Web2.0NYC Recap

What a trip that was! I’m busy packing for my trip to SF this week for the TechStars Demo Day 2008 in Mountain View. If you are an investor and would like an invitation, please let me know.

Highlights of my trip:

• My sister Susan Hyde is doing a fellowship at Princeton. It was fun to visit on a hot, muggy summer day. She is doing amazing as always. I took NJ transit down for the day, a fantastic few hours. We watched Burn After Watching, we both loved it.
• Had a great conversation with the Kauffman Foundation who is doing some impressive work.
• Great to walk around the floor of Web 2.0 Expo with Ellen Gerstein who works in publishing. Even more fun that I don’t.
• The best part of the Expo was the Web 2.0 Open put on by the conference and Nate Westheimer. Some of the best talks were done in a very intimate setting. Think barcamp in the middle of a conference floor. Quite the energy. I lead a talk about Startups entitled “Startup Deathmatch.”



• I ran into Joe Stump at the Wine 2.0 event (which I found very wine 1.0 with the same snooty wine habits, good event, but I would have loved to see something really new, perhaps this warrants a blog post)
• Joe introduced me to Scott Beale, who was one of the first bloggers I started reading four years ago. He took us all to Burp Castle, which is now one of my favorite bars in NYC.
• Went to a Yankee game by partnering up with Brian Shaler to buy 10 tickets for anyone that wanted to go, and promoted it through twitter. We filled up, and got to go to the game with some really cool people.



• My friend from a few Startup Weekend‘s Chris Hutchins was working in NYC and let my old friend from High School Chris Mintiens and I crash his amazing rooftop deck (click on this link to see the amazing midtown skyline.



• Met about 10 really innovative companies. I wish O’Reilly would have a 2 hour demo pit for underfunded startups doing innovative things, like Occipital.
• The Ignight NYC was a hit. Amazing presentations. We should do one in Boulder.
• During one of the presentations with Tim O’Reilly I brought up my biggest complaint online right now, which is the lack of encouragement for quality user engagement. I will post a larger post on this, but the premise is that there are more people every night that eat at a restaurant than there are reviews online for that restaurant. YouTube comments are garbage. Finding a system to really reward this positive or engaging participation will be beneficial to all startups.
• I met the great folks from the European Web2.0 summit. Perhaps I need to go to that? Ernst-Jan Pfauth, wrote about my business cards (actually quite a few people did). I love having the ones I have. Letterpress next?
• I met with the crew from Bottles Blends and Brews
• Talked all about AngelSoft
• I waved the flag of TechStars, and met quite a few really quality investors and entrepreneurs.

That was an amazing trip. I’m thinking about taking some time to volunteer for the new game in town.