Yesterday I went to the first Amazon Start-Up Project event, which was organized by the AWS team (Amazon Web Services). I did some liveblogging.
By far, this was the best event of the year for entrepreneurs. Why? Because it was a room full of entrepreneurs and investors (and the AWS team), but that was it. Other events always have a lot of service providers (lawyers, consultants, agents, etc.), usually on a rate of 4:1 (4 services providers for each 1 entrepreneur/investor).
Jeff Bar talk was good. It was a great overview of the AWS platform (S3, ECS, Message Queue) and how companies can take advantage of that. It makes a lot of sense.
My only two complaints about the event was the audio that was hard to hear on the back, and the projection screen which was too low and you could not read the bottom 1/3 of it.
There was a short talk by Smartsheet.com and Jamglue.com. After the break Matt McIlwain from Madrona Ventures gave a standard talk about what VCs like to see on companies and he hyped a little the Seattle-area for the great opportunities around here.
Four ex-MSNSearch members were there: Me, Brady Forrest (now at O'Reilly, and he was moderating the panel discussion), Josh Petersen (43 Things et al) and Christopher Payne (ex-MSFT VP of Search, now building his own company).
I also meet some other great people:
Max Ciccotosto, founder of Wishpot.com. We had exchange a few emails on the past but this was the first time we've met face-to-face. Max knows a whole lot about Mobile (Email/SMS/MMS) after spending 7 years on Microsoft Exchange. This is the guy I'll bug when we are implementing SMS features.
Daryn Nakhuda, co-founder of EyeJot. Very nice guy. We are going to get together to talk some ideas that might be beneficial for both of us.
Josh Herst, founder & CEO of TripHub. Geoff Entress from Madrona introduced us. He looked like a nice guy and we didn't have enough time to talk.
Besides those, I also had a chance to catch up with Jeff Barr and Steve Rabuchin, both organizers of the event.
The biggest surprise was the number of startups on the event. Probably more than 100. I need to do some serious updates to Seattle 2.0 blog.
I expected to see a few people that were not there: Kelly Smith (ImageKind), anyone from Twango, anyone from BlueDot, Hans Omli and others. How did you guys miss this?
I hope Amazon does another event like this soon, however I was told they would take this on the road now, so it might take a while until they are back in Seattle.
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team (Amazon Web Services). I did some 
January, 2008