FounderConference: Adeo Ressi, Drew Houston, Dave McClure give tips; “90% of you will fail”

Posted by DROdio on Aug 18, 2010 in Lifehacking & Technology |

Another awesome event at the Mountain View Microsoft campus (the last one was the FounderShowcase event) called FounderConference. This was a seven hour marathon event geared towards tech founders, and it featured industry heavyweights Dave McClure and Adeo Ressi, as well as the founder & CEO of Dropbox, Drew Houston and reporters Anthony Ha from VentureBeat, Ryan Singel from WIRED, Chris O’Brien from SJ Mercury News and Hooman Khalili from Alice 97.3FM.

Here are videos from the event – they’re all phenomenal and worth watching.

Adeo Ressi gave a very honest (brutal) assessment on being a founder, and he absolutely tore some entrepreneurs up on stage, but not in a vicious way. He was very constructive about it. Still it’s sobering to watch.

Drew Houston talked about what did and didn’t work (mostly what didn’t) as he was launching Dropbox, and how they were successful in spite of their attempts at buying AdWords and other marketing tactics. He really dug into what has made Dropbox’s growth so phenomenal.

Dave McClure (here are Dave’s slides, also below) railed the audience on what founders typically do wrong, and he wasn’t shy about it. ”90% of you will fail” was his theme for the night. But he also dug into what works, and how his AARRR approach of “Metrics for Pirates” helps startups iterate on what works. ”Get your users to love you or hate you” Dave said, as long as they’re not indifferent. Indifference is the kiss of death, at least if they hate you, you have something to iterate on. A very powerful & awesome presentation.