STIRR Backchannel

Evan Williams, Jonathan Abrams and Michael Cerda shared their insights at STIRR’s FounderHacks III.

There were over 300 in attendance.  Over 75% founding teams of early stage startups.

Here are the talks:

Ev Williams “Just Say No”

Jonathan Abrams “Common Wisdom sometimes isn’t”

Michael Cerda “Stick to your DNA”

The good folks over at Found|Read wrote about the talks here.

Kudos to Chef Paul for catering and the STIRR Armored Door Team for keeping the flow moving smoothly.

Our thanks to Scott Rafer, Patrick Koppula and James Currier. Here are the talks from FHII:

James Currier

Patrick Koppula

Scott Rafer

If you haven’t grabbed tickets yet, head over to http://founderhacks2.eventbrite.com before the prices go up at 12pm.

The videos from FounderHacks I have arrived.

Munjal Shah, CEO, Like.com

David Weekly, CEO, PBWiki

David Marks, CEO, Loomia

Ted Rheingold, CEO, Dogster/Catster

Thanks to Nandor Fejer from bub.blicio.us for the videography work with nods to Brian Solis and Allison McNeill. Thanks to the San Jose Mercury News for additional footage.

Entrepreneurs share tricks of the start-up trade at Silicon Valley’s STIRR Mixer

Silicon Valley’s leading event for early stage technology companies puts learning ahead of promotion

Palo Alto — July 17, 2007 —STIRR, a network for entrepreneurs, is re-inventing its popular monthly technology mixer to showcase veteran entrepreneurs. Founder Hacks is designed to give entrepreneurs a forum to share their experiences and benefit from hearing those of others, Founder Hacks continues STIRR’s commitment to short-form, interactive events, abandoning the traditional sit down and listen format. Each entrepreneur will have between 1 to 3 minutes to impart their wisdom on everything from financing to hiring to managing to scaling up and much more.

The inaugural Founder Hacks will take place on Wednesday, July 18 at 6pm PST at Trader Vic’s in Palo Alto. This month will feature Ted Rheingold of Dogster www.dogster.com, Munjal Shah of Like.com www.like.com, David Marks of Loomia www.loomia.com and David Weekly of PBWiki www.pbwiki.com. All will give 1-3 minute anecdotes on a Founder Hack they have used. Tickets can be purchased online at http://founderhacks.eventbrite.com

“There’s no set playbook on how to start and grow a company. Experienced entrepreneurs who have ‘been there and done that’ have inspirational, useful stories to pass on, we’re providing a regular forum for that conversation,” said Sanford Barr, Chief Stirrer and Co-Founder of The STIRR Network. “We feel that founders have just as much if not more to learn from the anecdotes and experiences of other founders. We’re aiming to take ideas off the PowerPoint and put them into the mouths and hands of real people.”

Founder Hacks, will continue STIRR’s model of having companies demo and showcase their companies and technologies, but will personalize the format placing the individual entrepreneur front and center. In addition to the anecdote and open mic sections, Founder Hacks also includes a Q & A session as well as over two and a half hours of networking and table demos. Entrepreneurs will converse and network with VCs, angel investors and journalists.

STIRR Mixers are a “must attend” and “must present” for CEOs in my portfolio because of the quality and wide reach of the audience,” said Jeff Clavier, a leading Silicon Valley Angel with SoftTech VC, “Having entrepreneurs share their experience, wisdom, lessons and failures will make STIRR Mixers even more interesting.

STIRR has a proven track record of being the first place in Silicon Valley for companies to present and demo their products, with over half of its presenting companies in the past year just emerging, STIRR is the first place for entrepreneurs to make their debut.

“Since our founding a few years ago, STIRR has been focused on building a community around entrepreneurs and their needs,” Barr added. “With Founder Hacks, the format and the wide range of attendees and participants, we’re taking that next step towards providing a complete menu of resources for entrepreneurs.”

About The STIRR Network

Founded by and for entrepreneurs, The STIRR Network is a networking company aimed at building a community of future business leader and catalyzing entrepreneurial activity in the SF Bay Area and beyond. STIRR has created and hosts a series of innovative networking events that break from the traditional “sit down and listen” format and focuses equal attention on the personalities and personal needs of founders and trendsetters. The first networking company to combine the tech demo and mixer methodologies into one cohesive event, STIRR’s suite of events includes:

- Founder’s Mixer: members of the tech community are invited to actively interact and listen to 60-second pitches from early-stage entrepreneurs

- Founder’s Table: a monthly event around held around the Bay Area, up to 7 start-up founders have dinner and discuss business challenges

- PitchLab: Interactive training and networking session designed to help CEOs practice and prepare their pitch to VCs and other investors

- Founder Hacks: innovative event gives founders an opportunity to share and learn from the stories and anecdotes of their peers in the entrepreneurial community

Founded in April, 2006, The STIRR is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information please visit: http://www.stirr.net/

We wanted to liberate the great advise shared at STIRR’s Founders Table in a larger format. Come join us for great Networking and an insightful story or two from some of the Founder’s Table alums.

