My talk from Webstock. Probably doesn't make a ton of sense without the video of the talk...

1. Lessons from a 40 year old

14. 20s 40s
Work Personal

16. “Stack Overflow and Stack
Exchange have been wildly
successful, but I finally realized
that success at the cost of my
children is not success. It is
failure.”

18. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I just
need a few more minutes on
the computer; then I can play
with you.”

20. “The world is full of ideas that can be executed
with 10 to 20 hours per week, let alone 40. The
number of projects that are truly impossible
unless you put in 80 or 120 hours per week are
vanishingly small by comparison.
This is of course nothing new. We’ve been
playing this bongo drum for years. But every
time I see people crumble and quit from the
crunch-mode pressure cooker, I think what a
shame, it didn’t have to be like that.”

23. Web app building 101
1. Identify something in life that
annoys or delights
2. Build a web app to automate that
3. Make it multi-user, social

28. “Bootstrapped”
“lifestyle business”

31. Taking the long-term view

33. Signed Band Unsigned Band
write music write music
play music play music
record music
produce music
market the band
build a website
book travel
book venues
design merch
sell merch
sell tickets
hire road crew
manage road crew
find openers

42. “There wasn't initially easy
access to venture capital in
L.A. and entrepreneurs had
no choice but to build
profitable business models
from the start”

43. Benefits of a long-term view

51. WWIC?

54. Hire the best, as early as possible

56. Growing slow = thinking small?

57. Short-term thinking/
funding

60. “I imagine your work on
MetaFilter might be similar- and
since you’ve had the good sense
to retain ownership, you are able
to continue to shape your
creation according to what you
think is best. That matters a lot.”

65. Examples