Lessons & inspirations from the 2011 Stanford BASES entrepreneurial bootcamp

There’s a handful of inflection points throughout one’s professional career that meaningfully make a collective difference over time that compound in value. Whether it be meeting one specific person or collection of people, landing a particular job, hitting an entrepreneurial milestone, and so on.

In the Spring of 2011, I attended the second annual invite only Stanford Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) and Princeton Business Today entrepreneurial bootcamp hosted in Palo Alto, CA where ~50 student entrepreneurs gathered to refine their concepts and learn from some of the best. At the time I was a senior at Boston University and was attempting to build a marketplace that facilitated college student-focused apartment rentals. This was all right around the time I was contemplating foregoing a career in finance, in part motivated by how captivating the promise of smartphones was and my early curiosity in learning how to build web and mobile products following the AppStore’s launch. I decided to apply to this conference and before I knew it I was on a flight to visit California for the very first time. A few weekends ago I came across the bootcamp booklet and some of my notes on each of the working sessions. It was complete nostalgia.

Some of the relationships I was able to establish and some of the learnings I was able to come away with during this trip were instrumental to my development as a builder and entrepreneur within the technology ecosystem. It’s incredible to reflect on some of the folks I met and see what they have gone on to do! In this piece, I outline a few of those learnings and inspirations gained as many of them happen to still hold true and mirror advice I have gone on to give entrepreneurs and peers of mine. It’s quite cathartic to reflect on a lot of this!

Below I also highlight some of the amazing folks who attended this conference. Please note that some of my highlights are based on notes over 12 years old — so there may be slight errors!

Learning #1 from my first ever VC pitch, be weary of regulatory grey areas!

I had never met a VC before attending this conference and didn’t fully understand what they did at the time. Roelof Botha of Sequoia Capital was a speaker and also hosted one of the networking evenings at the multi-day event. For the product I was building, I did not fully appreciate how difficult it was to natively build out a payment processor (this is before Stripe existed and Braintree’s APIs were lackluster) nor did I know what money transmitter licenses were. Within three minutes of speaking with Roelof, he made it clear why I should stay away from being labeled as a money transmitter. The primary learning here is to know your use case well enough to understand the underlying regulatory grey area, especially in seemingly unprecedented (digital money transfer over the web) territory.

Learning #2, prioritize the uncomfortable things in life as they force the most change and opportunity!

Marissa Mayer was the VP of Location & Local Services at the time at Google, which she had been with since her post-grad Stanford graduation. She presented at this event on one of her biggest learnings early on in her career, which was centered around what to do after she graduated from Stanford. Nearing her graduation, Marrisa was leaning toward the more popular, traditional jobs (14 job offers total, large corporate, consulting, finance, etc.), but one of her professors pressed her to consider working for two Ph.D. students who they considered to be on a different wavelength of brilliance. After an evening of not being able to sleep, she took a leap of faith to join Google as employee number 20 in 1999.

At the time, in April 2011, I was also on the fence about whether I wanted to truly go all in on building “tech stuff” instead of taking a cushy finance job. Marissa helped motivate me to take a plunge very early on in my career to pave “my own way”.

Learning #3, network effects can be extremely powerful in digital businesses, especially those targeting consumers

Konstantin Guericke was one of the earliest pioneers of online network effects. Many are usually quick to think of Myspace, Facebook, and early messaging apps as being the earliest proven use cases of network effects. In reality, LinkedIn was one of the prime examples of how a network effect could build you a quasi-perpetual moat earlier than most. He broke down a lot of his learnings along the way of figuring out what would get users to promote the service to others.

I remember this was quite inspiring and interesting early on. It drove me to think about it in the context of something I was already generally fascinated by — the ubiquity of smartphones and, in particular, how the AppStore was driving a lot of this in a highly uniform way. If network effects were creating immense, overnight scaled value on desktop applications, imagine the high growth and scale potential of a smartphone app……(my co-founders and I later went on to launch a series of mobile products that reached scale, most notably Fam).

Learning #4, don’t compromise on time spent, and build for stickiness!

Garry Tan, at the time, was working on Posterous and hosted a working session on things he wished he had known years earlier as a builder. Some of the things that stick with me to this day include building products that can be used over and over and always being well intentioned by those around the table. When spending time with customers or any external party in building a product, be sure to always either be learning something new or having the opportunity to complete a sale, otherwise, you’re probably not maximizing your time.

Miscellaneous mentions of student entrepreneurs I also met who inspired me in different ways, some remaining friends I collaborate with to this day

1. Joseph Lau was my gracious dorm room host, letting me sleep on his dorm room floor for a few evenings through the event! I recall some late night chats about the material at the conference and what we were both respectively working on. This went on to develop into a 13+ year friendship with him, and later on his co-founder, Nikil, as we continued the tradition of having me sleep on his couch through my visits to SF over the years. Joe and Nikil went on to build one of the most important developer tooling companies today, Alchemy, and I can proudly say they are very supportive 186 Ventures LPs today.

2. Peter Reinhardt was the first person I met at the conference as I sat next to him on the flight to SF and later ended up spending time with him at the conference. I recall his suspense thinking of whether he would get into the Y Combinator for his project, ClassMetric (later rebranded as Segment and sold to Twilio). Peter has gone on to make a meaningful impact on saving our planet with his current work on Charm Industrial. Beyond the conference, he inspired me early on in follow up chats in Cambridge to push my technical abilities.

3. Liz Wessel was assigned to the same group I was in and we participated in a number of working sessions together. She went on to build a great company called, WayUp, and we recently caught up for coffee in SF!

4. Max Novendstern was an undergrad at Harvard and was also in several of the working sessions I was a part of. Max went on to found multiple companies working on noble problem sets, Worldcoin and Mana.

5. Sunil Nagaraj was exiting his startup at the time, Triangulate, and had recently moved into the VC world. He gave a great workshop on simplifying business model goals for internet companies and focused on LTV > CAC. Some of my earliest learnings of conversion funnels and unit economics pertaining to online businesses came from this session. Sunil has now gone off to start a great seed stage VC firm, Ubiquity, based in Palo Alto.

It is always interesting to think about how relationships that may seem fleeting at the time can go on to leave long-lasting learnings and in some cases develop into life-long friendships. Much of the tech professional I’ve become today can be attributed to various facets of the 2011 Stanford BASES & Princeton Business Today entrepreneurial bootcamp.

If you attended this and want to connect, be sure to ping me!