It all looks pretty easy when you see a TC write-up on them and VC business cards sprawled out on the floor, but some interesting back-story from Evan on how LAL got started (from the Startups Open Sourced interview):
"As soon as I graduated from business school I started a company called ProFounder with two cofounders, Jessica Jackley who had started Kiva before, and Dan Mauriello. While doing that, I met my current cofounders for LikeaLittle, Shubham and Prasanna. They had left Microsoft, came to Stanford, and used to hang out there because they were trying to start a company. A mutual friend introduced us and after a month or two we decided to join forces.
So we started ProFounder. I worked there for about six months and then it moved on to L.A and I didn’t want to go to L.A; I decided I wanted to stay in Silicon Valley and do some consumer Internet things. So, Shubham, Prasanna and I came back to Palo Alto, lived together in a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture, slept on the floor, subsisted off of rice, and tried a bunch of stuff until we caught something that worked.
This was January 2010. For several months we just brainstormed; it wasn’t until October that we actually came up with LikeaLittle. We had probably tried 10 ideas before that and they all failed miserably. So, in October 2010, we created a first edition of LikeaLittle.
We’ve been working together for almost a year, but before YC we had not done any fundraising. We were bootstrapping the entire time; we were living in a one-bedroom apartment our entire time together and then for a two month period, [my cofounders] lost their visas, so we had to go and live in India together. So we lived with my cofounder’s family in India and were doing the startup from there. It was interesting, the power would go out all the time and our users were in America so we had to be on U.S. time; all kinds of crazy stuff was happening.
But, in India there were no expenses. The family would make us food and we’d stay with them; we literally had a zero dollar burn rate in India. So that was pretty fantastic; we kind of had an infinite runway. We’ve basically spent the entire year living off of rice and beans and sleeping on the floor, together."
Wow, just wow. This is why I read Hacker News. Three guys living in a single bedroom apartment, sleeping on floors, being forced to move around the world, failing 10 times, and still pushing forward. That's dedication if I've ever heard it, and these guys have just earned my respect a hundred times over. Often times, especially when TC is involved, the startup life seems like fun and games, with a hackathon thrown into the mix here and there. It's obviously not the case, but the media likes to portray it that way.
I wish there were more firsthand accounts like this. Keep up the great work, LAL team!
This was a lot more entertaining than the typical Techcrunch blog spam. They should maybe try to do more things like this "boots on the ground" sort of stuff. I'm so tired of hearing about so-and-so getting funded by so-and-so, that stuff was never interesting. But here we're getting some actual honest content. We get to see a startup doing tech stuff, where and how they work, in their natural habitat.
That aside, these guys kinda look like they're following the Social Network playbook to the T. I wonder how long it'll be until they hire Sean Parker and dilute one of the founders' stake in the company.
I am so glad these guys are happy. I would not be okay working in that environment.
I already have had (and left) a dorm room.
My perfect coding environment is a quiet office, alone, with an awesome view of mountains. High speed internet. Silent computer. Company IM. Garguntuan monitors. On the walls, whiteboard, and a bookshelf somewhere. So, totally not LAL!
This is interesting to me. How can I put this as diplomatically as possible?
I'm glad that there is a culture like this out there. It espouses productivity and gives a real view as to what folks will do in order to try their hand at a serious venture.
Clearly the guys here are aware of exactly what they're doing by putting this whole thing on film. They're happy, they believe in their projects, and they're not ashamed to put this on the record.
I'm older than these guys--late 20's, married, no kids (yet). I just don't see this lifestyle bring very practical for married/family folks. But then again, I've never heard any stories of people other than young singles doing stuff like this. Anyone know of any outliers like this in the valley?
I'm the same age but single, and I applied to LaL but realized that I just don't have the energy anymore to sustain the pace they want. I could've done it at 19, I probably could even have done it at 24, but now that I'm 29, I just can't code for 14 hours a day, let alone 20. (Actually, that's not entirely true - I've pulled 14 hour days for 4-5 day stretches working on a Google doodle or coming up to a launch, but I need like 2 weeks of recovery time afterwards.) Alas, I wasted my twenties on college and 3 failed startups.
