After a week busy working on “legacy” projects we were able to attend the second SF beta on Thursday. It was a quite interesting evening, because of the setting, the people we met and the way the evening was organized (by Christian Perry from Zaptix) .
SF beta took place in a club called ”Shine Lounge” on Mission Street. So there was a security guy on the door and a bar inside and everything you would expect from a club.
At the registration desk inside I saw T.J. from guba.com (video site) again - so seems like he was helping to organize the event. They offered not only name tags, but also about 10 other tags you could stick to your shirt, e.g. “foundr”, “bloggr”, “investr” … you could also get blank stickers to write on yourself, so we wrote “mobile”. Entrance fee was 10 bucks and drinks were not free, but it was still worth it.
We met Jeffrey McManus, web services evangelist and head of approver.com (a new document sharing and collaboration service), whom we already met at XTech 06 in Amsterdam. We had a nice chat with him and with Markus from miaplaza.com - a German guy who came to the Silicon Valley several years ago.
I also had an interesting conversation with Bryan from likebetter.com, they actually have some plans how to turn their project into a profitable business. Their project got seed funding from Paul Graham’s Y Combinator and we talked about this also. The longest talk however we had with a woman from Kodak at the bar - I’m not sure what her name was (sorry), Karen I think, but she shared some intresting views and asked some quite interesting questions that definitely prepared us for the day we will talk to VCs - if this will ever be the case. Jason from hostedLABS was about to leave, but still was kind enough to share some interesting insights about his plans in providing better hosting for web application providers (like us in a little while). We will definitely check out his products as soon as they become available.
Oh yes and the event kicked off with some quite funny limericks, presented by several start-up companies. Check out Rafe’s blog post about the event to read them all.
