the conference or anything. Hear the whole thing dammit. I can’t believe you passed up the opportunity to attend this in the first place!

Oh you say you were rejected? Well, my friend Arun was “rejected”. Jessica had emailed a link after my “acceptance”, to confirm that I will be coming. I used this to insert Arun too. I guess at some point they ran a cross check and removed his name. I guess they’ll be giving printable e-tickets with bar codes next year :-D Anyway, Arun got in. When I applied, I was thinking that I’ll do a hunger strike in front of the conference hall if they rejected me. Serious. Yeah I am telling you again - if you didn’t come, you missed a lot - at least get something from the podcasts.

BTW, I am typing this offline as the net cnxn in my hotel room is not working. So I dunno if there are other blog posts about the Startup School already. Also I am not gonna give you any links. Go Google urself.

As an icing, the weather was glorious at Stanford and we had (+have) rented a convertible. No jealousy plz - we are from Seattle.