MattMaroon.com

The TechCrunch party was fun. I had taken out a stack of what I thought was at least 1 billion business cards, plus another 10 or so in my wallet, and managed to give them all away and get a few dozen in return. I plan on following up on pretty much all of them.

It was nice meeting some of the TechCrunchers. Michael was, of course, the man of the hour, so I didn’t really get to talk to him much, but I did chat a little more with some of the other crew members. They apparently have a number of interns who all seem to really enjoy working there. I’ll have to figure out how to get us a few of those pretty soon.

I met people from every sort of startup imaginable. It was almost entirely Web 2.0 stuff (no big surprise) with social networks devoted to niche after niche, from fantasy sports to food lovers. There were a couple guys who run a social network for dog owners (and have a sister site for crazy cat ladies too) called dogster. When I told them what I’m doing (and here’s the first public hint) they asked me what I thought about Michael Vick. Their users are more or less ready to tie him to a stake.

I talked a bit with Robert Scoble, asking him if he felt like an enemy combatant, but the recent feud appears to be all in good fun. He’d invited me to talk about my startup on camera (I assume for Podtech) but I wasn’t sure we were ready for it yet so I declined.

Y Combinator startups were there in full force. The guys I’d previously met from Xobni were around, as well as Justin TV (minus Justin), Weebly, and a couple others. Trevor was the only founder in the house. I was asked a ton of questions about the program from pretty much everyone I met. It was nice finally being in a crowd where everyone knew of Paul Graham and not LeBron James. They’ve definitely built up a massive amount of interest and good will in the tech community, and I hadn’t really known about it until then.

I met with a couple investors, and someone who promised to connect me with a firm that’s very interested in our field. I also met a ton of PR and marketing people, who I pestered for as many free tips as I could. That’s going to be a considerable part of our success I think.

I was too busy handing out business cards to take many photos. I did take one with Michael Arrington but haven’t seen yet if it came out well. I’ll Flickr it later.

 

 

 

This entry was posted on July 29, 2007 at 6:27 am and is filed under Startup . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.