Monday, April 11, 2011

StartUp Week: Develop, Design, Pitch

StartUp Week At NYU April 6-15
2,000 Squats
Getting To Meet Mark Suster In Person
Meeting Brad Feld
StartUp Week: Job Fair: Fish Market


They shifted the venue from the first floor to the fifth floor. The food part was a pleasant surprise. I was not expecting. But after the first speaker was done, it was food time. After all three speakers got done, I went ahead and ate some more. I did not have dinner later.

During the first break Holly sitting across the table remarked: "You look happy."

"I am a happy person," I said taking in what I thought was a compliment to my general demeanor.

"I think it's the food," she cut me short.

The mongoDB guy cut his presentation short realizing what he had prepared was too technical for the audience he found himself with. Mongo in mongoDB stands for humongous, I learned.

When it was time to ask questions, I raised my hand.

"FourSquare had a major meltdown with you guys several months back. Have they forgiven you yet?"

The guy started laughing. He said the NY tech ecosystem was "incestuous." And that having the same VC helped with the communication.

Not long after it got announced that there will be food, Xhakli, who I met at the Brad Feld event Thursday, leaned over and said, "Dinner is on me tonight." He is a European entrepreneur passing through town hoping to move here. He is an ethnic Albanian in Lithuania.

The Hard Candy Shell folks spent some time making fun of all those people who have a rather weird idea of what design is all about.

Eric Friedman of FourSquare was next. The guy was obviously the star speaker for the evening. After the talk ended, a long line formed to get to do one on one with him. I was not in line, but I stuck around in the room long enough that the line was finally down to a few people, and I went to talk to him. He surprised me by telling me he was aware of my blog. I guess I should not have been. But I was.

This Google Alerts thing is crazy. Mark Suster said in his talk probably the best way to get his attention is to blog about him. You show up in his Google Alert.

In his talk Eric relayed the story of how he got hired by Union Square Ventures. He said he showed up for the interview with his resume, "and they said they are not interested in looking at my resume, and I freaked out, but I have put an entire life of work into it, I thought. They said they had read enough of my blog posts to get a good idea of who I was."

I am extra excited about the event tomorrow. It is a bunch of entrepreneurs.

Tuesday, 4/12: Variety of Tech Entrepreneurs Panel 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM Room M1-100 Spencer Fry (@spencerfry), Carbonmade Hilary Mason (@hmason) bit.ly Vin Vacanti (@vacanti), Yipit Yasser Ansari (@trisomy21), Project Noah Seth Frader-Thompson (@fraderT), EnergyHub Colin Freund (@Swimmingloaf), Agennix AG James McChullouhgh, Exosome Diagnostics
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