On a panel at TechCrunch40 with Netscape founder Marc Andreesen, YouTube founder Chad Hurley, and Yahoo founder David Filo (moderated by Sequoia Capital VC Mike Moritz), Andreesen and Hurley trade reminiscences about their first business. For Hurley, it was selling paintings on his front yard when he was five years old (later, in high school, he tried to sell knives.
For Andreesen, it was a classic lemonade stand, also when he was in kindergarten in rural Wisconsin. But he made one critical error:
My strategic miscalculation was that my house was 10 miles out of town at the end of a road.
On what makes a good startup idea, Andreesen says:
For a startup to have a big enough opportunity, it must have an idea sufficiently crazy that a big company won't do it. So it is that one in a thousand that is both crazy and correct.
And Hurley on transitioning from founder to CEO:
You try to make that transition from building the product to building the business. You need to get the right people on board to scale.
Coming from a design background, it was how do you find the right piece?. If you do get the right people in place, you are able to survive.
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