You must be new to Silicon Valley if you think Marc’s signature is his bald head.

Although Bezos did in fact basically pitch his own product during his entire presentation I do think that it had some relevancy to the audience and he at least tied it back to a startup that has had some early success with it, http://animoto.com, which I thought was cool.

Pretty solid marketing if you ask me.

I was wondering more about who the guy was who answered several of the questions for him that he apparently had no clue about. That was interesting, eh?

Hmmm…I must have been too distracted by the glare off of his signature, clean-shaven dome. If in fact it did go down as you claim, then this is officially the first documented instance of me being wrong and it’s definitely not nearly as funny.

Dang it.

I was rather disappointed with Bezos’ talk because while I have heard that he is a great speaker usually, he devoted almost an hour to talking about how great AWS is rather than offering any insights or advice for people interested in entrepreneurship.

It’s a great question! But to answer it, we’d have to know:
- What’s the ratio of men:women in startupland?
- Was there an open invitation to present at this event?
- Were women specifically invited? And if so, why did they decline?

I think it’d be awesome to have more female rolemodels in this sphere, but I believe it’s particularly important to take lots of issues into consideration and not 100% blame conference/event organizers for a lack of gender balance.

The person asking the question said 20 million while Marc corrected him by saying it was really only just 15 million. Geez, get your facts right.

Well, the audience was 98.9% tech dudes, so even though I’m sure that there are plenty of qualified women out there who would of fit the mold for a possible presenter I’m guessing that they weren’t too worried about getting someone with two X chromosomes involved.

Also, the penis joke was based around being able to interpret long word stings and Peter Norvig mentioned a few bad domain name choices and one happened to be penisland.com, which is a place to buy pens in bulk.

Of course, reading Mark Andreesson’s 3 part blog series on career planning (http://blog.pma...marca-gu-1.html) gave me a little nudge as well. Definitely worth a read if you have a few minutes to spare.

of course he was a speaker at the event, too. See what I mean?

Anyways, quickly here are my speaker highlights of the day:

- Paul Buchheit being able to crack a joke about the SMTP protocol and the crowd actually getting it – and laughing.

- Paul Graham’s sandals and amazing presenting skills. He had a slide that was a huge cockroach and it actually worked.

- Peter Norvig’s penis joke and sweet Hawaiian shirt.

- Greg McAdoo’s ‘hair on fire’ and ‘big wave’ analogies.

- David Heinemeier Hansson making fun of Greg McAdoo’s ‘hair on fire’ and ‘big wave’ analogies. What an intelligent smart ass.

- Marc Andreessen correcting the question about him burning though $15 million a month with a start-up by stating that in fact he was burning through $20 million a month. Get the fact’s straight, people, geez.

- Jeff Bezos talking about the rocket ship that he’s building. I mean, the 3 rocket ships that he’s building. Being a billionaire has to be fun. Personally, I would rather build a cruise ship or two, but that’s just me.

- Michael Arrington’s inspirational and nearly epic ‘ode to community and down with the trolls’ ending to his presentation. Preach on, bruthu – preach on.

Amazing group of geeks and I was glad to be one of them.