Sanjay Parekh pulled off Startup Riot 2009 with style and smooth organization. The sold-out all-day event was held at the Twelve in Atlantic Station followed by an after party on the top of five floors occupied by Nelson Mullins, LLP, in their Atlantic Station offices. The keynote speaker was Chris Wanstrath, a San Francisco transplant from Cincinnati who is co-founder and Chief of Marketing at GitHub, a social code hosting service for projects that use Git. Launched in February 2008, GitHub was written in Ruby on Rails by Logical Awesome developers Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner and has amassed an impressive list of marquee customers in a year.
In the keynote address, Wanstrath advised, “Do what you love.” He said making a lot of money is not what’s important, but being happy, meeting people, and having a great product is.
http://www.vimeo.com/3296529Wanstrath quit a corporate job in 2007 to consult in Ruby on Rails and save some money to fund FamSpam, a website co-founded with Hyett where families could keep in touch using one family email address on the site. FamSpam launched, wasn’t really making big numbers, when Wanstrath had a sort of epiphany. He didn’t love FamSpam. He didn’t wake up every morning eager to get on the site. FamSpam had been live barely a month with a fair amount of time and money invested when Wanstrath launched GitHub, something he loves.
Even with a list of blue chip customers, Wanstrath still has no office, only recently started taking a salary and just got business cards. Wanstrath said great customer support in a company is essential because happy users are the surest way to grow your business. Should you boostrap your startup like GitHub did, or take angel or venture capital? His advice – do what you want, do what makes you most comfortable, and above all, do what you love. The full text of the keynote address can be found here on Gist.GitHub.
The most talked about presentation followed lunch. Local serial entrepreneur Scott Burkett pitched Wifi Cat, a wifi repeater in a cat collar, that would be be profitable in 90 days and guaranteed a 500% IRR! He had Venn diagrams, hockey stick charts, and this quote from the unwitting godfather of early-stage investing in Atlanta, Sig Mosley, ”…[amazing]…”
There were about 50 presentations in all. We have covered AccelerEyes, Feedscrub, Good Egg Studios/Elf Island, MechanixLoop, Rank ‘Em, Regator, and Servinity on TechDrawl. We were already fans of Jumbis, Twitpay, and CloudSurance, and are new fans of Fuzzy Logic and Offload.me.
Early during the after party, it looked like a tornado might blow Atlanta’s entrepreneur community right off the outdoor balcony at Nelson Mullins!
http://www.vimeo.com/3295440You can read more accounts of Startup Riot 2009 by Lance Weatherby here, here, here, and here, Paul Stamatiou here, Urvaksh Karkaria here, Stephen Rosenberg here and Tessa Horehled here.