It's certainly possible to start a company in your 30s - PG did it, founding ViaWeb at 31 and selling it at 34 - but it does seem like a bit of an uncanny valley without many founders. My theory is that people who are the type of person that's going to found a startup probably would've founded it by 26, and then if their first couple attempts failed, they're licking their wounds at 30 and trying to figure out how to give it another go.
Those same people often end up starting follow-up ventures much later, after the kids are self-sufficient. I have one friend from elementary school whose dad is working on his second startup at the age of 70. His first venture - founded at around age 60 - ended up IPOing at a market cap of several billion before crashing and burning.
Most of our engineering and management team is married or with kids and are early Google and FB employees so there's no desire to have to go with this type of lifestyle. I admire the youth who can pull this off and I think it makes sense when you are bootstrapping a service that requires a lot of work to scale up quickly.
lal is a curious site. I've known about it since december when my sister told me about it. She used to spend hours on it reading to me funny little flirts that people wrote. The initial users had a great sense of humor and it was really lightweight and fun. Now though, it is so heavy and serious! It seems like half the people who post are depressed by a breakup and are looking for an outlet. Also, since the site is less popular now than it used to be the posts stay up for a while and the content is rather stale.
Evan: This is one of our recruiting strategies. We literally go to recruiting events...and we just tell them, "Hey, I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can beat my co-founder, Prasanna here, in a coding challenge."
The story is impressive... And I hope they're on to building something big and serious. Am I getting this right, 5 ACM finalists working on a nicer version of craigslist's missed connections?
When I was looking for an room 6 months ago in Palo Alto I thought it would be cool to live with hacker/programmers/whatever. I quickly changed my mind when every house I saw with self-proclaimed hackers ended up looking like this.
Nothing against LikeALittle, but I really wish people with such kind of raw talent and dedication were doing something better than solving the problem of anonymous flirting.
Startups may need to live on a budget, but good to see that they didn't overlook the importance of nice whisky with the Johnnie Walker Blue. No office should go without a good scotch.
allot more partying and girls in the myface movie... that looked pretty smelly and claustrophobic to me, but going by the comments i'm in the minority.
e: just to clarify, you guys are awesome and i admire your work and attitude... just each to their own and when in rome yada yada
When I saw that Philz, I recalled all the long hours I spent at that table outside working on my at-the-time first iPhone app... the valley is a very special place.
This to me is one more link in the chain of evidence that this is not just the 2000 bubble rehashed. Not just different people but different kinds of people are in charge this time, different methods are being employed. The focus is less on sheen and who has the biggest flagpole or best in house sushi chef and more on results and methods.
I like that a little, even on the chance that it does fail again at least this time it will be on our terms.
I think this just means that software and software development is cheaper this time around. Back in the day, your CRUD app needed a proprietary compiler using proprietary libraries running on a proprietary operating system talking to a proprietary database. This cost mucho money, and was super buggy. So you needed a lot of smart programmers and a lot of time to get anything that worked.
These days, you just use Ruby or Perl or something and its 100x faster to develop and probably runs faster than 1999 C++ on a mainframe did. So there goes your main cost. (Netscape is a good example from that era. Not that great a piece of software -- it ran super slow and needed a lot of people to write it.)
Also, good startups are pretty easy to do with just one person. So when you only have one or two people, you don't need flashy offices or sushi chefs... you just rent a nice apartment and order out. Expensive, but much cheaper than what people did in 1999.
[+] [-] jmtame|15 years ago|reply
"As soon as I graduated from business school I started a company called ProFounder with two cofounders, Jessica Jackley who had started Kiva before, and Dan Mauriello. While doing that, I met my current cofounders for LikeaLittle, Shubham and Prasanna. They had left Microsoft, came to Stanford, and used to hang out there because they were trying to start a company. A mutual friend introduced us and after a month or two we decided to join forces.
So we started ProFounder. I worked there for about six months and then it moved on to L.A and I didn’t want to go to L.A; I decided I wanted to stay in Silicon Valley and do some consumer Internet things. So, Shubham, Prasanna and I came back to Palo Alto, lived together in a one-bedroom apartment with no furniture, slept on the floor, subsisted off of rice, and tried a bunch of stuff until we caught something that worked.
This was January 2010. For several months we just brainstormed; it wasn’t until October that we actually came up with LikeaLittle. We had probably tried 10 ideas before that and they all failed miserably. So, in October 2010, we created a first edition of LikeaLittle.
