Yesterday, it started a 7:30 AM in a raining day and it went through the entire day until 8:00 PM, non-stop. That is the Entrepreneur University organized by NWEN. It was an awesome event. Third time I attend and this is by far the best Entrepreneur event that I attend every year.
Here is a quick summary of my day and some of my thoughts.
8:00 AM: Morning Keynote by Jim Sinegal, founder and CEO of Costco: It was ok. He did a lot of advertisement for Costco and talked about their history. Not a lot of value but good to know anyway.
9:00 AM: Nick Hanauer (2nd Avenue Partners): Great, great talk on what he sees as transformational value created by a company. A few people probably left that talk and decided their idea was not good enough.
10:00 AM: David Weld (SeaTab software): It was supposed to be a talk about "Listen to Your Customer". It wasn't awful, but near awful. He brought a customer to talk about him. Boo-hoo.
11:00 AM: Jon Roberts (Ignition Partners): The talk was about scaling your business. And he starts with a bomb: "Don't scale to early", then he lists 9 things that you must achieve/be doing before you decide to scale. Very good.
12:00 PM: Lunch. I sat on the table with a guy from Marchex (Ryan Burt) with the theme "Web - Search Engine Marketing". Not interesting.
12:30 PM: VC Bistro: 5 minutes to talk to a VC 1-on-1 (about 10 of them). I picked Dan Rosen, Chairman of the Alliance of Angels. Great guy, great talk.
1:00 PM: Chase Franklin, founder and CEO of QPass: It was a good talk. He explained what the went through during the dot com bust (BTW, Chase, "dot com" should be spelled like that, and not "dot.com" because then it would be "dot-dot-com" )
2:00 PM: Therese Adlhoch Smith: Talk about Marketing on the Cheap. Similar presentation from another guy last year called ("Creating a brand on a shoe-string budget"). I hope someday these people understand that "cheap" and "shoe-string" is a couple of thousands of dollars, and not $50K or more!
3:00 PM: Denny Weston (Fluke Venture Partners) on "Writing an Executive Summary". It was a good talk. I knew most of the stuff there, but I'm sure a lot of people learned a few new things.
4:00 PM: Janis Machala (Paladin Partners) and Craig Sherman (Wilson Sonsini) on "Funding Early Stage Companies". This is probably that eleventh time that I hear either Janis or Craig (or some other Angel or Lawyer) talking about the same bullet points. Boring for me, but very valuable to other people.
5:00 PM: Pete Higgins (2nd Avenue Partners) on "Ten pitfalls for Early Stage companies": Best presentation of the day. I didn't know Pete was so good at giving talks. It was entertaining, informative and had a lot of value.
6:00 PM: Cocktail. Great for networking, which leads me to...
Geir Hansen: Manager at Silicon Valley Bank. He loans money to companies and VCs. Added an option to when you are about to close a round, but need immediate cash. I'll keep that in mind.
Hans Omli: I've met Hans at the TechCrunch Party Seattle. Mike Koss had introduced us by email before. He is just starting a new company. I'll talk more later.
(Microsoft Employee Number 12345): Can't tell his name because he still works at Microsoft. I've meet people like that every year. He is thinking about quiting and starting his own company. Good for you.
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: It was ok. He did a lot of advertisement for Costco and talked about their history. Not a lot of value but good to know anyway.
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October, 2007