Review: Entrepreneurs/Co-founders Mixer

Sunday! It was an awesome morning and an interesting event ahead - "Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs/Co-founders Mixer: Tea & Music".

I had a perfect mood for networking and ideas and I must say, the event was AWESOME :) We were one of the first people that came. It was a nice building with lots of cubicals inside and a big room filled with chairs and a stage.

In a couple of minutes lots of people came, and by lots I mean tens, and then it was over a hundred or even two.. We were quickly approached by some entrepreneurs that were looking for companies that could help them out in their ideas. There were also some foreign entrepreneurs who were offering different services - for instance there was a guy from Belarus which had a mobile development company, which is mostly developing products for iOS. There also were some guys from India who were offering web development (that's a must-be factor) and other services.

So, there were quickly formed lots of groups, where people were discussing their businesses and exchanging business cards (note to myself: MAKE A BUSINESS CARD!). It was interesting, the weird thing is that I was promoting Drupal and Propeople, instead of minding my own business - but doh, I'm still happy if one of those guys will eventually call Propeople to work on their projects.

In a couple of minutes, after drinks (tea and wine), people start coming on the stage and giving 2 minute pitch talks. From what I remember:

• there was a guy who is working on a comics web project
• there was a girl who was looking for fundraising in educational domain (I don't quite remember the details :) )
• there was a dude who created a fast video-processing method for iOS and he was looking for someone who will help him out and create a video sharing/storing web platform for people to store and share personal videos.
• there was also a political project where people would vote for things

I don't quite remember other pitches, but I'm sure they were interesting as well :)

An interesting thing - when people were leaving the stage after their pitch, they were going on the same path through the audience, and along that path, there were sitting a bunch of people, who I think were VCs (venture capitalists) or private investors. They were listening closely to the pitches, then they were picking the right person, and along his way, they would stop him, talk to him and give away their business cards. That was a sort of a ritual - if you are stopped on your way off the stage - that's a good sign and you passed the ritual, and if not, well, there's always a next time.

After all the pitches, groups which were formed took shape: video-related groups, fund raising groups, web-development groups, mobile applications, venture capitalists and co-founding discussions, etc.

All in all I had a great time, made some connections, promoted Drupal and learned a couple of lessons and it's awesome. I definitely will be much more prepared next time.

Keep on networking and mixing ideas ( https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html ).