r | p 2012: Startup Lessons: How to Change the World With Your Mind - Garry Tan

This talk is part of the 18th annual reflections | projections conference (http://acm.uiuc.edu/conference) run by the Association for Computing Machinery, University of illinois at Urbana-Champaign student chapter (http://acm.uiuc.edu).

We live in extraordinary times where hackers can build software that reaches billions of people. But creating things is hard. For every successful startup, a hundred big things and thousand little things have to come together in the right mix. Come learn lessons I learned the hard way about how to think about ideas, how to get them into other people's heads, and how to get there from where you are now.

Biography:
Garry Tan has been in your shoes. As a naïve computer science student at Stanford, he landed a spot at Microsoft's Windows Mobile, pre-iPhone. He was an early employee who co-founded the engineering team for Palantir's financial product, and designed Palantir's logo. He co-founded Posterous, as a part of Y Combinator's Summer 2008 batch. Now he's a partner with Y Combinator, helping jump start tomorrow's world-changing startups. Learn the lessons Tan learned the hard way as a student, big company drone, early startup employee, founder, and now, an investor.

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  Science & Technology