I was admittedly sick for the first portion of the event, but attempted to watch it from my bed on justin tv. However, bing completely miserable, tired, and between the sheets, it was quite difficult to let anything sink in. Until DHH came on. (Here are the minutes to his speech )

Couple of things have really resonated with me.

1) Starting a business isn’t rocket science, as long as you don’t aim at somehow getting a lot of users and cashing out to retire. Most entrepreneurs he talks to today has focused too heavily on that.

2) Focus on solving your own problems. Your problems, like mine, are probably not unique. In the Fortune 5million world, it’s not out of touch to get 0.01% of that market. Do the math. Heck, maybe I should take my own advice sometimes.

3) Above all, don’t waste time — shorten your work days. This pushes you to be productive with whatever time you do have, and at the same time, you don’t have to waste your day. This brings bad bad memories of a summer quarter in which I took about 2.5 times the full-time units in one quarter. Least to say, I do not recommend this as I did a lot of work on the pooper, hauled a 15 pound backpack around all day, and ate all my meals in classrooms. This also reminds me of what the four hour work week had to say about productivity.

4) Bringing up Zappos as a business who has started out by making customers first.

Very traditional business values.

—–

Other awesome entries:

Mentioned at the talk was Fooled by Randomness .

Young man vs old man’s business models , insight on our different takes on the business world as structured by one’s life experiences.  A damn good read!

How working for the big corporation is becoming increasingly more like a trap. NYtimes . With a good comparison of wages & situations of today vs about a decade ago. (but, you know, this is nothing new.)

In more interesting news, it seems like Advertisement is the new porn now.  Although, I’m not convinced the market is saturated just yet.