111 Minna St. in San Francisco is a Gallery during the day and a club/bar at night. It’s also evolved into the preferred spot for the very popular SFBeta events that take place once in a while. We went to SFBeta November last year and it was a great experience, so we had to go to this one too.
Yesterday was the first anniversary of SFBeta. The event started around 6:00 pm and it got crowded pretty soon. We met some familar faces like Daniel from Bitpusher, Vivek from RapLeaf and Philippe from CScout Germany, but we also got in touch with some new people from all over the world doing pretty exiciting businesses, such as Anton from eBlizz.com or a mobile webhosting company from the Czech Republic amongst them. The party ended around 10:00 pm. Afterwards Alex suggested we go grab a drink and we went to a nice place on Divisadero called Nopa, one of the places open late even during the week. Great food and wine there.
The SFBeta is a typical event for why the Silicon Valley is such a special and interesting place for doing web business. It is a very casual and social after-work event where you can meet a lot of people, sometimes well-known, from the industry and can have some really nice talks - not only about coding ;) It is not just an “exchanging business cards event”, but more of getting in touch with like minded people who struggle(d) with the same problems you do. And quite often you end up staying in touch with those people after the event. We definitely will.
So, if you are in the Bay Area, you should definitely go to an SFBeta event. It is really worth it. Christian Perry, the organizer, did a great job - again! Thanks!