If you haven’t joined us before, STIRR’s ‘Hack’ talks are typically short 3-5 minute vignette’s about hard lessons turned into success from entrepreneurs who have felt the pain. Each time with give the Hack format to a new speaker it morphs a little to fit the topic. This time the VC’s turned it into more of a “do’s and don’ts” talk based on pitches they have received in the past. We encouraged stories of previous failures/deals they regret passing on, and there’s a hidden gem in Jeff Clavier’s talk right at the end: see if you can catch what deal he missed before he really groked the power of social networks a few years ago (hint: the company was sold to Yahoo).

Adeo Ressi (The Funded) and I spoke offline before the event and the stories he has to share are arresting and should be shared. He didn’t get into any detail in his talk, but we’ll invite him back to speak privately in the future so he can get deeper into the topic. For DealHacks, instead of a hack, Adeo riffed on the two VC talks before him.

Beyond the talks the crowd was great. There was a mix of pre-launch (Involver, Lipzoo, etc.), early stage (Mint, Satisfaction, Watercooler, Mixbook), post acquisition entrepreneurs (Mybloglog, etc). A huge round of thanks to everyone who made it special. If you have photos from the event, please tag them “stirr” and “dealhacks”.

Words of thanks to:

• First Round Capital for buying the first round of drinks (thanks Rob!)
• Sun Microsystems our Gold Sponsor for the evening. If you run a startup, check out their Startup Essentials program.
• Jeff Clavier, Rob Hayes and Adeo Ressi for great insights and keeping the crowd smiling.

Shout outs:

• JobScore has launched (run by STIRR co-founder Dan Arkind). It’s free and takes a bunch of pain out of the candidate sourcing process. Dan and the team have done a killer job, check it out.

Videos:

Jeff Clavier, SoftTechVC

Rob Hayes, FirstRound Capital

Adeo Ressi, The Funded

Photos from the event:

Photos and writeups of Soiree2 have been coming in:

STIRR Swings into the Holiday Season “STIRR has outdone themselves, yet again, with this year’s elegant and stylish Holiday Soiree in San Francisco. It summoned the a-listers and the up-and-coming entrepreneurs alike, and everything in between. All adorned suits and gowns – who knew geeks cleaned up so well. Champagne flowed, chocolate paired, conversations planted clusters of entrepreneurs in their place, and Lavay Smith decorated the ambiance with sultry swing.”

Stay Classy San Francisco: “Can a city go, in a year, from geek to chic? Unlikely. But consider this: A year ago, Stirr held its holiday mixer in the Exploratorium, a children’s museum full of science exhibits. This year, the place was the Julia Morgan Ballroom in the Merchants’ Exchange Building, right on the California Street cable-car line. Last night, as I made my way in, I was thinking to myself, “2007, or 1907?” Alas, the aura of gilded-era chic didn’t last much past the elevator ride up to the 15th floor. The first person I met was ubiquitous egoblogger Robert Scoble. Check out our gallery for pictures of actually-not-bad swing dancing — Stirr cofounder Sanford Barr, above, showed off his moves — and people in formal attire playing Wii.”

Julia Morgan Ballroom Elevates Startup Scene Thanks to STIRR.: “Sanford Barr, Sean Ness, and Dan Arkind have outdone themselves. The amazing organization of guests and kind hearted sponsors benefitted as well by mingling with the big personas that attended such as Robert Scoble and Brian Solis. The special details that kept on coming throughout the night were hors d’oerves from Chef Paul, Lavay Smith performing, and magician Robert Strong. It was obvious that everyone enjoyed their evening with these special touches that were promised and delivered by the thoughtful men of STIRR. Gold Sponsors Felicis Ventures, Gabriel Venture Partners, and Sun Microsystems made this event possible and I for one appreciate their support. After a night like last night, I would have to go way back to my college Prom in Manhattan to compare the venue.”

It sold out in under 6 days. All told we had about 420 people attend and a knockout time. There are additional photos from the event from Brian Solis, Alex Ho and if you have more, send us a note to ‘photos’ at this domain. Wishing everyone a terrific New Year. More photos after the fold:

Photos courtesy of Lane Hartwell, Valleywag and Brian Solis

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.

]]> http://stirr.net/2007/11/16/the-talks-from-founderhacks-iii/feed/ 0 http://stirr.net/2007/09/14/the-talks-from-founderhacks-ii/ http://stirr.net/2007/09/14/the-talks-from-founderhacks-ii/#comments Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:08:34 +0000 admin http://blog.stirr.net/2007/09/14/the-talks-from-founderhacks-ii/

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

James Currier

Patrick Koppula

Scott Rafer

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.

Image Courtesy of Brian Solis / Futureworks PR ]]> http://stirr.net/2007/05/23/images-from-25/feed/ 0 http://stirr.net/2007/04/14/24-in-photos-2/ http://stirr.net/2007/04/14/24-in-photos-2/#comments Sat, 14 Apr 2007 22:35:00 +0000 admin http://www.stirr.net/posts/show/98

Photos Courtesy of Lane Hartwell

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

Part I

Part II

Video Courtesy of Nandor Fejer

http://bub.blicio.us
http://www.future-works.com

Attendio

Confabb

Collaborative Drug Discovery

JobCoin