A little before 9pm on Wednesday night and I'm standing on the'VIP' balcony of San Francisco's Regency Ballroom, holding a can of something called 'MySpace Buzz' and waiting for Weezer to take to the stage. It's a weird scene, all told, and not just because I thought Weezer was dead.The bulk of the weirdness stems from the make-up of the crowd: a dozen feet below me in the main auditorium there are maybe a couple of thousand writhing teenagers - Weezer fans to a (wo)man, cheering and shouting and jumping and sweating and doing all the things I remember doing a little over a decade ago.These are the invited fans; those lucky enough to have been chosen to attend this 'secret show', organised by MySpace. You know, for kids. Every so often one of the stage lights picks out a tiny puff of smoke in the crowd. Ah, you crazy kids and your pot: I feel like I've been transported back in time.

  On Thursday, Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a surprise visit to the Web 2.0 Summit and was interviewed on-stage by John Battelle for about 18 minutes. Our full notes from that day are here, but the video above gives a good sense of where Brin's head is at right now. Also check out his what he's wearing on his feet at the beginning. I'm not sure if those are shoes or rubber socks. Brin touches on Twitter, Bing, Android, the growing network of Google alums heading up other companies, the book settlement, his surprising lack of baseball knowledge, and Chrome for Mac, among other subjects. (Video after the jump).

  Zynga founder Mark Pincus is the final speaker at Y Combinator Startup School 2009. My notes on his talk are below.Pincus kicked off his talk by asking the audience how many wanted to become great entrepreneurs (much of the room raised their hand). But fewer raised their hand about becoming a world class CEO, which is something Pincus says they need to address.Out of college, Pincus says he went into banking and then business school, after which he worked in major corporations. He says that sometimes entrepreneurs are born after finding that nothing lese works for them, explaining "I got kicked out of some of the best companies in America".

  Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has taken the stage at Startup School this afternoon to talk about company culture and delivering happiness. Hsieh started out by talking about his beginnings at LinkExchange, a company he sold to Microsoft in 1998. The reason LinkExhange sold to Microsoft was because of the company culture, according to Hsieh. After LinkExhange, Hsieh was an investor in Zappos, and two months after the founding of Zappos, Hsieh came in as the CEO. Zappos started in 1999 with no sales, and last year in 2008, had over $1 billion in gross sales. Hsieh mentioned that the biggest source of revenue for Zappos is word of mouth, as well as repeat sales.Zappos is best known for their customer service. When Zappos started out, there was no company culture. In 2003, Zappos decided that they needed to differentiate themselves from all the other companies, and chose customer service. Zappos now follows the 3 C's; Clothing, Customer Server and Culture.

  Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stage at Startup School, where Y Combinator's Jessica Livingston is interviewing him. I'm liveblogging the interview below.Mark Zuckerberg: "I love being here. These are like, my people.Q: I want to go way back, before Facebook. What did you learn from those experiences?A: I mostly built stuff that I liked. When I got to college I started messing around with other programs. There's this story — I was making Facebook the week before finals, and there was a class where you had to learn all these pieces of arts. I was supposed to be studying, but instead I was learning Facebook. A few days before the exam I was screwed. I took all the images, make a website, where you could add notes to each image, and it was a 'study tool' where everyone else filled in all the notes that I needed to pass the class. After that the professor said it had the best grades of any final he'd ever given. This was my first social hack. With Facebook, I wanted to make something that would make Harvard (and more open that) more open.

  Bump Technologies, the startup behind the very popular iPhone application Bump, has closed a funding round led by Sequoia Capital. We had heard whispers of the news weeks ago, but the company declined to comment on it. Today though, during Sequoia Capital Partner Greg McAdoo's presentation at Y Combinator Startup School, we got all the confirmation we need: Bump was listed on one of his Powerpoint slides as a company Sequoia has funded this year. Bump once again declined to comment on the funding and the amount, but the cat is out of the bag. We've heard the amount raised was over $1 million, and are looking into getting more details.

