An Article Cal E Week Chokes On

By Larry Chiang

In the same way I like dogs and cats. I like Cal. I really like Cal. As founder of “Cal E Week”, #CalEweek, I hope to meet you.

I’m breaking all sorts of rules writing this:

	Larry Chiang (@LarryChiang)
6/4/14, 9:03 AM Things Stanford did to go from “Top 50” to Undisputed #1 can help you as a first time founder.

Remember, I went to Illinois and vomit a li’l in my mouth that private school kids get every advantage. World class athletic facilities. Alum support. The Buck Cardinal club. Big budgets!!

Disclosure: I’m a Buck Cardinal club member.

When Stanford recruited me (the first time for baseball), the school was at-best top 20 in the way that your friends friend quotes their crap college having the #1 program of a major with no ROI. The football program was a joke. It had Olympic swimmer and Olympic water polo.

In Naperville, where I’m from, we thought water polo was played in a 6′ pool and swimming was a haze because we had to ride the bus to nnhs (we shared a pool with the rival high school)

Here is a barf-tastic historical examination that will double as preparation for you as first-time-founder. Remember. Entrepreneurship professors pour over these blog posts so you should put pen to paper and *ingest*. Yup, just swallow it—

[Swallow Point #1]

Be open source cuz you kinda don’t have a choice!!

“How to do what Stanford does without having to pay Stanford tuition.”

The entire college has every morsel of knowledge loaded up via the Internet. Pay zero tuition. All-the-knowledge.

As a first time founder, YOU MUST do a slideshare, “How to do what Muck9 does without having the hire ‘Mexican Underground Credit Knowledge 9′”. Edit-find-replace, “Muck9” with your new startup

Pay attention to this pattern: The most closed entities suck. Remember, if you’re in stealth…, everyone thinks “partial retard, fully a newbie”. Muck9 is my next startup with a clear gameplan I have openly blogged here. My ideas are ok. My execution is legendary.

Ya. Can’t. Stop. Me. (That should be your attitude too 🙂 Now execute, “How to do what xamarin does without having to hire Xamarin” (Obvi replace with your startups name. See the duck9 slide-by-slide-mentorship

[Swallow Point #2]

Engineer up a tidal wave of Asian momentum.

VCs used to ask, “What is your Asia strategy. Now we all ask, “How Asian are you?”

Look no further than Bay Area eateries. It’s actually impossible to eat out for a week and not eat fusion (aka 50% Asian) and ingest a gallon of soy sauce.

Translation for first time founder: Be a “chinaman chinaman, sitting on a fence

Makin’ $600k outta fifteen cents”

Engineer up a tidal wave of Asian self-funded hustle. Remember Leland recognized the productivity of an Asian with a wheelbarrow and a shovel. You have “two iPhones and a microphone (aka a Mac)”

[Swallow Point #3]

Host the best events and make money doing it. [insert a million historical citations here]

As a first-time founder, host 11 minute events replicating the pattern “After Party”. There is a techcrunch post on this. Pay particularly close attention to the business recipe “MPAF” (it’s only at TechCrunch, I didn’t put it in my book or anywhere else)

An eleven minute party where your Eventbrite links to your wordpress links to your Plancast, links to your YouTube links to your landing page is a method to make money while you make money.

[Swallow Point #4]

Tease the VCs.

Stanford does this magnificently. It teases VCs. Remember if you’re a bull looking at a field of bitches, you stroll down the hill (so you can bang em all). You don’t run down the hill.

And you don’t overly show your enthusiasm for female cows on The Farm by stampeding down the hill!! Go slow. Make them all wanna bang u

(Confession: This is admittedly a male perspective. If you’d like clearly female mentorship, see my Women 2.0 content. Also google my “gender reversal entrepreneur exercises”)

First time founders, VCs need to be teased and fluffed. Go back and execute Point #3 and #2, then text me. I’ll text you back, I swear.

[Swallow Point #4]

The whopper.

Encourage people to steal your content. Reduce barriers. Cross the chasm from the right (CTCFTR)

As a first time founder, no amount of patent protection protects. If a fortune 100 company like Nalco Chemical wants a long and drawn out battle for your “Internal Nuclear fission engine that bypasses use of steam for power plants”, you’re losing that legal battle 11 times out of 10.

Instead, do [Swallow Point #1] and mentor them to “do it in house”

I mentored the engineering school {+ placement office?} and talked about street smarts and how we females need to transition from “I-Dont-Know-to CEO”. Street smarts I simple read and regurgitated

My mentor’s Mark McCormacks book.

Like all alpha leaders, they said “We don’t wanna do this in-house. U come teach it.”

That’s how I ended up teaching

ENGR145’s Anchor Concept: Lemonade and Gua Gua Guacamole

It moves you to the right on the entrepreneur bell curve

At a crap college like the University of Cal, they’d say (internally to themselves :-), the Cal administrators would say: “We sorely need this but we would rather throw up roadblocks and preserve power”

As a first time founder, get political and just secretly like my scandalous insight.

[Swallow Point #6]

It’s a video for women ONLY