The event kicks off on July 18th in a new location, new food, no disco ball - heck we’re all grown up.

Click for tickets and more detail

Photos Courtesy of Lane Hartwell

DemoStage Presenters for 2.4 on April 11th This month’s presenters are:

	ApplicationExchange, Tim Delhaes, CEO Applicationexchange.com allows everybody - not just programmers - to build business applications through a simple web interface. Through partnerships with market leaders like Google these applications can be natively integrated with leading on-line services. This for example allows users in the future to view their customer email communication from within a customized CRM, view closing dates of opportunities in a Google Calendar or synchronize campaign information with Microsoft Adcenter.
	Edgeio, Keith Teare, Founder and CEO edgeio’s is a Platform for classified asdvertising online in the same way Adsense is a paltform for advertising. Its classifieds boards product is producing eCPMs of up to $4000 for web site owners. The company believes classified ads will form a major part in the next phase of internet content monetization.
	Spinn3r, Kevin Burton, Founder/CEO Why write your own spider when you can just use ours? In order to build Tailrank, we needed to create a spam-resistant and high performance spider to index the blogosphere. This involved spam prevention, language categorization, complex trust ranking, realtime ping support, etc. Needless to say, building a high quality spider is a difficult task. How does it work? Simple. You focus on building your application and we just give you access to our weblog index. Developers within your company just need to call our API every few minutes.
	Xcellery, Reto Laemmler, Founder/CEO Stop sending new versions of your spreadsheets, share them on Xcellery now! Xcellery lets you share and edit Excel files with others online. No installation is required. Xcellery combines the power of Excel with the power of the Internet. Changes are revision controlled. Work offline and synchronize back later. For non-Excel users, Xcellery also provides a browser-based editor.

More details about the 2.4 event here

The presenters:

	Buxfer, Ashwin Bharambe, Founder Buxfer an online shared alternative to Quicken.
	Criteo, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, CEO A real-time personalized recommendation engine.
	Metaweb, Jamie Taylor, Minister of Information Freebase.com a home to a global knowledge base.
	Wrike, Andrew Filev, Founder Wrike.com marries web and e-mail, so you can easily work with your peers on plans and get things done.

The guest host for 2.3:

Rafe Needleman, Editor at Large

To keep STIRR events free for the entrepreneurs and the presenters, STIRR relies on generous sponsors. This month’s sponsor was Sun Microsystems and their Startup Essentials program. More about Sun and the Startup Essentials program at the end of this article.

The wrapups:

• Salim Makes Good - Hundreds of Entrepreneurs now non-thirsty
• Bubblicious on 2.3 “… the premiere monthly tech event” (blush)
• Webware on Freebase and 2.3

The photos:

• Lane Hartwell
• Brian Solis
• Mark Villamek (AmmieWang Photography)

Mixer 2.3 Exclusive Sponsor:

STIRR thrives through great sponsors. Mixer 2.3 was sponsored by Sun Microsystems, and their Sun Startup Essentials Program. Sun announced Solaris Express, Developer Edition. the first release of a free new distribution based on the OpenSolaris project, providing developers with an integrated environment optimized for developing Solaris, Java, and Web 2.0-based applications on commodity desktop and laptop hardware. Sun also helps simplify development and speed deployment of secure Web-based applications and services with easy access to an AMP — Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python — stack recently optimized for the Solaris 10 OS. And the Sun Startup Essentials Program includes new features to help startup companies conserve cash, accelerate their development cycle on Solaris, Linux or Windows, and speed time to market. The program, which already provided discounts up to 60% on its enterprise-grade servers, was expanded to add Sun’s storage products at discounts of up to 70%, as well as free email support from Sun’s technical experts, and easy access to Sun’s free software. You can sign-up for Sun Startup Essentials here.

More Sun Startup Essentials details:

• Free software - get popular opensource infrastructure software, such as Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, postgres, Tomcat, etc.—all optimized for the Solaris operating system, and all free and ready to download.
  
• Discounted servers - get deep discounts on CoolThreads servers, x64 servers featuring AMD Opteron processors, and x64 and SPARC workstations.
• Discounted storage - get deep discounts on Sun StorageTek network and direct attached storage appliances, plus a Storage Area Network and Direct Attach Storage product enabling startups to start small and add capacity as needed
• Startups Ask Sun - get answers to your questions about architecture or Sun products and technologies from Sun engineering experts.

Mixer 2.4 is April 11st

If your company or a startup that you know is ready to launch and would like to present please see: http://www.stirr.net/apply/presenters

Full wrapup forthcoming.

STIRR Sydney host Martin Wells lists the next wave of startups at the next Sydney STIRR Mixer on March 29th.

Omnidrive - WebFS
Rave About It
dLook
3eep
Booking Angel