Defining your Users
Saturday 9/20 10AM to 11AMHow do I define my target users and their needs? The second and most important exercise in the Inception phase of the Skool OS. This exercise helps your team create dynamic profiles of who your target users are including, names, gender, income, marital status, what their goals are and what needs they have from you and your product. The end result is 3 to 5 user profiles that will serve as the foundation for the creation of your application. If you were to do only one exercise in the entire Skool OS, this would be it.

Defining Your Business Goals
Sunday 9/21 10AM to 11AMHow do I set and prioritize my business goals? This exercise defines your goals and assign priorities. It divides your goals into 3 bucket – 1) Revenue, 2) Awareness and 3) Efficiency. This exercise is important because it helps a team express their priorities without lengthy arguments and conflict. This and it’s two preceding exercises are the foundation of The Skool OS. This “trinity” of exercises allows you to collaboratively define who you say you are, (Brand) who you are providing value to, (Your User) and what you hope to accomplish for your business (Your Goals).

Behavioral Economics For Startups

Saturday 9/20 2PM to 3PM

You will leave this class with a whole new perspective on marketing and distribution & a few distribution ideas to experiment with in your product.

This Session was originally presented tothe Peter Thiel 20 Under 20 Fellowship Retreat and this will be the second time I’ve ever presented it in the general public.

You will learn

• A basic overview of behavioral economics and why this disciplne is hugely important for startups and products.
• Specific examples of how these abstract behavioral economics principles are tested and used in products & the business world.
• Some personal experiments how we applied these principles and the results they’ve generated.

Throughout the whole class you will have time to share your own perspectives, ask questions, and discuss these principles with the group.

Over the past fifteen years, Steve has directed strategic initiatives for leading technology, consumer, and entertainment companies including AFLAC, AMD, BEA, Disney Pictures, HP, NetApp, Netflix, Sun, TiVo, TIBCO, Twentieth Century Fox, VISA, and Universal Pictures.

As Director of Strategic Services for Coakley Heagerty, he’s led branding projects for Charles Schwab, Rambus, Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, and several divisions of Cisco Systems. In addition, Steve has written executive video presentations or a number of technology leaders, including Steve Ballmer, John Chambers, Mark Hurd, and Dan Warmenhoven. A Silicon Valley native, he was the 2010-2011 Web Strategy Forum Manager for the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association.

High technology entrepreneur and investor with 30 years experience in Silicon Valley, Canada and Europe. Founder Gavilan Corporation, designed and marketed the first notebook computer. Founder Micro-ware Ltd, author of micro chess, the fist game software marketed for personal computers, Chairman of Visicorp – the developers of the original “killer app” VisiCalc – the first spreadsheet application, and much more.

G Stearns an entrepreneur and venture capitalist, with more than 25 years in high-tech. An inventor with patents for developing artificial intelligence technology. Leader of global programs at Hewlett Packard for more than 10 years. His pursuit and advocacy for innovation led to opportunities where Stearns consulted on technology for Fortune 500 companies. He has consulted with industry leaders on technology, such as Bill Gates of Microsoft, and made presentations at workshops for MIT Media Labs.Stearns & More Capital is doing Fundraising & Business Development in Silicon Valley & Hollywood.

Owner, GRL Games Graeme is a 30 year industry veteran who has worked on everything from a TRS-80 to a Xbox 360. In the early nineties he pioneered CD-ROM gaming with the breakthrough title The 7th Guest, he went on to become the lead designer on Quake III Arena and Halo Wars. Graeme started GRL Games in December 2010 to focus on bringing entertaining titles to the iPhone, iPad and Mac Desktop.

A full-stack developer with experience developing for the Internet on 3 continents. From tiny startups to Yahoo! and anywhere in between. Currently at Twitter as part of the Growth team. Hands on Ruby, PHP, JavaScript coder who is equally at home in Emacs on a remote server as a well as in a modern IDE on a shiny MacBook Pro.

David Hoffman has two professions and two passions. He is one of America’s premier documentary filmmakers and he has been a lifelong strategic communications hands-on consultant for more than a dozen Fortune 500 and more than 50 startup companies. Hoffman’s 175 reality films ( mostly sponsored by corporations) have appeared on primetime PBS including Nova and The American Experience, Turner Broadcasting, Discovery, and The History Channel.

His films have won every major national and international video communications award.Hoffman has also worked with senior executives at companies like AT&T, United Technologies, Mobil, Aetna, Sony, Google, Amazon and Verizon Wireless on strategic and tactical communication issues such as target audience positioning and key messaging. These days, Hoffman is working with several major corporations and startups on how to take advantage of Web video and especially YouTube to reach and motivate target audiences.

