October 21, 2009

Launch48 - Day 1 Summary

Well this is my first ever blog post, and it is partially written standing up on the tube so if it is rubbish I blame that. I’ve just spent the weekend at Launch48 - a weekend that got a variety (and when I say a variety I really mean a variety as I will detail later) of people together to attempt to build a web app.

To kick things off they held a one day conference at the Paypal offices in Richmond, West London. In this blog post I intend to detail the conference part and I'll do another post or two to cover the rest of the weekend where we split into teams and built an app.

Before I continue let me just say I am very blunt - if I don't like it I'm not going to sugar coat it. I didn't meet anyone I didn't like - so please don't take anything too personally - but people who are too positive about really crap ideas piss me off, so I make sure I am not one of them.

Also let me say that whilst I pass out some criticism here I am only doing it for the areas that need improvement because I think it is worth it - I'll be the first one to buy a ticket for the next event - it was brilliant.

So the conference got started around 10am. Adil, Ian and the others (there was one other main guy up the front and I embarrassed to say I’ve forgotten his name) did an amazing job organising it but there were a few things they could have done to improve it. Firstly there were way too many chairs, they probably shouldn't have had so many out in the first place, but they definitely should have asked everyone to condense up a bit once it became obvious they had too many. I sat at the back so I'm as guilty as anyone, but these things work better and there is more energy when people are packed like sardines. While I'm being negative I'll keep being negative but there are loads of positives so keep reading. Unfortunately I think Adil and Ian are probably a bit geeky like me, our types aren't really the types to get an audience going, they really needed an MC of some sort. There were no "are we all having fun?"s, there was no turn around and introduce yourself to someone you don't know etc. It made it all a bit flat. I went to Techcrunch's Geek & Rolla earlier in the year and I would say that is how you want to run a conference. There also seemed to be a lack of a microphone. It wasn't the biggest space but it was a bit hard to hear some of the speakers (and certainly the pitchers later on). The microphones did appear come Sunday night.

So onto the speakers (and this is where I get positive). I don't know how the guys got these speakers, tickets for the event were cheap so they weren't paying them, but they were bloody brilliant. It started with a sports guy (Dr Dorian Dugmore), I've spent the year training for a couple of triathlons and it has made an amazing difference to my entire life so he was particularly relevant for me. He perhaps went on a bit long and some people may not have been that interested in their health but he was an excellent speaker about an interesting topic.

From there we got into more startup related talks. Next up was Bill Morrow from Angels Den (one of those pay to pitch type groups that Jason Calacanis is having a go at currently). Very smart guy who had some good advice on creating a business investors might be interested in. He was followed by Danvers Baillieu – one half of the Danvers and Barry show, if you haven’t met these guys they are absolutely classic – funny, nice guys and really into helping start-ups – you almost forget they are lawyers! Danvers gave lots of good advice on legal aspects to think about when starting a company, and some great on advice on a few issues to try and not worry about until you need too. I work on a real basis of “a nice problem to have” because that generally means you are finally having some success and some of his talk was along those lines. He also had a great slide pack, you can find it online. I'm definitely going to have to get along to one of their Bootlaw sessions sometime soon.

I’m just looking at how many more talks there were (8) and thinking I don’t quite have the energy to summarise them here, but one talk (which I also heard at Geek n Rolla) was from Reshma Sohoni from Seedcamp. She is a great speaker and did a brilliant summary of different revenue models for web apps, if you ever get a chance to hear her talk do so. All of the other speakers were very good, I think slide packs are available online for some and they are worth a look.

Now one key thing I did pick up on was the variety in the audience. The conference was sold as a web app building conference and I was amazed at the number of people who do not come from a technology background (they were very interested though, they hadn't just gone to the wrong conference). I met several people who had never even heard of Techcrunch. Personally I thought this was brilliant. I feel the start-up community is a bit too into itself and getting people from more conventional businesses involved is great. There were CFO’s, Management Consultants and loads of others. For these people the conference must have been absolutely fantastic as it gave such a great guide as to how technology start-ups get going. Which also brings me to my final criticism – I didn’t really learn anything. I spend way too much time reading about stuff, watching presentations from other conferences etc. I said at the top that I’d be back next time, I definitely will be for the overall weekend, if they do another day session I may think twice. Saying that I met some great people during that first day, and I may well think of going again just for the networking.

The first day was finished with “Launch48 Lessons Learnt” from last time and a panel discussion. The panel discussion was a bit light weight but people were getting a bit tired by then anyway. The two Lessons Learnt talks from the last Launch48 were brilliant. Very honest analysis of where they went right and wrong by two guys that I think most people probably wished were available to work in teams rather than just mentor over the weekend.

And that is the end of my analysis of the conference part of the event. Hopefully I might get a post about the pitching process out tonight, and I will attempt to do a post about creating the project, and end with my analysis of the six projects that got created.

I hope this has been of interest to someone.

PS. A quick edit - I've named Adil and Ian at the top of this but there was loads of people who made the event happen - thanks to all of them