This Week in Startups - Best of This Week in Startups: Week of November 23rd, 2020

Episode Date: November 26, 2020

E1143 featuring Indie Hackers Founder Courtland Allen: https://rb.gy/jbxxwc E1144 featuring Meratas CEO Darius Goldman: https://rb.gy/yghgbe Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

On episode 1143, Cortland Allen explains how he got inspired to start indie hackers after witnessing extreme founder worship at Y Combinator. Really, I think the moment of inspiration for me was probably in 2011 when I moved to San Francisco and got into Wycombinator. And if I am being honest about my motivations, like I wanted to start a company. I wanted to get rich. And I wanted to do it basically having a lot of fun, which for me meant, writing a lot of code, being creative, not having a boss, not having to report to anybody. I would much rather make a lot of money doing it that way than, you know, working a desk job or going to Wall Street, like a lot of other people that I knew. But when I showed up at YC, it was a little bit

different than I thought. There was almost this weird, like, I don't know how to explain it, like this culture of like hero worship being. It was a little bit off putting to me. I remember a day where Mark Andreessen came into YC and, you know, he's this very tall, like six foot two. two, like, you know, egghead looking guy. He's very striking figure. And they're like, hundreds of founders just like huddled around him trying to ask him a question and people asking for his autograph. And I was like, well, what about like the part where we build stuff? And we're not just sort of sucking up to these different figures. And the people who I really looked up to NYC were the people that nobody else mobbed. I remember Kevin Hale came and gave a

talk and he was running this company, Woofoo. And he talked about how they packed their bags, left Silicon Valley, moved to Florida. And they were making millions of dollars a year. they're turning down all their investor phone calls, and they're like sharing their profits with the team and just chilling out, living a great life. And I was like, that sounds like the company that I want to build. That sounds like the perfect combination of not only achieving financial independence, but also building a company that gives you basically the perfect lifestyle where you can choose who you want to work with, what you want to work on, and all that great stuff. So that was 2011. Fast forward, maybe six, seven years of a lot of startup pain, a lot of start failures. And I decided to start any hackers, not only

only as a way for other people to learn how to build these sort of self-funded, profitable businesses, but also as a way to do that for myself. I remember there was a guy in my YC batch who had raised from A16Z and like the first week of Y Combinator. And the way people were talking about them, they're like, oh, have you talked to so-and-so? It feels like talking to Mark Zuckerberg before he made it big. And like eventually his company sort of like flamed out and it didn't go anywhere. But like everybody was celebrating the fact that he had raised so much money. Nobody was celebrating how successful his business was, how much it had changed his life and the people's lives. But I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about the press.

You mentioned, you know, Corlin, how did you come to this? Well, if you have at all followed startups in the last 15, 20 years, you get your news from like podcasts like this one, from tech crunch, from the other tech press, from Twitter. And while there isn't any sort of secret cabal meeting in a dark room to try to, you know, push the sort of VC funding narrative, I think just the nature of the tech media is going to do that already. So there's kind of like three different ways this happens. Number one, the press is going to write about what people want to read about and people want to read about these giant consumer facing, you know, B2C startups, the Ubers or Facebooks, your Twitter's or Airbnbs, exactly. And these are always going to

be well-funded companies. So that's going to be like one situation where you figure out, you know, what story do they have? And it almost always is going through YC or raising a ton of money. The press is also going to want to talk to people like you who are very well connected, who have broad knowledge, who have deep access. Generally, you're going to be investors. And then finally, a large number of stories in the press are going to come from the comms departments of well-funded startups or from PR companies. And so if you read any of the tech press, basically you're just going to, like, if I go to TechCrunch.com right now, I guarantee you like four to the top five stories is going to be this company raise this much money, XYZ. And so you just don't really get

exposed to another path if you're reading about this kind of stuff. And when I was in college reading about all this stuff, it was basically TechCrunch and Paul Graham's blog. And every single source said, the way to do this is you raise money. And what I think is insidious about it is that when you consume this much information that doesn't really give you a full picture of the world, it turns out like human beings, we aren't that creative. We don't tend to create new things from scratch. Instead, we're more like remixers. We take the knowledge and the experiences we have from our past and we remix them into other things. And so if all of your knowledge comes from this sort of biased source which says the only way to start a company is to go through YC or beg angels for money, then you're going to think that's the way to do it.

And so that's what I did. But I think the reality is, and you know this just as well as I. do that you don't need permission to build a business on the internet. No one's going to stop you from going online and putting up a website charging customers. I mean, you had Dave Weiner on your podcast a week or two ago. And I didn't know anything about him. Great guest. Super inspiring guy, brilliant, played like this great role in sort of pioneering and spreading RSS and a bunch of other technologies. But he had this other thread running through a story where he just seemed so bitter and upset at investors for never taking a shot on him. And he's this brilliant guy. And I was thinking the

entire time listening to it. Like, you don't need investors to take it. You don't need anybody's permission. On episode 1144, Maritas CEO, Darius Goldman, explains the history of ISAs and what went wrong in their original iterations. The original ideas credited to Milton Friedman, who in the 1950s, in 1955, wrote an essay. And the essay, without getting into it, said, how do we remove the government from educational funding? And the idea was invest in human capital. let people invest in other people as you want a corporation, invest in their future. That's who's credited with the idea. But then fast forward to 1970, Yale University of All.

So not a mill, not a predatory school. Yeah, an Ivy League. Ivy League created the first ISA cohort, but there was a flaw in how they did it. They did it on a group-wide basis. So the entire class was responsible. It was an entire class pool. Well, so that was the failure of the Yale experiment, and everyone says, everyone acknowledges it was a failed experiment. But the clause that actually made it fail other than being a group cohort was they let the high earners buy out from the ISA for a denominal price.

So all the high earning students bought out of the contract and it left nothing but the lower owners, freeloaders. Yeah, I'll say it. Freeloaders. Right. We have those, right? So it was a failure of an experiment. That was the second incarnation of ISAs. The recent ISA experiences within the past five years, and it's on an individual basis, and the way it should be, it's linked to your individual performance. Schools are using at Purdue University is the most well-known school using it.

It's also been adopted by trade schools, skill-based learning, upskilling, re-skilling, and coding boot camps. The reason that ISAs works so well with skills-based training is that I think it's fair to say if you go to Yale or Harvard, you know you're going to get a job. The diploma is worth, maybe it's not worth the price of admission, but you know you're going to get a job offer. The best of this week in startups is brought to you by Clavio is the E-Colm, commerce marketing platform that helps brands build relationships with memorable email and SMS messages. Today, more than 50,000 brands like Living Proof, Hint, and Chubbies, choose Clavio to help them grow. Get started with a free trial at clavio.com slash twist. That's KLAV-I-O-O-com slash twist. LinkedIn jobs.

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