StartupCamp
This is a post from Luke's old blog; it is saved here statically for historical purposes, as of October 2008
StartupCamp is closing down now. It's been a great two days, but it's somewhat difficult to describe how it was good. I didn't learn anything specific -- but it was great to see other startups in spaces other than Web 2.0, and it was great seeing a bit of an ecosystem around the startup world.
One of the standouts for me was the session on analysts today, run by Steve O'Grady from RedMonk. I never really thought about analysts, other than the big ones like Gartner, but it was great seeing that there are great, small companies out there providing good information on the industry.
I also got to spend some with a Puppet user, Randy Bias, who's working on his company neoTactics, which provides a virtual server infrastructure for early-stage startups.
I ran a couple of sessions in the camp, on open source startups and trailblazing startups. The open source session went a different direction than I expected, since Matt Mullenweg and I were the only people representing startups producing open source. So, we mostly talked about startups using OSS, rather than producing it, but it was still a good session. The trailblazing session was smaller but still good -- the topic was how to deal with having to market both the problem and the solution. Discussion bounced between my company and a mobile GPS company, and although it was marginally difficult to keep the discussion from focusing on the company instead of the general problem, we still had a fruitful discussion. I was convinced by some attendees that I should create a web-based forum for Puppet in addition to the mailing list.
Like I said, it was a great camp, and it was a great excuse to come back to the bay area (again).
