September is always an interesting month in Silicon Valley. Students are moving into their Stanford dorms, creating a familiar buzz around Palo Alto - all the while livening up the San Francisco weekends. The summer's perfect high 70s weather starts to taper along with the sun, once again demanding Silicon Valley's timeless fashion piece: the hoodie.
It also happens to be one Valley's most exciting and insightful months because of a phenomenon found nowhere else in the world: Burning Man. After a week of physical, emotional, and intellectual challenges and celebrations, many of the brightest innovators in the Bay return from their playa pilgrimage inspired, hopeful, and totally drained from a sort of post-apocalyptic utopia. The same utopia just happens to have inspired companies like Solar City and Google.
Back here in the real world, September brought a lot of great ideas from similarly inspired writers. This month, we learned about everything from how to really explore Silicon Valley, to how you can should scheme to get hired at your dream startup, to the dynamic male-female duos that have shaped the Valley.
Check out our 10 favorite pieces from the blog from late August & September:
X Meets Y: The Gamechanging Male-Female Tech Duos of Past & Present
Twain Liu is a brilliant inventor, technologist -- and a proud woman of the startup world. By the time she caught the DreamForce women's panel, she had already been talking and writing about women in the tech world - but this event flop would be the straw that broke the camel's back. What Twain crafted in response was refreshing: instead of a pointed complaint, she compiled a historical celebration of female-male innovator duos, from the first programmers (Ada Lovelace) to the latest in AI researchers. If you've been dreaming of a more diverse tech world - and we definitely have - Twain paints the picture of progress that should inspired all our teams and projects to become not just more inclusive, but more innovative.
Steve Blank's Guide to the Real Silicon Valley
It has been our great privilege to welcome the creator of the lean startup movement, Steve Blank, to Startup Grind in a handful of cities around the world, and now as a contributing author to the blog.
His first piece is one of my favorites: a true hacker's or hustler's guide to diving in - for real - into the startup scene of Silicon Valley. Far from the shallow Google or Facebook tours, Steve's guide helps new arrivals truly understand Silicon Valley by leading with a first principle: the Valley is about the Interactions, not the buildings. As travelers, city dwellers, and hustlers of the Valley, we couldn't agree more.
Like what Steve has to say? Expect more of Steve's classic pieces to appear on the blog, and join us in February to hear Steve in person at the Startup Grind Global Conference.
The Rap Genius Guerilla Marketing Guide
Ever wonder where the writers of HBO's Silicon Valley looked to when hitting writer's block? Forget Pied Piper. I like to think Rap Genius, the Andreessen Horowitz-funded Silicon Valley star child built to annotate rap lyrics (and now, everything else), has been a key inspiration. Never in the history of TechCrunch has so much swag - and sass - been concentrated on stage as during the 2013 TC Disrupt interview with the Rap Genius team. At the heart of this attention economy was none other than Mahbod Moghadam, something like Silicon Valley's own Kanye West: well-intentioned but misunderstood, drawing the eyes (and gasps) of the world. While Mahbod has gone legit to promote his next venture, in this piece "Maboo" gives us one more peek behind the kimono on the tactics that made Rap Genius a household name. You've been warned.
How to Land a Job at a Hot Startup
Steve Dean is nothing short of a superconnector: in his first post, he helped Startup Grind readers level up their own networks with the best strategies and tools for building deep and consistent connections. In his second appearance, Steve draws on his startup work to present one of most important network hacks of all: a definitive guide to getting a startup job - even when you've only got passion to offer and no role formally exists. As someone who has used these exact tactics to land internships and later consulting clients, I can't vouch for his piece enough. There's nothing like experience to transform you into a founder, but working at a startup is a great way to learn how a company grows and keeps moving forward. Steve shows us how to get there.
Your Layman's Guide to Uber's 9th Circuit Appeal, on "Employees or Contractors"
We've loved John Michael Eden's piece not just for the topics, but also for his excruciating detail. During his first dive into startup metrics, readers loved the deep dives into Soylent, Tesla, and Omada Health. For his latest piece, he chose a new, similarly huge target: Uber, and the colossal class action lawsuit that has already shaken the on-demand industry. While Sprig proactively turned its contractors into employees and HomeJoy closed its doors over worker classification regulations, Uber is fighting the matter tooth and nail. If you've ever wanted to see what this battle looks like from the front lines, John has the scoop.
