The place was crowded. The crowd was awesome. Some of the talks were outstanding (some not so much), and I didn't make a fool of myself when I talked. By any definition, the Ignite Seattle 2 was a success.
Met a few old friends, like Brady Forrest (one of the organizers of Ignite), Josh Petersen (43 Things), Hans Omli (Shoestring Venture), John Cook (Seattle P-I), Krishnan Iyer ("stealth" startup).
I also had the opportunity of meeting Hillel Cooperman (Jackson Fish Market) face to face, which gave a fun talk about where to eat when you are not on your town and how to order great food (he writes a blog about food). Hillel left Microsoft recently and we've been talking to him about cooperation with Sampa.
I've met a few other people, like the OATV guys, Bryce Roberts and Mark Jacobsen. I had the opportunity to talk pitch them on Sampa. And when they tell you they "see the problem and know there is a need for the solution" it really means a lot. It means the concept passed the sniff test for "not dumb idea", but then, we have to prove that we are the team that can execute and conquer that market.
Some extra feedback on the event:
Brady Forrest was extraordinary! The guy 'owned' the event, in a good way. He was calm, focused, relaxed and having fun. I've organized events before. So stressful that sometimes you don't enjoy it the party.
The accoustics was good. Not great, but not bad either. I've done talks like this before to hundreds of people in a bar setting that only the ten people in front of you can really hear you. This one, I'm pretty sure people could hear all over the room.
The place was too packed. When I arrived at around 8pm there was no way to find people because you couldn't move. By 9:30pm things were a bit better. This is a networking event (dare I say a 'social networking' event?) It is important to have space to walk around, meet people without the need to push people to get through or have to yell your name when having a conversation.
I wish I had met more entrepreneurs. I don't like name tags, I think they are horrible (note: this event didn't have that, thank you!), but there should be a wall with posters of all the startups in Seattle. I want to know about them. Or some other way for you to know who is there.
More girls than I would expect. Which is a good thing. It is my view that software doesn't have enough women touch on it.
The event had 21 presenters, ranging from super geeky (MapReduce from Barry Brumitt) to life style (How to eat out by Hillel Cooperman). The quality of the slides and the presentations varied widely as well.
It made me realize one important thing: Never, ever, over-rehearse!!!
I'm not talking about myself because I don't have time to over-rehearse. I'm talking about some of the presenters that clearly did that.
That quality of a great presentation, IMHO, is flow of information. It means two things: people get the key point on each slide, and slides move from one to another in a progressive cohesive way.
When you over-rehearse, you usually add too much information and says phrases that look beautiful on paper but look 'posh-y' when you are standing up and giving the talk. Nobody talks like that. It also causes a lot of "ah" and "um" coming from your mouth, because you are using that to go to the back back of your mind and remember what is the next thing you have to say. If you have to do that, the flow is not right.
Another one... Reading from a piece of paper... Ummm.... It's bad. The only person that I see pull that of was Jon Roberts from Ignition Partners when he was talking about how you scale a Startup. But he wasn't reading from a paper. He just had it as a reference to remember the order of the ten things. And he had no slides.
Finally, on "screenwriting-world" they say the phrase "show not tell". It means that instead of you writing a character saying "I'm tired", you write a paragraph that once becomes movie will show him tired. Same thing for presentations. Can you do a PPT that doesn't have a single word in it? Maybe that is extreme, but if you are reading bullet points why don't you just sit on the side and let me read it by myself.
I didn't stay for all the talks because I was tired and not feeling well. But here are some points:
Matthew Maclaurin (MS Research) on Programming for Fun/Children/... This was a very interesting topic. Logo was the first language that I learned when I was 11. I think it is super cool what he is doing. The talk was good as well.
Elisabeth Freeman (Author of Head First Series) on How To Write a Technical Book That Doesn't Put Your Readers to Sleep I love this book series. It is very good. She is very smart.
Avi Geiger on Power Consumption of Home Computers and Incandescent Lightbulbs Brady was right. This talk did open my mind to a lot of things. Avi makes lots of good points about how much power computers are consuming in the US and how improvements in perf could save energy. Microsoft should take a look at this.
Ryan Steward (ZDNet's Universal Desktop, Threecast) on The Rich Internet Application Space. It was a good summary of the different types of technology that exist and are coming out. Slides had too much text. I wish he would had given a screenshot of each technology being used on the real-world.
Nancy White on What the Bleep is a Community Technology Steward. I phased out. Didn't get what she was trying to say and by the 2nd minute (remember it is just 5 minutes) I stopped paying attention.
On the second set of talks, we had:
Hans Omli (Shoestring Ventures) on Elevator Pitches. I know Hans and we bump on each other every Entrepreneur or Geek event in Seattle. He had to change his talk last minute because he was going to talk about some real world examples. Turns out that some of the companies are in stealth mode and he couldn't use that so he had to change things. The information on his talk was great, the delivery could have been better.
Sarah Davies (Freedom for IP) on Share and share alike: GPL, Creative Commons, and the future of digital freedom. To summarize her talk she says that copyright prevents freedom of culture. Sorry, I don't buy it. I'm all in favor of GPL, Create Commons et al (even use on some of my stuff), but I didn't buy half the arguments she was making.
Lars Liden (Techtown) on Web Technology to Help Children with Autism and Kurk Brockett (Identity Mine) on A Look at Windows Presentation I missed this two talks because I was the the corner of the stage waiting for my turn to get up.
Then it came my turn, but I can't comment on my performance until I see the video.
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was a success.
October, 2007