The Amsterdam Techcrunch Meetup

Yesterday I was at the Amsterdam Techcrunch Meetup. I love networking and meeting new people so this was the place to be. I think I managed to speak to about 75% of the people and it wasn’t hard to notice some trends.

First off, mobile is hot! Up until I came to TC Amsterdam I hadn’t realized the sheer impact of mobile yet. It seemed like 3 out of the 4 people I spoke to have their focus on the mobile platform. What interested me is that almost none of the mobile startups I talked to had launched yet (eBuddy and Nimbuzz as the exceptions). I then asked the question, how long have you been developing? It wasn’t uncommon to hear 1~2 years. That raises the question; does launch quick with minimal features apply to mobile? I don’t think it does and these are my reasons:

There was one sector within mobile where a lot of the attention was focused. Mobile Location Based Awareness Applications (that’s a mouth full). At one point I was standing with three different entrepreneurs each with their own company but all with the same pitch that started with that mouth full of words. Mike Butcher (Techcrunch UK/USA) had an interesting take on them and said they would eventually become “commodities”. On my train ride back from Amsterdam I thought about this. I think if there’s one thing we’ve noticed on the Internet is that there continue to be new ideas that differentiate themselves from the competition. So will location based software really be a commodity?

If you are Mike Butcher or Patrick de Laive( The Next Web) you have to endure some serious flattery. My last post mentioned the Techrunch Monopoly on Web 2.0 content. However it’s no longer a monopoly they have on just content, they seem to have it on Web 2.0 in itself. Their blogs are seen as the Holy Grail for your startup. I don’t deny that a positive post can be the boost for your startup but what happened to just pure word-of-mouth. If your application is really good, they will write about you.

When you say you are building a search engine there is one guarantee, you will always get the surprised look and the “OOh”. In the middle of the event Mike Butcher gave a little speech about how there is no Silicon Valley in Europe but that it is a mindset that covers it (I will write more about this soon), he then surprised everyone by bringing up startups for an on-the-spot pitch. After about four pitches of a minute each, he mentioned my name. I love public speaking so I took the chance and jumped on the bench (see the picture below). I gave a one minute speech in which I said that our results will be “10 times better then Google”. Obviously this did not go without the necessary response of laughter, surprise and speech bubbles above their heads with the text “Is he nuts?!?” - just wait and see.

I love to shake things up a little!

I stayed till the end and at about 9ish after five hours of networking we went to the bar. A night full of great stories and discussions but at eleven o’clock there was need for some more excitement. We decided to show Mike Butcher the low points of Dutch Night Life. This says it all:

July 23, 2008 | Filed Under For the Moment 

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