The Octoparts have such a great, inspiring story. It's the quintessential startup: some guys have a problem they personally encounter, they casually decide to fix the problem for themselves, and a business is created almost by consequence.
"When we started we didn't know how to do any Web programming whatsoever," Morey said. "We didn't even know how to set up a Web server or a database. But we both sort of fell in love with all the new things we were learning."
Wow! That pretty much sums it up, AFAIC.
Start with a problem. Find a way to solve that problem, no matter what it takes. Have fun.
We were all doing physics before Octopart so we were pretty comfortable in a unix environment. I took a class in C as a sophomore in college and Sam took the same class in Java. When we decided we were going to start a company I had never heard of MySQL and when we launched we didn't know how to write a single line of javascript. Our core search engine is written in C++ so we've had to learn quite a bit more than traditional web programming as well.
"After a weekend of soul searching, Morey dropped out. Graham presented him with a T-shirt: "Strap on some plums."
Plums strapped, Morey persuaded Agarwal to drop out of Berkeley too."
Does anybody ever actually explain that shirt? One version I read said it referred to the courage to talk to investors, not cofounders (http://mattmaroon.com/?p=263). And YC seems to think it's an important bit of intellectual property (http://ycombinator.com/legal.html).
I am a dev for reliability software company and Octoparts solves part of a huge problem in the electronic parts industry. Users can now find, purchase and research parts using Octoparts. It'll be interesting to see if they solve the greater problem of providing additional metadata on all these parts. Either way the website is ahead of its time and quite useful! Good to know that even the mainstream media can see that.
I'll buy your tickets, but don't make me or anyone buy your data (Stats). If you do, I won't by your tickets.
People only care about the sports because of the data which composes the story line, make that a closed garden and I think a lot of people would be collectively pissed.
