SF Beta November: The Big Fat Wrap-Up

SF Beta came to life again on Thursday, November 16, bringing together a packed house at Shine Lounge at 1337 Misison Street. With over 165 confirmed attendees, this was our biggest event by far, surpassing last month’s numbers by at least 35%.

We had a rich and varied audience, including over 55 founders, several dozen bloggers and developers, and handfulls of lawyers, designers, consultants, and more. There were people from Yahoo, Google and Microsoft right down to one-man-band startups in the early idea phase.

Most people came to SF Beta to do what one does best at a club: drink and socialize. It seemed to me that our crowd was younger and more animated than at a lot of other networking events, and perhaps the loose, casual format had something to do with it. While the crowded room once again made it difficult to move around, I’ve heard from a number of people that they were able to enjoy good conversations with both new and familiar people.

Halfway through the event, Rafe Needleman kicked off our trademark Limerick Presentations, featuring six up-and-coming startups. Rafe’s post has all the limericks in full form, along with insightful commentary. (”It’s a good thing that Joyent makes a decent small-business office suite, because this is just about the worst limerick I have ever heard.”) You can view a complete list of startup poetry on SF Beta’s own Bad Startup Poetry page, as well.

Our event got pretty decent coverage across the blogosphere — I would say the best of any event we’ve thrown so far. In addition to Rafe’s post, PavingWays chimed in with their personal account of the evening:

They offered not only name tags, but also about 10 other tags you could stick to your shirt, e.g. “foundr”, “bloggr”, “investr” … you could also get blank stickers to write on yourself, so we wrote “mobile”. Entrance fee was 10 bucks and drinks were not free, but it was still worth it.

Bub.blicio.us had some flattering things to say about the attractiveness of the crowd, at least on typical a geek scale:

Out of all the mixers/events/parties I’ve been to lately, I’d say SF Beta, by far, is drawing a more attractive crowd in general. In fact, one rather notable attendee of the female persuasion commented that she would bring more of her friends because there were actually “a lot of hot guys here.”

Woohoo! Thanks to everyone who came for making the night a big success. See you in December!