How to Start a Startup

On March 7th, I went to a lecture by Paul Graham at Harvard. He basically read the whole essay but he writes well and you can read what I heard here. It was about starting a company and he drew mostly from his (quite fortunate) experience starting Viaweb (and selling it to Yahoo). Some points I liked:

• are you the kind of person who "wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life."
• he worked 7 days a week till 3am with only a couple of exceptions
• business is not mysterious
• "In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where."
• "Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it's easier to sell to them" because "while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back, you can't outsell an Oracle salesman"
• "Aim for cool and cheap, not expensive and impressive. For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs"