Natalie Downe & Simon Willison - Lanyrd: From side project to startup

Web Directions Podcast

Natalie and Simon launched the first version of Lanyrd.com while on honeymoon in Casablanca. As the site took off, they realised their side project was destined to become something much bigger. This talk will tell the story of Lanyrd, from a two-week proof of concept to a full-fledged startup via three intensive months of Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. They’ll share the trials, tribulations and lessons they learned along the way. This is the talk they wish they’d heard before they got started! Natalie co-founded Lanyrd on her honeymoon with her husband Simon. Before co-founding a startup, she worked as a senior client-side engineer at Clearleft in Brighton, UK. Today, she juggles leading design, client-side engineering and UX on the project with building the company. If Natalie had any time for hobbies, she would enjoy pottery, yoga, writing and flying her kite. Follow Natalie on Twitter: @Natbat Simon is a co-founder of Lanyrd, and co-creator of the Django web framework. Prior to diving in to the world of entrepreneurship, Simon built crowdsourcing and database journalism projects for the Guardian newspaper in London. Simon is responsible for all of the server-side code on Lanyrd, unsurprisingly written with Django. He is also obsessed with Zeppelins, and hopes one day to build one. Follow Simon on Twitter: @simonw Licensed as Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).