Patrick Reilly, J.D. is the Founder or the Intellectual Property Society, Associate Publisher of the Personal Data Journal and a practicing intellectual property attorney. Patrick has a special commitment to encourage civic engagement with the evolution of Patent Law, personal data rights and Internet identity.

His law practice encompasses patent prosecution, creative rights management, start-up formation issues, trademark prosecution, copyright protection and trade secret policy. Patrick is a graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Russian Language Studies, and has earned a BS in Sociology from the State University of New York, a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Toledo and a JD from Concord University. He is a member of the U.S. Patent Bar and the California State Bar. Patrick’s personal interests include linguistics, open water swimming and (remedying the lack of) public service media.

Lloyd likes to make things. He has been founding CTO of many successful startups including llooker, Readyforce, Luminate, LiveOps, and Commerce Tools (acquired by Netscape). Lloyd’s expertise includes data analytics and business Intellegece (llooker, Borland and more), crowd sourcing and behavioral economics (LiveOps, Readyforce and DMoz.org), and programming languages (llooker, Netscape and Borland and Sophco).

Stephen Beitzel has been developing software for over 20 years. He’s worked at all stages of the product lifecycle, from startup through iterative improvement and maintenance to end-of-life support. He has
experience in large and small environments and has worked at startups and established companies. He has over ten years’ experience developing high-performance Java server applications for LinkedIn and Netflix. He is currently working in Perl for San Jose State University Research Foundation, in partnership with NASA.

Creative visionary with over twenty years of experience producing successful marketing solutions for some of the world’s most recognized brands. Expert in concept and strategy development, with a proven ability to motivate and inspire creative teams to deliver outstanding creative work.

Craig Vachon wrote his first business plan at 12 years old, sold his first company at 25 years old, and has been a relentless entrepreneur/angel investor ever-since. To date, Craig has raised $1.17B in PE/VC investment for 14 companies in seven countries.

Craig is currently supporting a portfolio company as their corporate development leader. He joined AnchorFree in 2011 but has been an investor and advisor to the company since 2005. AnchorFree is the world’s most popular consumer VPN providing security, privacy and freedom to over 60M web surfers. Prior to AnchorFree, Craig was Chief Commercial Officer at Immersion [NASDAQ: IMMR] and he has held leadership positions at major mobile operators, as well as software, services, and technology licensing companies. He was CEO and president of Varatouch, an intellectual property components and software company focused on the UX for consumer electronics. Before Varatouch, he was CEO and chairman of Sirenic, Inc., a mobile information access software company, [both Varatouch and SIrenic were sold at multiples of VC investments].

Earlier in his career, Vachon was chief operating officer of Nextel Int’l; vice president of sales and marketing of Birla AT&T in India; and director of new product development at AT&T Wireless Services (formerly McCaw Cellular). He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Business Communication, both from Emerson College.

Jose Caballer is the Chief Education Officer at The Skool, an online education movement that aims to teach the standard process for successful web projects. He is the product of a mother who was a teacher and a father who was a preacher mixed in with a graphic design education at Art Center College of Design.He took a front row seat in the .COM boom working at Razorfish, one of the first digital agencies where he went from designer to Design Director of the Los Angeles office by the tender age of 28.

In 2001, he left Razorfish to start The Groop – a boutique digital agency that allowed him to work with Al Gore, Jamie Oliver, Thomas Keller of The French Laundry, Alice Waters of Chez Panisse/The Edible School Yard Project, and corporate clients such as Disney, News Corp’s Myspace and over 30 start-ups including ThisNext, Savings.com, Storkbrokers and Hunuku.Today, Jose combines his 15 years of experience as a web designer and his passion for teaching to share the gospel of Web Design to over 20,000 people in his popular weekly show This Week in Web Design, which is broadcast live and posted on YouTube and iTunes every week. He has also helped train hundreds of students, freelancers, entrepreneurs and professionals at weekend workshops, LIVE webinars and online videos at The Skool.

Chris McCann is an entrepreneur, writer, and a lifelong student of psychology & philosophy. He has led the entrepreneurial programs at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, co-founded StartupDigest, helped start TEDx Silicon Valley, a mentor for the Thiel Foundation 20 Under 20 program and advisor to StartX, and advisor for Singularity Universities Graduate Studies Program.As the co-founder of the StartupDigest, Chris is recognized worldwide for creating a new group structure for its 300,000 member community and thinking about events as an entry point to new communities.

