Geek n Rolla

Yesterday TechCrunch UK ran the Geek n Rolla event, mainly for new technology startups but also covering some other elements. My main interest was to see whether the startup community had taken notice of The Crunch, and what had changed from the go-go times of a year ago.

I was tied up in the morning so only arrived in time for a fairly interesting (in all senses of the word) panel on Women in Tech. The issue of "why there are fewer women in Tech than men" crops up perennially and usually circles round with no conclusion. No change this time, but the ante was upped by the Daily Telegraph's Milo Yiannopolous taking the contrarian, un-PC, (and inaccurate in my experience) "its natural that men are better at some things and its OK". Gets you fired from Harvard but got Milo mild admonitions and (according to him anyway) lots of private support.

Ah well.....I go back to Janet Parkinson's work last autumn in Berlin which showed that there are more women on-web than men, controlling more spend, and they use the quite Web differently - so anyone who designs applications for what women want has probably got a competitive advantage that most (male built) sites will never understand. I recall Wired's Ben Hammersley going hammer and tongs at her in Berlin when all she had done was assembled a basic fact base of these things (see the link above) , so there is clearly something deeply visceral in some men about admitting all this stuff, which Milo clearly tapped.

Anyway, what about the Crunch? There were quite a few useful talks on this:

- William Reeve, an experienced entrepreneur, gave a rational and dispassionate analysis of how two companies in the same space (Lovefilm vs Screen Direct) can be so totally differently run, and the difference between a bootstrapping culture and getting too much funding too early. He also touched on designing for scalability early, a drum we bang too. William's talk is online here.

- Nick Halstead of Tweetmeme on getting Angel funding, and how it was like herding cats. He also talked about how all negotiations can change up to and including the last minute, and the issues around board structure with multiple angels.

- Lesley Eccles of Hubdub outlined their strategy of running a company from Scotland but aiming at the US market "because thats where the money is" (from the large customer base and funders. Proves that you don't have to be SV based to take US money.

- Reshma Sohoni of Seedcamp went through the funding models of their funded companies. I was quite amused to see "Freemium" has now replaced "Advertising" as the business model de jure (see this post on the Seedcamp companies from last year) - I hope it works out for them, as its a far from proven model. Reshma and others noted that all the evidence is that "Freemium" has to be designed in from the beginning.

- Fred Destin of Atlas talked about getting VC money in tough times - team, tech and market size important as always but I heard much more focus on "show me the money" in the business model than has been prevalent in the last few years. Also, us Europeans are far too polite vs the Israelis, Indians and Americans

As always there is the socialisation, I throughly enjoyed the Pizza n Rolla dinner some of us had afterwards before the obligatory apres conference party (Geek n Rolla Ball?) - nice to meet existing Twitterfriends in person as well as FOWA's Ryan Carson. And clearly if this whole sector collapses then TechCrunch's Mike Butcher has a budding second career if his performance on the drums is anything to go by.