My favorite talk was the one given by Jessica Livingston.
The way she simplified what it takes to be a good entrepreneur, resiliency and drive and the "monsters" you'll meet along the way was amazing.
My least favorite moment was Uber's founder talk. I love and use the app but his talk sounded too much like 30 minutes comercial on Uber... A special award to Ben Horowitz for humor and to Robert Scoble who managed to speak (ask a question to Ron) even though he wasn't on the speakers's list :)
JL efficiently didn't delve into #1 monster of cofounder disagreements. An insightful point was about the large company corp dev monster.
Another must watch is Joel's talk: deciding and knowing what kind of venture one is in, so that one takes the more appropriate actions when situations arise.
I thought Travis from Uber had a great talk because he showed the operations of his business. Zuck mentioned that companies can 80/20 somethings but have to be the best at some things to beat the competition. I think Uber's core is operational efficiency. They keep metrics on everything, they predict where riders are being underserved, not just where they are. I posted some more of my notes on http://tommy.chheng.com/2012/10/24/startup-school-2012-summa...
My best advice is just go and watch the BOS videos, I have been blown away. Their videos beat any conference on tech entrepreneurship in my opinion. I measure this based on substance. The Clayton Christiansen talk alone is worth more than watching all the startup school 2012 videos! This is just my opinion.
PS: Already a down vote. Be man or woman enough to state your case.
I think this is the first year that the videos are linked to directly from the startup school page. A much better experience than having to search through justin.tv, youtube, lanyard, etc. to find all of the videos. Also, nice to find the list of speakers on the startup school page, since I think it traditionally has been replaced with the most recent year's list of speakers each year.
How about just making it a part of the video? The video would automatically switch back and forth from the video of the speaker to the slides as necessary. This is the format that was used by pretty much all of my college classes, and I never had any issues with it.
You're wrong. Depending on where you look, nonverbal behavior constitutes between 60% and 93% of communication. If I really am interested in a podcast I will always opt for the video-version if it means I can't put it on my iPod and listen to it while doing chores like I could with the audio version.
Gotta say that Startup School 2012 had some really great talks. I had the chance to attend in person and it exceeded my expectation. The speakers shared some great insights and stories about their startups and each one gave a different perspective.
My favorite speaker probably was Joel Spolsky (and his slow, organic growth vs land-grab talk).
I love how Joel used Fog Creek to fund StackExchange's development and now Trello, which both seem to be land-grab businesses. It's almost like Fog Creek is it's own startup incubator now. Maybe a new model of funding/startups?
I'd like to think that the RIAA blocked the video for his use of hip hop quotes sprinkled through his talk.
"I'm from where they send shots then we send 'em back
A half a million dollars worth of crack money
Wrap your parents up, now you got a black mommy
Yeah I did it, true to my religion
Two guns on me, both with extensions"
Maybe to avoid sharing away from the site? My other (half joking) thought is to stay consistent with the considerably dated markup and design that runs through most of the YC sites
On the main level it was pretty bad on the right side closest to the stage. The audio speakers sounded muffled, but sounded fine as you stepped further back.
You could tell we couldn't hear anything because no one was laughing when everyone else was.
Aside from maybe Jessica Linvingston's talk, Spolsky's was the only one that said something very interesting to me, even though it was basically 12 years old.
