TechCrunch50 – Star-Studded Tech Sundance

09.10.08 | Category: Breaking News, Power Zen, Valley Future, Video

“We’d like this to be the Sundance Film Festival” for the tech industry – said Jason Calacanis—to over 1700 attendees, partners and press that rocked the San Francisco Design Concourse Center. Sterling sponsors including Fenwick & West, Google, The Founders Fund, MSN Money and Yahoo! made it possible. 52 top startups were selected from 1038 hopefuls and earned coveted 8 minute spots to present before the A-list audience. Short pitching sessions were judged by Valley icons like Google VP of Search and User Experience Marissa Mayer, MySpace Founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe, Angel Rockstar Ron Conway and Youtube Co-founder Chad Hurley. See our ValleyZen Flickr set HERE. Check out ValleyZen’s exclusive interview with Chad Hurley. Chad gives a warm shoutout to our ValleyZen audience:

Thank you to Jim Hornthal, Venture Partner at CMEA Ventures for shooting.
Angels Say Cut Clutter
ValleyZen gave top points to the panel “The Role of the Angel Investor” which featured Ron Conway, Yossi Vardi, David Kidder, Chris Sacca, Matt Coffin, and was moderated by Jason Calacanis. Each of the panelists were asked—What does the ideal email from a hopeful entrepreneur look like? We liked Conway’s ruthlessness when it came to cutting clutter in email.
“One paragraph in the body.
One page executive summary.
That’s it!”
Yossi Vardi seconded the notion of removing as many unnecessary ingredients from e-mails and business plans as possible. “Do you want to know what sausage and business plans have in common? Only people who don’t know how they are made eat them.”
Chris Sacca revealed to ValleyZen his secret technique for clearing his mind of Valley clutter – “running and juggling simultaneously!”

Blah Girls Glorify Drugs, Poop and Silicon(e) Breasts
TechCrunch50’s starting lineup of startups included four centered on youth, namely Shryk, Hangout Industries, BlahGirls, and Tweegee. Ashton Kutcher’s BlahGirls was indeed one small step for man, one thousand steps backwards for womankind. The new web property by Katalyst Media aimed at girls and women 13-35 did its world premiere for a TechCrunch audience that was 90%male.
Blah girls features three girly girl cartoon characters on a “Krackintosh.” In his own words, Kutcher describes Blah Girls as an “interactive animated web series focused on celebrity culture.”

Culture Watered Down
To give you a sense of the Vitaman water sponsored animated cast, Britney introduces herself as different from the Britney who “shaves her coochie.” Krystle drools over “SiliCONE Valley” and yelps “We should totally get boob jobs!” This is interesting for a site that Kutcher promises is “designed just for teenage girls.” Poo is launched into the air and Pop culture becomes poop culture in a fav segment called Celebrity Crap. Later Krystle describes women after pregnancy as getting “GI-Normous Va-JJs.”

Calacanis noted that TechCrunch50 should be like Sundance, where everything is judged on merit. The merit of the scatalogical “blah blah blah” of the Blah Girls remains to be seen. However Kutcher’s intuition to position himself in the middle a new budding romance between Hollywood and Silicon Valley is smart indeed. We should all keep an eye on those first awkward embraces.

Two Thumbs up
Overall ValleyZen gives the conference and many of the exciting startups from DotSpots to OpenTrace two thumbs up. Arrington and Calacanis successfully cultivated a Sundance-like vibe. Creativity crackled in the air as entrepreneurs, VCs, engineers, lawyers and journalists rubbed elbows and looked towards the next big thing. Ron Conway put it best in expressing the crunchy energy beneath the multi-colored lights: “When you meet an entrepreneur you are looking into the future. You are talking to a crystal ball. That is how I felt when I first spoke with Larry and Sergey.”

Even a wifi crisis and chair shortage were handled with aplomb. Calacanis helped attendees personally with the chair shortage, while Michael Arrington kept calm 1700 anxious people for whom an internet connection is oxygen. Arrington played it cool with his remark on imperfection, “The conference is still rough around the edges. That’s part of its charm.”

7 Comments so far

  1. Leslie

    I love Conway and Vardi’s Zen-like directive to cut the noise. It’s always seemed to me that no matter how hi-tech the subject or even the medium, written material comes down to the same old-fashioned rules of writing: anything that’s not absolutely necessary is boring and clouds your meaning. Good writers know the pain of cutting beautiful but gratuitous prose.

    And, in the spirit of practicing what I preach, I’m not going to even touch the Ashton Kutcher/Katalyst Media project. You’ve already said it all…

  2. George

    What were the highlights? Any inspirational ideas?

  3. sandra

    How is you tube being used,in the business model,of some of the finalists?

  4. Susie

    Blah Girls? Sometimes I find it difficult to decide if the minds behind ‘creations’ such as this are simply in the gutter and better left unacknowledged, or are utterly brilliant and should be recognized for having chosen to grab our attention momentarily so that we will either a) read a little more deeply into it and value it as some kind of commentary on our increasingly shallow and debased society, or b) allow them center stage for sufficient time that it can be used as a launching pad for future greatness.

    Whichever it may be, I’d like to thank Drue and Bill once again for bringing such a diverse range of new media topics into my living room via the always stimulating Valley Zen, but even more I’d like to give kudos to them for never failing to please with their rich vocabulary and delicious turns of phrase: ‘a new budding romance between Hollywood and Silicon Valley…We should all keep an eye on those first awkward embraces’ – fabulous! Truly good chocolate for the brain.

  5. marguerite manteau-rao

    Drue, thank you so much for inviting me to visit. I love the title of your blog. Zen is a quality that’s missing from the Silicon Valley culture. Zen needs time, a commodity in short supply here.

    I just wonder if the success rate of startups in the Valley, would not go up dramatically, if entrepreneurs here, spent more time on their ideas, and let them ripen, instead of rushing to execution. It is one thing to be creative. It is another to let the work of gestation take its course.

    Also, part of being zen means being in touch with oneself, and others. That quality translates into intelligent marketing, another quality that’s often missing from many Silicon Valley startups. For every Google or Facebook, how many companies are they that are out of touch with the fellow human beings they are pretending to reach?

    I am reminded of the La Fontaine fable, the hare and the turtle. There seems to be too many hares, and not enough turtles in Silicon Valley.

  6. Vlasta Diamant

    As someone who has seen the physical Silicon Valley rise up out of fallow fields, displacing hapless animals, changing the landscape, I am curious to observe the fresh growth of entrepreneurial saplings vying for their spot in the sun: who is the future Google and who’ll succumb to the shade of anonymity. The sky always changes . . .

  7. Jen

    “Blah Girls” — This interesting play on the term “blogger” purports to put women and young girls at the forefront of high tech interaction available on the web. Representations of women in the media challenge our very conceptions of selfhood, and it remains to be seen whether “Blah Girls” is just another stereotyping mechanism or truly engages us on another level. Given its celebration of hollywood culture, I will not be holding my breath.

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