  FriendFeed Co-Founder, Paul Buchheit has taken the stage at Startup School at UC Berkeley. Buchheit is talking about what he's learned so far as an entrepreneur, from creating Gmail to founding FriendFeed. Buchheit made some interesting points from his career at Intel, Google, FriendFeed and now Facebook. He's also winging his presentation to see how it goes (and he's doing a good job at it).Buchheit talked about his past at Google, where he is of course known as being the creator of Gmail, as well as Intel. At Intel, Buchheit learned that he didn't enjoy working at large companies. People often ask what's the formula to startup success. Buchheit answered with that Google had a formula for making successful products that everyone had to follow.

  Ev Williams and Biz Stone have just taken the stage at Startup School, where they'll be taking many questions form the audience. You can submit questions by tweeting a question like this "@poll _________" (where the blank is your question). I'll be liveblogging the session.Q: What was the original motivation behind Twitter?Biz: We should start with Odeo. We were working at Odeo, we weren't as passionate about the podcasting service as we should have been. We weren't using it, and that was a problem. Twitter got started because Ev gave us some freedom to think along different lines.

  While most users may have not realized it, Twitter has had a rather annoying problem for some time now: If you deleted a tweet, it would still reside in Twitter Search's index. This meant that if you said something you didn't mean to, or made a mistake that you hoped to correct by deleting the tweet, it was still easily accessible by anyone who simply typed your username into Twitter search. Finally, that's no longer the case.Now, when you delete a tweet, it will instantaneously be removed from Twitter's search index as well. We've tested it out this morning, and it is in fact the case. Even better, those tweets are also removed from the search API. We've tested several third party apps, and none contain the tweets that I deleted.

  Every few months we get a press release about some great device from a no-name manufacturer who promises to change the world. One example was the TXTR reader from Germany last January. Another is zzzPhone, a company selling dual-SIM Android powered smartphones from China. Neither company produced much of anything. Era of the Silicon Valley success story - two guys making something cool in a garage and selling it - is over, at least in hardware. The costs of making consumer electronics, including cellphones and computers, on a small scale have risen so much as to be prohibitive and then the marketing costs of that same hardware is even more prohibitive. Whereas, once, two nerds in a basement could build a computer company I worry that it takes more resources than any one man or woman can muster these days to even approach something like success.

  Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson is now speaking at Y Combinator's Startup School about Freemium Business Models. Anderson likened freemium to handing out muffins on the street to entice people to start eating your muffins. But with muffins there's a significant cost to giving away each muffin. With digital goods, you can give away 90% of your product for free, without any cost for those goods.He says 'free users' aren't free loaders, and that it's okay to let the minority (paid users) subsidize the majority. Because the free users will recommend to friends, it's a great form of marketing. And for those paid users, many of them are very strong customers — they may be price insensitive, with very little churn.

  Jason Fried of 37Signals has taken the stage at Y-Combinator's Startup School this morning at UC Berkeley. I'm taking my notes below on his talk.Fried has started off by talking about bootstrapping startups. Startups that bootstrap are more "money hungry" then companies that are funded. If you are a funded company, you generally have money to spend that investors encourage you to spend as well. If you're a bootstrapped company, you're hungry to make money.

  I'm here at UC Berkeley for Y Combinator's Startup School 2009, where the startup incubator has invited hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the country to listen to some of Silicon Valley's most accomplished founders and investors share their advice on building a new company. Sequoia Capital Partner Greg McAdoo just took the stage to talk about the current economic conditions, and how startups can actually thrive during them. Below are my paraphrased notes on what he said. You can also watch the live stream here, or using the embed at this bottom of this post.During the last 12 months since the fall of Lehman, we have been more busy making investments. Made ~20 investments (Series A/Seed) in the last twelve months. Don't let the negative headlines get to you. If you look back at the headlines of the 70's (1975-78), there's quite a bit of bad news, but some of the biggest names (Apple, Atari) were founded then.

  A couple days ago at the Web 2.0 Summit, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong caused a little bit of a stir when he hinted that AOL is working on a "secret" technology project. When pressed for details on what exactly it is, he was vague. But after fishing around with our sources, we have a pretty good idea. The secret project is a new content-management system (CMS) which will make it easier to produce and publish Web content across AOL's sites and perhaps beyond. It will also help AOL scale up the number of contributors who write articles and produce videos for its numerous media sites well beyond the thousands who are working for it today.