Octopart was the first company that came to mind when I thought about writing Startups Open Sourced. Having not heard about them for a while, I wanted to know what they were up to and writing a book about it was a good excuse to talk to the founders firsthand.
Here's an interesting part about their decision to drop out of the PhD program at UC Berkeley to do Octopart:
Q: When did you decide to drop out?
We wrote the first line of Octopart code during my third year in grad school. We launched a prototype as soon as we had something ready. The prototype was awful. The logo was an octopus drawn in MS Paint and the prototype took 20 or 30 seconds to return results; we launched as soon as we had something ready, and by launch, I mean we just emailed friends and family and told them, "Hey we're working on this electronic parts search engine, here is a link." We basically did that to motivate ourselves. We knew that as soon as we got it out there and told everybody "We're working on this company," we would actually have to have something to show for ourselves. We figured, with the prototype, the more embarrassing the better—it was an incentive to make the product better.
Around that time, Y Combinator was organizing a funding cycle so we decided to apply. Sam came out to Berkeley and we filled out the application. We didn't think Octopart was very good so we weren't planning on getting Y Combinator support. We didn't even think we would get invited for an interview. But we got invited and we went out to Boston. We met Paul, Jessica, Trevor and Robert and, that night, Paul offered to fund us.
Sam made the decision to drop out of grad school before we even applied to Y Combinator. His last day at CU Boulder was actually the day before the Y Combinator interview. I was closer to graduating and I really wanted to finish my degree so I was planning on doing both Octopart and grad school.
After we got YC funding, I took off for Antarctica to deploy the calibration device for my experiment. While I was there I worked on Octopart at night and when I got back I kept doing both Octopart and grad school. But by the end I was basically going into the lab and working on Octopart, almost exclusively. It took me a while to admit that I wasn't actually doing grad school anymore. I was just doing Octopart, except that I was working on it while sitting in my windowless grad student office.
Q: Was it your involvement with YC that finally convinced you to drop out of grad school?
At that time, Paul and Jessica would take all of the YC founders out to dinner. We met up with them at Jessica's favorite restaurant in Berkeley. We had a really nice conversation and towards the end of dinner, Paul asked me point blank if I was committed to Octopart and, I don't know, the question caught me off guard.
I told Paul that I was fully committed and he responded, "Well, as long as you're still in grad school, investors aren't going to invest in your company." I had been working on Octopart for six months already and mentally I had already gone all-in on the company. Before Paul's question I hadn't thought about how my decision to stay in grad school would cause somebody to think that I wasn't entirely committed.
The dinner with Paul and Jessica was on a Friday, I remember, and I said to myself, "Okay, this weekend, I'm going to figure out what I want to do; it's going to have to be one or the other." On Monday I went in to the lab and told my advisor that I had to drop out.
In grad school I worked on IceCube which is a neutrino telescope at the South Pole. The
detector is an array of photomultiplier tubes embedded in the ice underneath the Pole. At the time I was mostly working on electronic devices for calibration and measuring ash layers in the ice.
When we got accepted to YC I thought I was going to finish my PhD and work on the startup at the same time (ha!) so I kept working on the experiment. I went down to Pole for a month before YC to deploy the devices I was working on. While I was there I also worked on Octopart around the clock. Sam was actually in Argentina at the time so we would both log into our server in Berkeley to ychat when the satellite link was up. Somehow the timing worked out really well and I flew back from the Pole just in time for the first YC dinner.
Not the entire time. Andres was installing a sensor a mile beneath the water surface (if my memory is right; writing this from a mobile phone without the book on me). That was part of his research, I believe most of his time was spent in his grad student office.
Here's an interesting part about their decision to drop out of the PhD program at UC Berkeley to do Octopart:
Q: When did you decide to drop out?
We wrote the first line of Octopart code during my third year in grad school. We launched a prototype as soon as we had something ready. The prototype was awful. The logo was an octopus drawn in MS Paint and the prototype took 20 or 30 seconds to return results; we launched as soon as we had something ready, and by launch, I mean we just emailed friends and family and told them, "Hey we're working on this electronic parts search engine, here is a link." We basically did that to motivate ourselves. We knew that as soon as we got it out there and told everybody "We're working on this company," we would actually have to have something to show for ourselves. We figured, with the prototype, the more embarrassing the better—it was an incentive to make the product better.
Around that time, Y Combinator was organizing a funding cycle so we decided to apply. Sam came out to Berkeley and we filled out the application. We didn't think Octopart was very good so we weren't planning on getting Y Combinator support. We didn't even think we would get invited for an interview. But we got invited and we went out to Boston. We met Paul, Jessica, Trevor and Robert and, that night, Paul offered to fund us.
Sam made the decision to drop out of grad school before we even applied to Y Combinator. His last day at CU Boulder was actually the day before the Y Combinator interview. I was closer to graduating and I really wanted to finish my degree so I was planning on doing both Octopart and grad school.
After we got YC funding, I took off for Antarctica to deploy the calibration device for my experiment. While I was there I worked on Octopart at night and when I got back I kept doing both Octopart and grad school. But by the end I was basically going into the lab and working on Octopart, almost exclusively. It took me a while to admit that I wasn't actually doing grad school anymore. I was just doing Octopart, except that I was working on it while sitting in my windowless grad student office.
Q: Was it your involvement with YC that finally convinced you to drop out of grad school?
At that time, Paul and Jessica would take all of the YC founders out to dinner. We met up with them at Jessica's favorite restaurant in Berkeley. We had a really nice conversation and towards the end of dinner, Paul asked me point blank if I was committed to Octopart and, I don't know, the question caught me off guard.
I told Paul that I was fully committed and he responded, "Well, as long as you're still in grad school, investors aren't going to invest in your company." I had been working on Octopart for six months already and mentally I had already gone all-in on the company. Before Paul's question I hadn't thought about how my decision to stay in grad school would cause somebody to think that I wasn't entirely committed.
The dinner with Paul and Jessica was on a Friday, I remember, and I said to myself, "Okay, this weekend, I'm going to figure out what I want to do; it's going to have to be one or the other." On Monday I went in to the lab and told my advisor that I had to drop out.