We’ve been working together for almost a year, but before YC we had not done any fundraising. We were bootstrapping the entire time; we were living in a one-bedroom apartment our entire time together and then for a two month period, [my cofounders] lost their visas, so we had to go and live in India together. So we lived with my cofounder’s family in India and were doing the startup from there. It was interesting, the power would go out all the time and our users were in America so we had to be on U.S. time; all kinds of crazy stuff was happening.
But, in India there were no expenses. The family would make us food and we’d stay with them; we literally had a zero dollar burn rate in India. So that was pretty fantastic; we kind of had an infinite runway. We’ve basically spent the entire year living off of rice and beans and sleeping on the floor, together."
[+] [-] guynamedloren|15 years ago|reply
I wish there were more firsthand accounts like this. Keep up the great work, LAL team!
[+] [-] davidu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sukotto|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chopsueyar|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dstein|15 years ago|reply
That aside, these guys kinda look like they're following the Social Network playbook to the T. I wonder how long it'll be until they hire Sean Parker and dilute one of the founders' stake in the company.
[+] [-] pnathan|15 years ago|reply
I already have had (and left) a dorm room.
My perfect coding environment is a quiet office, alone, with an awesome view of mountains. High speed internet. Silent computer. Company IM. Garguntuan monitors. On the walls, whiteboard, and a bookshelf somewhere. So, totally not LAL!
[+] [-] tuhin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chopsueyar|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esmevane|15 years ago|reply
I'm glad that there is a culture like this out there. It espouses productivity and gives a real view as to what folks will do in order to try their hand at a serious venture.
Clearly the guys here are aware of exactly what they're doing by putting this whole thing on film. They're happy, they believe in their projects, and they're not ashamed to put this on the record.
Having said that, I remember my early 20s, too.
[+] [-] 3dFlatLander|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|15 years ago|reply
It's certainly possible to start a company in your 30s - PG did it, founding ViaWeb at 31 and selling it at 34 - but it does seem like a bit of an uncanny valley without many founders. My theory is that people who are the type of person that's going to found a startup probably would've founded it by 26, and then if their first couple attempts failed, they're licking their wounds at 30 and trying to figure out how to give it another go.
Those same people often end up starting follow-up ventures much later, after the kids are self-sufficient. I have one friend from elementary school whose dad is working on his second startup at the age of 70. His first venture - founded at around age 60 - ended up IPOing at a market cap of several billion before crashing and burning.
[+] [-] calbear81|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flynnwynn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeanhsu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msredmond|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rokhayakebe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] physcab|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myprasanna|15 years ago|reply
http://lal.com/about/the_game
[+] [-] wyclif|15 years ago|reply
EDIT: I wish I was experienced enough to work with you guys.
[+] [-] edw519|15 years ago|reply
Evan: This is one of our recruiting strategies. We literally go to recruiting events...and we just tell them, "Hey, I'll give you a thousand dollars if you can beat my co-founder, Prasanna here, in a coding challenge."
Jason: Do you usually win?
Prasanna: Ah, I mean, if we lose...
Jason: Then you're going to hire the guy...
Prasanna: Yea.
[+] [-] cemregr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] juiceandjuice|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codelion|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emreas|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Smirnoff|15 years ago|reply
These guys sleep like for 3 or 4 hours and code for the rest of the time. Amazing company :)
[+] [-] corin_|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MatthewB|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattberg|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fungi|15 years ago|reply
e: just to clarify, you guys are awesome and i admire your work and attitude... just each to their own and when in rome yada yada
[+] [-] bengl3rt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandropadin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d0m|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guynamedloren|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sonoffett|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phodo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etherael|15 years ago|reply
I like that a little, even on the chance that it does fail again at least this time it will be on our terms.
[+] [-] jrockway|15 years ago|reply
These days, you just use Ruby or Perl or something and its 100x faster to develop and probably runs faster than 1999 C++ on a mainframe did. So there goes your main cost. (Netscape is a good example from that era. Not that great a piece of software -- it ran super slow and needed a lot of people to write it.)
Also, good startups are pretty easy to do with just one person. So when you only have one or two people, you don't need flashy offices or sushi chefs... you just rent a nice apartment and order out. Expensive, but much cheaper than what people did in 1999.
[+] [-] trotsky|15 years ago|reply