Nadine Schaeffer is a Principal at Cloudforest Design and a user experience professional with over fifteen years experience planning and building internet, mobile and desktop applications. She has aided many companies large and small launch successful software products. Her clients and employers have included Apple, Oracle, Citrix, Fiserv, Juniper Networks, the New York Post, Sun, E*Trade, Verizon and Yahoo.In that other life that is miraculously free of work, Nadine kayaks, hikes, bikes, sketches daily and travels the world. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA with Cloudforest Design principal Jason Wehmhoener and a pack of furry creatures.

My goals: membership of advisory board for tech companies. Consulting on building a tech company and online marketing in general. Bootstrapped companies excite me.I’m a software entrepreneur, and have been since the age of 14. I have much experience building software/tech/internet companies, designing products, acquiring customers and engineering an exit. I consider myself a do-er, someone who worries as much about tactics as strategy.Specialties

Building bootstrapped companies, designing good software, walking both sides of the developer and sales aspects of companies.

Sol Lipman is an experienced entrepreneur and mobile developer who recently joined AOL as a part of the company’s acquisition of Rally Up, maker of the popular Rally Up and FacePlant mobile applications.

At AOL, Sol is focused on bringing killer mobile-first applications to market and identifying mobile opportunities for existing AOL properties.Sol was the founder and CEO of Rally Up and also co-founded 12Seconds.tv, an online video sharing platform. Prior to that, he co-founded Sticky Inc, a flash memory-based operating environment that was acquired by DeviceVM. During the swinging dotcom days, he founded thedigs network, which was acquired by idrive and is credited as being one of the first social networks.

Bob brings years of software industry management expertise to productOps. Prior to cofounding productOps, he spent two years at Krugle, where he built and managed the team that created a vertical code gathering and information management tool designed for software developers.

In 2001, Bob co-founded Open Field Software, developers of the award-winning Ella for Spam Control anti-spam product.In 1990, he co-founded Thuridion, a commercial software consulting firm. During his tenure as Thuridion’s CEO, he led the growth of the organization to over 50 people as it completed more than 500 projects for companies like Symantec, Microsoft, Adobe, Hewlett-Packard and American Express. Bob’s passions include quantitative analysis, usability, and software aesthetics.

Alex Cowan is the founder & CTO of Leonid Systems, a leader in enterprise 2.0 solutions for cloud communications. He is also the author of ‘Starting a Tech Business’ (Wiley, 2012). Alex has always had a strong interest in helping others distill, understand, and apply technology to their business. His role as a mentor and advisor to other startup’s led to his writing ‘Starting a Tech Business’ with the team at Wiley.

Tatyana Kanzaveli held executive roles in number of startups [CEO of Getwear, VP of Sales and Marketing at Kaidara, etc] and multinationals [PwC, Deloitte].

She is Investments Director at Phenomen Ventures, mentor in residence at 500Startups, board member at number of startups, frequent speaker at national and international conferences on social media, marketing. Tatyana is also the organizer of TEDxBayArea. You can follow her on Twitter @glfc

Bill is solo corporate lawyer based in Santa Cruz, California. After years of advising entrepreneurs, he took the plunge and started my own solo corporate law practice. His mission is to provide entrepreneurs with a level of corporate and transactional service that goes toe-to-toe with the big national law firms (but at rational prices), and in doing so, to give entrepreneurs the tools and backbone they need to close transactions that are durable, smart, fair and maximize value.

Prior to forming Richter Law Offices in 2002, he practiced corporate law for five years at each of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C., and Shearman & Sterling LLP. I served as Chief of the Privatization Division within USAID’s Moscow Mission in the mid-90’s.

He holds a B.A. from Yale College, a Masters from Harvard (Russian) and earned my J.D. from New York University School of Law. I serve on two non-profit Boards, Shakespeare Santa Cruz (at UCSC) and Georgiana Bruce Kirby Preparatory School, an independent 6-12 school in Santa Cruz. He intentionally keeps a low web-profile (not even a website), as he prefers to meet clients and maintain relationships the ‘old-fashioned way’. You can reach him by e-mail at bill@richterlaw.com, and at 831-458-2100.

Tyler Young is a commercial artist and entrepreneur with experience producing professional journalism, action photography, illustration, typography, information and ecommerce web sites, product and brand name creation and identity design, and more.Having founded and sold two indie brands since 2000, he is currently co-founding his third venture, Plastic Trophy, focusing on emerging trends in the digital lifestyle revolution.