Yesterday was the second rev of Startup Riot. Forty nine companies and one make believe company gave three minute pitches on their startup. Once again, it was a fantastic event. Improved in every way from last year.
WifiCat was a highlight. WifiCat is in integrated cat collar and Wifi access point. It’s a joke. The parody that Scott Burkett presented on everything not to say and do in a presentation was laugh out loud funny. Even more so because some of the morning presenters had violated the unwritten rules of pitching.
Paul Freet gave the best presentation of the day. Three slides. Three pictures. You had to listen to him to understand. It forced people to look up from their laptop and phones. While not the most technology driven company in the bunch Offload.me‘s value proposition is clear and compelling. They provide remote personal assistants for busy executives. Eight words. Use that many to describe your company.
There were three Atlanta Startup Weekend companies in the bunch. Kidkey, Jumbis, and Twitpay. I got a shoutout from the latter with a Madoff comparison. We used my business PayPal account to alpha test the Twitpay service during Startup Weekend. I can assure you, all funds have been returned.
I believe for the first time we had companies traveling from out of state to attend Startup Riot. ShoutNow (another Startup Weekend company) made its way from Indy and Kansas City, while WOMBeat! traveled from Tampa.
Somehow or the other the keynote speaker Chris Wanstrath, the founder of GitHub, joined our lunch party late and squeezed in next to me. He was late to lunch because he had to go take a shower after his presentation. Puts Melanie Brandt’s comment about the desire to wash his hair in perspective. Overslept it seems. Both a nice and witty guy. Had our end of the table rolling.
Kudos again to Sanjay Parekh. Too many good companies to mention. More investors in the audience. Companies traveling from afar. Great networking between sessions. Better in every way.
Two suggestions to make it better. The Wifi failed before the show started. We need more IP addresses available. Get that and make folks pay for their own coffee. As for the community. Everyone, including me, needs to treat the presenting companies with more respect. These folks are trying hard. I feel sorry for the guy that was on stage when someone in the audience got rickrolled. And some of the comments on BackNoise were down right mean spirited. Sanjay started Startup Riot to help entrepreneurs and startups. We all need to act in a way to further his mission.
One more thing: Stop with the walking down to Publix and buying six packs of beer. There is a time and place for everything. There are professional investors in the room that are starting to take an interest in concept and seed stage startups. The after party starts at 5:00. Show a little restraint.
Doing those two things will make Startup Riot 2010 the best yet. Even better then the fantastic 2009 version.
Update: More coverage on Startup Riot by Paul Stamatiou, TechDrawl, and AtlanTech.