Salim makes good. Hundreds of Silicon Valley STIRR Entrepreneurs now non-thirsty

Categories: Ethics, EventsPosted on March 22nd, 2007

Last time at the STIRR event, Salim Ismail had a slight incident on stage, As a recap, Salim promised to buy everyone drinks if they clapped (applause as currency for voting) for his product to receive an award. The excited crowd gave their full attention, resulting in Salim’s company Confabb to win, after receiving the award, Salim retracted the offer for drinks, in which the crowd boo’d and hissed, see video of presentation.

I gently prodded via my blog but kudos to STIRR MC Rafe Needleman of CNET’s WebWare full on gave a nice public rubbing, “Field Report Stirr wrap-up, part 1: Sun, slogans, and how to cheat your audience”. Ouch! Salim immediately left comments on our blogs telling us he will make good, as well as confirmation from his company. Yesterday, while walking up to the event, I see Salim, who’s made good on his promise. I ran into Salim as he parked his car “that wasn’t my best public speaking” and was eager to restore his reputation.

Last night, at STIRR, in good spirit, Salim made good with the drink gods.

Salim greeted each guest and presented them with a drink ticket, and enjoyed the jokes and appreciation. You may also know that Salim has recently joined Yahoo, and is heading up their skunkworks team, which will yield some exciting products. I wonder what additional innovation will come out of Yahoo, I’ve got great interest after hanging with YPN, Pipes, and MyBlogLog teams.

Who else was at STIRR? Michael Arrington, Niall Kennedy, Sarah Meyers, Kevin Burton, PodTech, Bubbilicious, Duck9, Dave McClure, Ian Kennedy, Joyent, Oren Michaels of Mashery, Jeff McManus, Oren and of course the companies presenting were Buxfer Criteo Freebase Wrike, and sponsorship by SUN.

Good show Salim, and congrats to all your new ventures.

Fully-Naked-Transparent-Open-Nudist-Disclosure: Salim bought me and a couple hundred others drinks last night, duh

Share This Post:

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 4:23 am and is filed under Ethics, Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

[...] 3) Live your word It’s easy to say something you may regret later, so be careful about your approach to win audience flair. Fortunately, there’s always a chance to make things right. 4) Go “up” messaging The most savvy speakers can pitch their product or service, without ever mentioning the tools or technology. If you can master this, you’ll be able to progress most of your audience to the demo. By going “up” means that you focus on the market need, user need, business need and tie it to a solution that you offer. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » 10 things to know before your Pitch at STIRR (or anywhere else for that matter) on April 12th, 2007 at 8:50 am

[...] It’s hard to keep track of influx I’m having an increasingly hard time keeping track of all the start-ups being launched. I go to STIRR events (and here, and here) Startup Launch events, read Techcrunch, Techmeme, Digg, etc. One of the markets that I think is interesting are the do it yourself Social Networking applications (build your own myspace) and I started a list. At first there were 8 companies on it, now there are over 50! Low, low barriers to entry With startups being so cheap to create (see this video interview of Guy Kawasaki and his $12,000 dollar success/failure) we’ve got to believe that the barriers to entry are low, maybe too low. As technology matures, open source infrastructures are a commodity, and grabbing piece meal of parts is so easily found, how will a Web 2.0 company differentiate? It’s also interesting to see which companies are getting funded. Differentiation There’s a few things they can do of course, 1) Niche into a different market, or focus on a vertical. 2) Have kick-ass marketing, know the right people, learn how to be louder that the rest, or get the ‘influentials’ (like the 400 on my Twitter follow list) to check the product out 3) Build a disruptive technology that no one else has done yet. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » The Challenge of Web 2.0 Company, there too many of us! on June 15th, 2007 at 10:13 am