I attended today’s OpenCoffeeClub event, the one in London. It is a loose framework of entrepreneurial meetup events that Saul Klein recently kicked off, as part of his recent broader initiatives to encourage interaction between and raise the confidence of European entrepreneurs.
The 90 minutes I was able to spend at the event included a grande latte and a series of quite interesting talks with several people. As I was wearing a Skype t-shirt, most of the contacts evolved around startups wanting to work with Skype so I have quite some business card passing to do internally to see if anything will come out of it. I’ve now also asked the guys from our Software Developer Program to attend some of the future events once in a while so that the ecosystem interest can fall into right hands more directly.
The energy level in the room was surprisingly high and enthusiastic entrepreneurs wooing and sharing ideas really seemed to dominate the group. As opposed to a pool of thirsty nametagged VC sharks circling around rare prey, the direction some of these type of events can easily turn into. Maybe it is just because of the excess of capital available these days. Most of even the very early stage startups I talked to had already raised the money they need.
On more personal immediate takeaways, I now have joined Hakon Haugnes’ .name space (<sten[ät]tamkivi.name> and www.sten.tamkivi.name setup took less than a minute!). And Mobyko‘s approach to mobile phone contents backup to web sounded quite cool, I’ll take time to check out their implementation later.