I'm new here, so not familiar with the history, but dude: Google grew from the two founders' PhD work in computer science, and Bill Gates is widely known for his technical brilliance and depth of technical knowledge. So unless there is some confusion on the context of your comment, your examples are just incorrect.
This is natural when you abide by "release early and iterate." Most of the companies 11 weeks old. When you release, you haven't yet implemented your entire vision. That takes much more time to develop internally and become obvious to outsiders. But the founders know that the first release is just the tip of the iceberg.
There is pretty much not a single startup in this session that isn't directly attacking a large market or has plans to expand into a market orders of magnitude larger.
There isn't any video. If you're curious about one in particular, contact them. They're all stand up folks.
"Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page, a Ph.D. student at Stanford.[1] In search for a dissertation theme, Page decided to explore the mathematical properties of the World Wide Web, understanding its link structure as a huge graph.[2] His supervisor Terry Winograd agreed and Page focused on the problem of finding out which web pages link to a given page, considering the number and nature of such backlinks to be valuable information about that page (with the role of citations in academic publishing in mind).[2] In his research project, nicknamed "BackRub", he was soon joined by Sergey Brin, a fellow Stanford Ph.D. student and close friend, whom he had first met in the summer of 1995 in a group of potential new students which Brin had volunteered to show around the campus.[2]"
It depends on how you define a hacker project. That is a fair characterization if you say that a hacker project is something that doesn't come out of a normal business process, regardless of the corporate structure that surrounds the people hacking away on it.
"... is there any video of the presentations? ..."
Asked of previous demo days, and the standard answer has been "no" - probably due to companies not yet ready for release. I thought the purpose of demo day was to allow VC's a sneek look at the latest YC recruits not a general public launch.
Yeah, apparently, according to wikipedia, Time Warner is thinking about splitting 'AOL internet access and adversting businesses into two, with the possibility of later selling the internet access division.'
So they haven't done it yet.
Leave Yourself a Place to Start (or: Leave work with something small broken)
is something I do all the time. I work Java at my day job, and have found that leaving out the semi-colon at the last place I touched (so that eclipse shows a compile error) really helps me get back to what I was doing the previous evening (or the friday before) so much quicker.
And the last point, get to know your tools. I am currently trying to learn emacs, but I have pretty much mastered eclipse (and other tools that I use). Not having to use the mouse to get to different views and perspectives to browsing around for files, absolutely necessary for improving your productivity at work.
In addition to the last point, getting to know additional tools outside of the development environment really helps. I read websites like lifehacker and have learned of tools like Launchy (on windows). Yes, it takes a while to get used to these tools, but once you have figured them out and configured them to your liking, you can really fly. Though i do get made fun of at work, considering the number of shortcut key combinations that I keep in my head. Invariably, someone will stop by to ask me for a key combo, and I have to type it out because a lot of the times its muscle memory.
I thought this was a great point too, but I did not take it as literally. I find that if I walk out the door with something in my mind that needs to be fixed, a real problem that I'm not sure how to tackle, that I'll daydream about it while doing other things. By the time I get back behind the keyboard I usually am anxious to try out at least one strategy so I dive right in and get working.
I do the same. The remaining problem is actually focusing on the task - I try to tackle that by doing (with a timer) "sprints" of 10 minutes of work (without allowing self to be distracted at all for that 10 mins). Once 10 mins is over, I take 2 mins to goof off, then repeat. After a few cycles I am in the flow usually.
Being a webdeveloper I found everytime I open my browser with igoogle I would get sidetracked by some story.
For what it's worth, iGoogle has a link in the upper right that lets you toggle between the "Classic Home" and "iGoogle". You could use Classic Home mode to do any necessary Google searches quickly without having distracting news articles on the page (and without having to move the keyboard focus to a toolbar search box).
