Startupday 2009: A Real-Time Report From a Sponsor

@calbucci, the impressario of today's impressively successful Startupday 2009 in Bellevue, sent a pre-event email to sponsors (myself and my firm included) in which he candidly stated that the "advisory room" was an experiment that might or might not work.

Well, it worked. Two of my colleagues, Bob and Serena, were there, and the format - attendees, for the price of admission to the event, could reserve 20 minute sessions with attorneys, recruiters and other vendors - gave pre-entrepreneurs the opportunity to ask substantive questions, allowed service providers to connect, and seemed also to facilitate yet additional, informal interaction at lunch and on the floor of the event.

Marcello's events (the first big one was the Seattle 2.0 Awards this past spring in Seattle) are successful, not only because they are well prepared and well run, but because, somehow, Marcello has figured out how to actually draw the engineers and the entrepreneurs he means to support.

The sense of the twitterstream of the event (#startupday) is that 75% of the audience were engineers or developers (exactly what you'd want for a conference to help people think through whether and how to start a new company). Somehow, the other emerging tech organizations in town that let service providers (yep, that would include me) participate end up having their events overrun with service providers! That drains such events of the energy that comes from real curiosity and open inquiry.

Anyway, many thanks to Marcelo and Seattle 2.0. Rich Barton is speaking as I post this. I'll include a pic of the main event floor from when Jonathan Sposato was talking, about 40 minutes ago.