June 106 cancelled in favor of toga party

June's speaker bailed, and I'm not in the mood to line up another one. What say we party instead? I'm thinking somewhere in Palo Alto, people throw in a few bucks, and we invite all the 106ers at one time. Who's in?

Thank you CommerceNet, hello Orrick

I want to thank CommerceNet again for their very generous sponsorship and hosting in the last 4 months. Rob Rodin in particular has been a good friend to 106 Miles, and a great mentor to me and Rifkin. We knew nothing about running a networking group when we started out in January, and now we know nothing++. :-)

So we've been wandering the Valley looking for a new home that meets our somewhat unusual requirements. To our great delight and relief, the law firm of Orrick Herrington and Sutcliffe -- specifically their new Emerging Companies Group -- has offered to be our host this month! Thanks in particular to Stephen Venuto, a partner in that group and the only lawyer I know cool enough to use PHP. :-)

Zod says not to worry about failure.

Paul Graham just uploaded the transcript of his 106-friendly May 2nd talk, "Hiring is Obsolete".

My favorite passage:

Even if your startup does tank, you won't harm your prospects with employers. To make sure I asked some friends who work for big companies. I asked managers at Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Cisco and Microsoft how they'd feel about two candidates, both 24, with equal ability, one who'd tried to start a startup that tanked, and another who'd spent the two years since college working as a developer at a big company. Every one responded that they'd prefer the guy who'd tried to start his own company. Zod Nazem, who's in charge of engineering at Yahoo, said:

I actually put more value on the guy with the failed startup. And you can quote me!

So there you have it. Want to get hired by Yahoo? Start your own company.

I also really like this passage:

I can tell you what tends to be missing when people lack experience. I've said that every startup needs three things: to start with good people, to make something users want, and not to spend too much money. It's the middle one you get wrong when you're inexperienced.

This is particularly true for people building Web-based applications.

LinkedIn for entrepreneurial engineers...

We've seen the debate unfold over time, both for and against LinkedIn.

I do believe the SimplyHired LinkedIn service takes us one step closer to LinkedIn being useful to entrepreneurial engineers, by allowing engineers to search for job openings based on specific skills, and then use their connections to facilitate networking their way into jobs.

But there are still plenty more features that can (and will) be added to make LinkedIn more useful for entrepreneurial engineers...

LinkedIn Group launches

The 106 Miles group launched on LinkedIn today! You can use it to connect with and look up the backgrounds of people you meet at our meetings. I'm always surprised what I learn about colleagues when I can see their resumes in detail -- like I just found out that last month's speaker Mike Rowehl worked at a teeny tiny startup with another friend of mine.

Send email to invites@106miles.org if you want to join, and we'll send you instructions for the somewhat complex process.