It has become commonplace in Silicon Valley to discuss whether the web 2.0 phenomenon bears any resemblance to the halcyon dot com days. If you don’t take business models and VC term sheets into account and only look at the parties, then the answer must be yes. The hype is back, and with it, the hedonism and glam. The Techcrunch party on Friday at the offices of August Venture Capital in Menlo Park was a must-go event for the Valley’s Who’s Who (if you want to raise money or have money to give, start with this guestlist), and it saw a lively crowd boasting about A- and B-rounds with wine and mini-burgers on the sunny patio.
A sure sign of the Valley’s renaissance is that it attracts many Europeans who were thus ever-present at the event (or maybe it’s because of my European bias). Guillaume Cohen, co-founder and CEO of the enterprise video broadcasting service Veodia, was queried about an alleged conspiracy against Tour De France winner Floyd Landis, a VC from SVB congratulated me (and Germany) on “a flawless World Cup,” and a half-naked young man in a Speedo made an abrupt special appearance - see video above (I heard it was a reference to an inside joke from last year that had to with Robert Scoble).
I spoke with a number of European entrepreneurs who all confirmed that Europe has become a driving force of web 2.0: Felix Petersen, co-founder of the Berlin-Zurich based Plazes, visited the Valley to meet with a number of VCs for a first round funding. Plazes is a social location directory with 100,000 users that can tag locations to find other users or related places nearby. The service has recently garnered a lot of media attention after it had long been the darling of super-geeks but Felix told me that most of the press coverage focused on the evidently Orwellian aspect of the service and hasn’t led to any conversion and hence “We don’t actively do any PR.” Plazes doesn’t make any money yet but hopes to offer attractive contextual advertising opportunities, based on its location-based user profiles. Tim Bonnemann, who wasn’t able to attend, was present as subject of conversations as he is the initiator of the Web Mondays that have become indispensable forums for web 2.0 entrepreneurs in Germany. Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, CEO of Paris-based vpod.tv, a video publishing on demand service, was in the Bay Area to attend the Digital Hollywood conference and present at the 3rd French-American Tech Connection in San Francisco.
On the way out, I met David Thompson of Genius who impressed me with a detailed recollection of all the times we had crossed paths before. Boy, if all sales guys were like him you wouldn’t need a CRM system!
By the way, even Silicon Valley's power has limits: the police showed up at midnight to shut the party down...
nice recap :)
Posted by: Rodrigo A. SEPULVEDA SCHULZ | August 20, 2006 at 03:09 PM