Thank You For Coming To Our Party

I believe we had as many as 200 people here last night for TechCrunch Meetup #3. The last of the guests left at 4 am. Thank you to everyone who came and everyone who tried to attend via festoon.

Scott Beale took my favorite picture of the event. Here’s my second favorite: Kevin Burton hard at work on TailRank - using my oven as a desk.

Thanks to our very generous sponsors we were able to cater the event and provide t-shirts for everyone. You can also purchase a tshirt directly from Zazzle.

There were too many demos but they were all excellent. It was exciting to see the first public view of Sphere, and meet some of the entrepreneurs behind the other companies as well. Thank you to everyone who took the time to show us their products.

Dave Winer gave a rousing keynote that got everyone fired up. People are calling it the Flickr of keynotes. The always cool Marc Canter and his wife were in costume (picture also shows Keith Teare). Robert Scoble was here for hours and barely left the back room where we were showing raw demos of the really young companies, including edgeio.

VCs were roaming the party, looking for the next great investment. Google, Yahoo and ebay all had product managers, developers and business development people quietly talking to entrepreneurs. Scott Beale, Tara Hunt and others were taking pictures of everyone and everything (Flickr tag for your photos is “techcrunch” - please post them!). It was Web 2.0 perfection.

The only problem was the whole festoon remote participation idea didn’t work out at all. People couldn’t see or hear anything. Someone created a very funny festoon image and defaced the wiki this morning. Instead of deleting it, we kept it up. That kind of creativity shouldn’t be deleted. We’ll get it right next time.

Then there was the whole keg situation. We never did get the damn thing to produce beer, even after a number of geeks and ex-bartenders went to work on it. Clearly we didn’t have the right kind of geeks at the event (via Marc Brown).

The best thing about these parties is that we all get the chance to get to know each other a little bit better, and intensely cross-pollinate ideas.

I am keeping a running directory below of blog posts and pictures from the event. Please email me if you’ve written about it with the link.

Pictures (tag: techcrunch), Dave Winer, Robert Scoble, Matt Marshall/SiliconBeat, Marc Canter, Marc Canter #2, Scott Beale, Tara Hunt, Ethan Stock, Narendra Rocherolle, Susan Mernit, Richard MacManus (you were here in spirit Richard), Ben Barren, Russell Limprecht, Bhagvan Kommadi, John Furrier, Allthatscool, Andrew Woolridge, Jared Cosulich, Sylvia Paull, InTheCrowd, Alex Moskalyuk (good overview of demoing companies), Zoli Erdos (great idea on people bringing their own nametags…Jeff Clavier did this).

• Sphere It
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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 at 11:36 am and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.