How to Do Startup CPR

By Larry Chiang

Med school kids practice on dead people. These residents carve up 10-20 cadavers before they're even allowed to execute surgery on something with an active heartbeat.

So as resident University of Texas' entrepreneurs-in-residence, does it not make sense to practice on something dead?! We should practice on the dead so there is only upside.

The startup fatality rate is stratospheric. This post aims to disclose how we can get a clear jump here in Austin. We can absolutely out-innovate Silicon Valley. This post serves as your 180 day head start.

Let's examine the oh-so-nueva-bougie-bougie "postmortem". It is a blog post on Medium that goes viral. Cuz everyone likes to rubberneck a train crash? Anyway the postmortem on Plancast made its way to TechCrunch http://bit.ly/mhendrickson711

Here is where the practice comes in!

Practice executing a handful of "signature Mark McCormack business recipes". I've curated the recipe steps into "hashtags" that reveal stepwise HOW TO EXECUTE. For example, "Plancast" was brought back from the dead right here in Austin using these recipes

– #ExternalAPI

– #LTMVP

– #CTCFTR

(I'm sorry I'm not sorry for speaking in hashtagged business subroutines. If you're an athlete, think of this as play-calling)

Another postmortem example is "99 dresses" #99dresses

	Asse9 Austin Secret (@asse9)
8/27/14, 10:47 AM Curious about the @LarryChiang #99dresses effort at #mbfw #nyfw cc@paulg #PostmortemsArePostpartums bit.ly/ndurkin710

It died

99dresses died and all the powerful y-combinators couldn't put the pieces back together. So let us (me and you!) execute a couple YC partner blog posts and the above "signature business recipes" that my mentor gave me…

– read Paul Graham's post "Do Things That Dont Scale" http://bit.ly/pgrahamCh6

– Jessica Livingston's http://bit.ly/jlivingston710

– Sam Altman's http://bit.ly/saltman710

Before you think I'm off the deep end, know that med school students practice on cadavers all-the-time.

I'm "Larry" & as a fellow Austinite, I wanted to give you a 180 day head start :-). All y'all will be 180 days ahead of Stanford Engineering and YC because we three are at the pinnacle of best startup practices.

This future practice method and future technology entrepreneur method rests squarely on my two Austin mentors. One is from my baseball world. Let me repeat, this entrepreneur practice derives from Austin Texas.

UT baseball coach Augie Garrido. He edited football practice and then incorporated rhythm into baseball practice.

UT film school stand-out: Robert Rodriguez. He edited film before he shot film. Directing is like being a founder. Editing is like fixing up the crap that the director shot ;-P

Disclosure: I studied film in the LA area and financially benefited from being in a George Clooney movie.

Let us practice entrepreneurship and StartUpery (bob metcalfe's word

Before directing, you should edit.

Before you co-found, you should edit.

	Larry Chiang (@LarryChiang)
10/11/14, 10:08 AM Director<~Editor. Founder<~ Repo Co-founder<~Fixer Founder<-ABC (assignment benefit creditors) Founder<~Editor #CS183Do cc #CS183B #PRPRPI