The START Conference 2008, Notes and Takeaway

I am fresh off my trip out to the Bay Area where I attended the 2008 Innagural START Conference.  It was put on by Jefferey Veen, formerly of Google and Adpative Path, along with Bryan Mason, COO of Adaptive Path .. until last Friday :).

When I first saw the link to the conference I headed over to see a great lineup of speakers and what seemed like a lot of great content that would be presented.  Then I saw the $200 price tag and knew I had to go.  It was well worth it and am looking forward to more of these events in the future.

The morning sessions included Ev Williams of Twitter, Mena Trott of Six Apart, and Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress.  It was a lot of pretty cool insight as to how they started and became successful.  One thing I took away from many of these sessions was that what you start out to do is not always what you end up doing and what becomes successful.

There were a lot of other great speakers and panels throughout the rest of the day and into the afternoon.  One was one composed of a lawyer, accountant, and a HR professional that gave a lot of good insight and advice to the budding entrepreneurs in the audience as to what to be prepared for and things to make sure were in place as we head off with our next great idea.  Here is a few items they discussed:

• chain of title issues
• non compete agreements
• ip ownership
• corporations are better for later funding events
• llc - more flexibility in organization and allocating profits

The afternoon was just as good (thanks to some awesome Blue Bottle Coffee on one break followed by a great microbrew beer on the next ) with some really good talks by Marc Hedlund, CEO of Wesabe, and Om Malik, of GigaOm.

Marc had some great advice as well as some funny notes.  He told the audience that there are two great ways to get VC funding …

1.  Call them and scream servers are melting, cant talk now

2.  Or if they call you, simply say “No thanks, we dont need your money …

both great ideas and got quite a laugh out of the audience.  Om Malik also had some sage words for all in attendance.  He said that he was very disapointed in the simple incemental steps the tech industry has taken.  he said he expects and looks for some big steps, something new, not re hashed ideas.  When asked “What have you seen in the last year that was interesting” he responded “nothing”. He also probably had the statement of the conference “New ideas come from your heart, not your wallet”.  How true this is.  It really hit a chord with everyone, evidence the swarm of tweets on it after he spoke.

Overall, it was a great time.  Met a lot of great people, many from back east which was cool.  The conference was put on very well with twitter and meebo chat rooms to allow the audience a little bit of participation.  The food was great, the venue was great, and the people were great.  For $200 it was money well spent and I can imaging I would love to go back again next year.