Esprit du Coffee

We were meeting in town anyway, so decided to meet at the OpenCoffee Club, Saul Klein's First Life social net to get the London Entrepreneurial scene going less formally. We were (un?)fashionably late - the place was heaving - anyway, chatted to loads of people, including quite a few entrepreneurs trying to get businesses ideas up and running.

Some general observations from the conversations mixed with our experience, all to do with the Boring Bits - that's right, the Infrastructure Behind the Sexy Stuff.

1. Infrastructure matters, especially the scalability bit. Too many Web 2.0 betas are built to launch, not to scale - causes big problems down the line
2. Forget about the whizzy bits, make the basics work first - and work fast
3. Many people we spoke to were going to have to build the same basic (SocNet) functionality, on their own - clearly an opportunity for a platform play.....

Had a chat after with Mike Butcher re software development productivity - probably needs a blog on its own, but in our experience anyway there is a very direct relationship between productivity, closeness of location and quality of team. Also don't get religious (or fashionable) about languages, or snotty about using open libraries of Other People's Code.

Anyway, great event - thanks Saul

Postscript - useful post on building for customer support on Ryan Carson's blog here, which led on to this one from Joel Spolsky. Customer service can seem like a pain but if you ever look at the economics of new customer acquisition vs keeping ones you have, you'll see that it is (usually) time valuably spent