5 Years to Overnight Success, Postmates nears $500M Valuation & 1M Deliveries/Mo
If you swung through the recent Startup Grind in San Francisco, you were in for a treat: Bastian of on-demand super-startup Postmates took us through the twists and turns of founding a three-sided marketplace, and how it was ultimately his users that came up with the idea. This piece was put together by Michael Gasiorek, yours truly, but let's be honest: I've really got to give the headline all the credit. Besides these two stories, one more of my favorite gems includes the story of how Postmates hacked together payments with cash cards - a frequent travel hacker tactic.
Hacker Houses, Homes of the New Renaissance
Whether dancer, chef, writer, or programmer Jim Rohn's now famous "Law of Average" argues that your life becomes the average of the five people with whom you surround yourself. Nowhere is this more pressing than in the startup world, where entrepreneurs become totally accountable for every moment of their time.
Enter hacker houses: group coworking and coliving communities reserved for hackers and hustlers building the future. Whether the residence is an affordably packed house or a luxurious metal box, the main goal is creating an environment of shared growth and momentum - you know, most of the time. Siouxzanna Downs takes us on a deep dive into the people and places where this new Renaissance is happening.
How to Start a Tech Company Without Writing Any Code
At Startup Grind, founders most often ask our team and Directors for three things, in no particular order: investment, promotion, and help finding a technical cofounder. The combo of all three, however, is the most vicious Wantrepreneur misery spiral of all:
You can't build a product without a technical cofounder.
You can't hire a technical cofounder without investment.
You can't get investment without a product.
For non-technical founders, there's but one solution: hustle - and the hustle runs deep in Benji Wakeham's latest post on building your MVP without writing code. There are now more tools than excuses to prototype your products, whether in Keynote or on the web - so Benji focuses on the idea, from validation to execution. If you're stuck in the Wantrepreneur's Spiral, read this post, then get to work.
Want a little extra kick in the butt? Here's one prototype that took a weekend to build and will keep you honest.
Unicorns Aboard the Ark: Building Companies to Do Good Well
What if entrepreneurs solved humanity's most important problems, rather than attacking glamorous Silicon Valley inconveniences? From Nnaemeka's The Unexotic Underclass to Silicon Valley's new obsession with Effective Altruism, a new chorus of founders and investors are getting tired of social networks for pets and Uber clones, demanding progress rather than flashy "innovation". Denise Terry is close to this problem, herself tackling both a social issue and a valuable business sector. If you're looking for a little inspiration of problems beyond the Bay Area bubble, get to know Terry's Ark Businesses.
3 Big Strategies Your Startup Can Steal from Inc. 500 CEOs
While the founding stories of companies like Facebook and Twitter are trending from water coolers to movie screens, many of the world's biggest fastest growing companies often go unnoticed - but they don't escape Inc's 5000 List. From telecom to healthcare, unsexy industries are growing as quickly as 25,000% year over year into unicorns of a breed slightly different from Silicon Valley. Jonathan Clark knows these goliath companies didn't start that way, and that at the helm are founders just like us. So what makes them tick? Check out Jonathan's piece to make the tactics of the world's fastest growing companies yours.
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September is cool, but Silicon Valley doesn't miss a beat. As October rolls around, Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Techstars will be closing their applications and starting new batches of hopeful Unicorns (and the new hotness, Dragons). Venture capitalists with remaining funds will be looking for last-minute deals before the holiday season rolls around, while big companies like Apple should be delivering a spike in news around product launches and sales in time for early holiday shoppers.
Oh, and we'll be just around 5 months away from the Startup Grind Global Conference, which - speaking as a nerd and entrepreneur - is looking to be bonkers. Keep your eyes peeled for new speaker announcements to join Steve Blank and Clayton Christensen.
But that's just us, and that's just here -- what's are you excited about in your ecosystem?
What's going on within your venture?
Learn or read anything cool this month?
Let us know in the comments -- we've got a long-running helpful streak.