Rails Hackathon Importance of Hackers

Michael K. Madison
Managing Director
March 19, 2011

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Ventures

Below deal ends in the next month 64% off 1GB Smart machine forever Outperforms EC2: 14x IO, 5x CPU, 3x memory, 100% SLA

www.joyentcloud.com/rails

My background
Nerd roots
Coding in 2nd grade, professional by 6th grade NASA, DoE, SGI, HP, Apple, Lucent, Intrinsic
Game/physics engine, haptics, flight-sim, VLSI, OS dev

Education
Berkeley MBA, Stanford MS EE, UMBC Comp.Eng (#1) Kauffman Fellow, Meyerhoff Scholar, etc.

Dark-side
Cocoon Ventures + Mitsubishi Innovation Kitchen World TaSCforce Society of Kauffman Fellows
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Why am I here?

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History and inspiration

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Georges Doriot
Father of venture capital
Harvard
Student Professor

Brigadier General
Military Planning

American R & D Corp.

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Post WWII Recovery

Venture capital and SMB growth Housing boom Automobile boom

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Robert Solow
Why he inspires us:
Nobel Laureate Tech innovation productivity
Innovation more than R&D

Answers Why startups?

1980-2005 US not productive w/o startups Sustainable job growth

Startups help regardless

Derivative work on success or failure
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Norman Borlaug
Why he inspires us:
Nobel Laureate Green Revolution
Saved > 1.5B lives

Answers Why Crossborder?

Defines need for WTSC

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The Green Revolution

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The future

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Traditional VCs are Farmers

Google John Doerr

Software

Kleiner Perkins

Silicon Valley
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Why not Mad-Scientists?!

CONFIDENTIAL DO deal flow ProprietaryNOT DISTRIBUTE

Future Hacker Cooperative

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Cooperative strength comes from differences

not commonalites

Proof of hacker importance

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Ubiquitous Hackerspace/Events

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Venture Shift Towards Hackers

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VC Shift Towards Hackers

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Thank you!

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