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Today I’m attending the Start Conference in Fort Mason, San Francisco, hosted by Mssrs. Veen and Mason . Rather than live-blog a short event, I’m going to try an adactio -style summary. The conference was in interview format; the first session featured Veen walking Ev Williams ( Twitter ) and Matt Mullenweg ( WordPress ) through their projects’ conception and early growth (along with wayback screenshots and back-of-napkin notes, including a pen drawing of my.stat.us, which later became Twitter). Mullenweg made a side point that startups shouldn’t limit their talent pool—a selection bias toward dudes around San Francisco, thereby ignoring ’99.9%’ of talent, including the Ev Williamses or Matt Mullenwegs in the tech “boonies” (though both are male and relocated-to-SF). Beyond the history and business decisions of MoveableType , Mena Trott answered questions about gender assumptions she’s seen during the growth of Six Apart.
The pre-lunch session featured a variety of beyond-the-web entrepreneurs— Ritual Coffee in SF , Rare Device and a Hollywood screenwriter (Josh Cagan) talked about their entrepreneurial efforts. It also featured a foray into business how-to (the room really perked up for that) with various legal/finance experts about taking a side-project into a full-time gig and protecting your work via ‘chain of title’, corporate entity types, non-competes, employment definitions and more.
Post lunch featured the inimitable Merlin Mann, with funny , cogent soundbytes that made the audience immediately look for podcast recording equipment. Wesabe ‘s Marc Hedlund and VC David Hornik followed up with a solid talk about motivation and priorities while being a startup CEO , courting (or avoiding) VCs. Which—post a beer ‘n ice cream and Om Malik’s counter-futurism—led up to the pitch round, which (to my mind) was a weird end to a conference strongly focusing on discounting startup/VC myths. Good conference, conflicting conclusions, but a lot of positive support by smart people…as expected. Were we trying to summarize the startup vibe, or evolve it?
On a final note, it was fantastic to attend a conference where there was almost a line for the women’s room.
