Last Thursday over 140 entrepreneurs, investors, and startup rookies came together for Startup2Startup, a monthly invite-only dinner built around fostering the startup community. This month’s featured speaker was Adaptive Path founding partner and ex-Googler Jeffrey Veen, who walked the audience through some of the key aspects of website design and how to deal with associated communication issues.
Following Veen’s presentation, the attendees shared their thoughts and experiences related to design in intimate round-table discussions. The event’s co-founder Dave McClure painstakingly creates seating arrangements to ensure that each table has an array of attendees ranging from startup rookie to veteran, ensuring that discussion is both lively and informative (and strictly off-the-record).
The evening was an overwhelming success, highlighted by Veen’s engaging presentation that was both accessible and entertaining (you can see an intro video and his slides below, along with a full video of his presentation). As a bonus, Veen introduced the audience to one of his newest projects.
Dubbed Wikirank, the site tracks the popularity of Wikipedia articles, sifting through hundreds of gigabytes of Wikipedia’s publicly available traffic data and presenting it in an intuitive and attractive interface. With this data, the site can generate an at-a-glance view of what the world is interested in at any given moment. The site also allows users to create embeddable charts comparing the popularity of different topics over time. If you’d like to try it out, the first 30 TechCrunch readers to enter their Email addresses here will have access to the site’s private beta.
Next month’s Startup2Startup event will feature Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, who will be offering tips on building a great company culture and customer service (for which Zappos is widely acclaimed).
Here are the full videos of Jeff Veen’s presentation:
Part 1
Part 2
Jeffrey Veen seems like he’s all there, which is pretty rare, but how is attending this thing going to help your startup?
Why isn’t it just wasted time?
Isn’t time better spent committing revisions to SVN or improving your business plan?
If you can’t spare a few hours to hang out with people going through the same struggles as you, or the people who have been there before, perhaps you need to rethink your priorities. If nothing else, the event is fun and is great for networking.
I spend every single day barring weekends with software developers in meetings, merging code branches, ect…
Developers have a much harder time with these things than pure entrepreneurs. Unless there’s an open bar.
When I was at Socal Linux expo the Boxee dev who was supposed to present didn’t show up. Probably because Hulu axed them, but any how, he didn’t show up. Some Ubuntu guy showed up instead in the room and bored everybody to tears. I left and never went back.
That’s usually how it happens. You have the speaker dictating and everybody else staying to themselves, afraid people are going to “steal their sh1t”. Even at a Linux expo. Especially at conventions like Adtech or Twiistup.
It’s like most people go to these things hoping to get something useful that will help them when they get home or back to their project, and 99% of the time you get nothing out of it. Literally nothing. Keynotes are not useful. State of the unions are not useful to entrepreneurs or developers.
We have documentation for that.
Jason, you need to update Jooce in Crunchbase
crunchbase.com/search?query=Jooce
Look at this Mangrove Q4 2008 report:
http://www.mang...load.php?id=251
Scroll to the very end:
“Jooce will be closing its doors
during the month of February.”
I was almost a team manager there. I talked to one of the principles in my final interview. I could not leave in the time frame that they needed somebody.
At any rate, it’s safe to say that webOS was a half baked idea. Android was a far better idea. People like snappy apps. Web and all other data transfer interaction should be out of sight as API. That’s part of why Mozilla is introducing javascript threads. To reduce the impact of web CPU overload(or at least hide it from the user)
To all of you considering working at a startup for “equity” in the company, consider that no matter who is behind it, even Skype founders, that equity 19/20 is not going to be worth squat by the time you’re watching soaps on your couch reminiscing.
one to grow on * * *
Just because Jeffrey Veen sold out his 9 month old project to Google before it beta’d doesn’t mean you will. Just like SeaDragon and Photosynth. Or Powerset.
Somebody has to sell it for you. It’s not something you’ll pick up going to a conference. So without being rude, what’s the point?
Any similar events in the UK or Europe?
The secret behind Startup2Startup’s success is the people. While the format is great, copying it for Europe would only work if you can attract similarly smart people in the room.
Who in Europe has the connections to make that happen? There got to be someone apart from Loic.
Anxiously awaiting the video. I’d love to go to these.
Now I just need to find me some sponsors for the application. =)
Jeff Veen is one smart dude.
hi, i like to get a beta invite. thanks
Most startups fail. Your best chance of succeeding is to learn from other people’s mistakes. This is the only event that I feel is worth my time. Others feel the same way, which is why it is so hard to get a ticket.
serious stuff… plaster topics are pretty sobering. In case you’re interested, here’s some neat information about webdesign company I found helpful
informative stuff… thanks