SF Beta

I was recently contacted by the founder a new site, LunchTree, which facilitates serendipitous lunches between members of the startup community every Tuesday.

Building on the momentum of our Financial Innovation event, our friends at the Future of Money & Technology Summit have offered SF Beta members and fans a 10% discount on tickets — simply use the code “sfbeta”, or click the link above.

Taking place Monday, February 28, the Future of Money & Technology Summit brings together the best and brightest thinkers around money, including visionaries, entrepreneurial business people, developers, press, investors, authors, solution providers, service providers, and organizations who work with them at the convergence of cash and commerce. We meet to discuss the evolving money ecosystem in a proactive environment conducive to dealmaking.

This Thursday, swing by 111 Minna Gallery (the same home as SF Beta) for an all-night dance party celebrating StumbleUpon’s 10 Million Stumblers! With DJs, giveaways, signature cocktails, live entertainment, and hundreds of fellow Stumblers, this is a party you won’t want to miss. Best of all — and quite unlike SF Beta — it’s free!

MEET other Stumblers and the SU Team!
WIN one of the 5 iPads being raffled!
SNAP photos in the Glass Coat Photobooth – http://www.glasscoatphotobooth.com/!
WATCH Sirron Norris do a live painting – http://www.sirronnorris.com/!
SIP StumbleUpon signature cocktails!
GET SU schwag – http://www.zazzle.com/stumbleupon!

DANCE tunes provided by:

DJ Spesh – http://www.djspesh.com/ – 8pm
DJ Ts & Roll (life/style) – http://www.lifestyletimes.blogspot.com/- 9:30pm
DJ Danny White of IndieSlash – http://www.dannywhitesf.com/ – 11pm

Interested in going? RSVP on Facebook.

I had the pleasure of chatting last week with Steve Hoffman, the founder of FoundersSpace, a new project designed to provide startup founders with free answers to commonly asked questions.

The site provides detailed answers to complex questions, including What is Class F Stock?, What are the tax implications in California between an LLC and a Corporation?, Where can I find a stock plan and equity compensation documents?, and many, many more.

The answers come from prominent investors and advisors, and go into rich detail. We’re proud to promote this valuable new resource, and recommend it to anyone who’s involved in an early-stage venture.

Okay, okay, we’re about three years late to the party, but hey, better late than never.

SF Beta has its own Twitter account now, maintained by me (Christian Perry) and Krystyl Baldwin.

Give us a follow!

As you may have seen on TechCrunch, we will be hosting the launch party of Powerset co-founder Steve Newcomb’s new company, Virgance.

A brief summary from the article:
“Virgance focuses on fostering and promoting benevolent, wide-reaching and important campaigns that also stand a good chance to make money. The Virgance engineering team, headed by VP of Engineering Naseem Hakim (who helped build the very popular Facebook app Circle of Friends), is building a platform designed to help promote these campaigns across a number of social platforms. Newcomb describes the platform as “the next iteration of what President Obama did” – leveraging the power of social media to reach the masses. But these campaigns are not simply about raising awareness – they have to let the community somehow interact, and they have to have a solid business model. Depending on the campaign, Virgance gets a portion of the incoming revenues.” 

At our next SF Beta, we’ll be featuring the ventures and adventures of Virgance, with tons of bloggers, press, and investors in attendance.  This is definitely NOT the beta to miss this year.

So I just wrote up a quick post summarizing my advice for men working the tech parties for a date.  This is just written from my personal experience, so feel free to keep your own style and hope for the best.  But hopefully it offers some guidance and assitance for getting that special someone:

http://troggerpath.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/find-that-entrepreneurial-valentine/

PS:  Thats the blog for our new start-up venture; so feel free to check it out.  We’d love your eyes and thoughts.

Our friend, John Mark Walker, recently pointed us to a really cool event coming up next weekend, LugRadio Live. The event features some of the best minds in open source gathering for an irreverent celbration of life, liberty, and the persuit of free software.

Tickets are even cheaper than SF Beta — only ten bucks — and when you consider that you get a full weekend conference for the price, that’s a pretty sweet deal. If any of the above topics interest you, check it out!

A mere seven days remain until SNAP Summit 2.0. As the Bay Area’s premier conference on the business and design of social apps, we’ve got an amazing lineup of speakers, and based on how sales are going, we’re expecting a really good turnout as well.

Check out the site for more info. Hope to see you there!

I just came across a blog post written by Hiren Patel about SF Beta. He writes a wonderful guide to attending our events, and includes some great suggestions on how to approach new people. My favorite line:

“The question you might be asking right now is what do I say to get into the conversation when two people are in it: Anything.”

You can view the full post here. Thanks, Hiren!