Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Startup energy and entrepreneurship in local geek events - check techcocktail and startupriot

Its been my dream see all local entrepreneurs, angels and startup geeks all over the country connected without losing their local flavors to demystify the startup process for new entrepreneurs!

I came across the Atlanta yenta when I connected with Sanjay Parekh who started Startup Drinks as a world-wide phenomenon from Atlanta, an energetic entrepreneur and fellow angel investor. Sanjay is head down focused on organizing StartupRiot, a cool one day event with 70 entrepreneurs presenting in Altanta on May 19th 2008.

Today I located the Chicago Yenta, and the search process made my day!

During the search I learned that we in the valley tend to rely on upcoming.org for our events, events seem to find me on Facebook, and from my east coast past and as an organizer of the Bay Area Facebook Meetup, I tend to lookup meetup.com for every special interest group.

Chicago is ahead of everyone in sharing events. Techcocktail is on twitter. Techcocktail is the first to bring total transparency and sharing the excitement of the conference planning live on twitter, not just during the event for live micro-blogging.

I found Jason Rexilius from an old ChicagoBarcamp wiki and he led me to find out about Techcocktail conference and follow up mixer event. There is a huge Techcocktail conference coming up on May 29th in Chicago, I am sure its worth the drive or flying to get to it if you can make it.

Techcocktail is a mixer event started by Chicago locals Frank Gruber of SOMEWHAT FRANK blog and SOMEWHAT FRANK TV and Eric Olson, founder of Feedburner and blogger at Olson’s Observations.

All of you in Boston, DC, Chicago and Denver, look for Techcocktail in your local area Its amazing startup energy! Tom Sherman maintains a calendar of events in Chicago at Windy Bits ha, local thinking in the name of the windy city!

Footnote: I cannot shake this thought out of my head after Web2.0 Expo, after hearing AOL, Y! and everyone announce open APIs.

Are we getting ready for the next phase of the Web and like Open source movement changed the face of software development, the barcamps, and techcocktails and startup dinners are scaling up the existing SuperHappyDevhouses, developer garages and Code-a-thons to build a huge wave of localized developer and geek networks to create an interwoven web with a new layer of product and services not even imaginable today!

Anyone there who shares the same vision, I'd love to hear from you!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the kind words but one correction. I didn't startup Startup Drinks, Andrew Hyde (of Startup Weekend fame) did. I'm not one to take credit for other's creations so he should get full credit for this great event idea. I just happened to launched it in Atlanta (at first branded as Open Coffee and now known as Startup Drinks). Check out www.startupdrinks.com for more info on that.

Thanks again for the kind words. I don't think I've ever been called a yenta. ;-)

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