A merged party of two allegedly disparate networking groups, that is. Last night the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) and iStrategy Labs combined forces to bring together the 'old' and the 'new'. Inspired by Zach Goldfarb's Washington Post article on events each organization held separately on June 23rd, Peter Corbett of iStrategy Labs (standing left with Lisa Anna Brunner) and Bobbie Kilberg of NVTC decided to join forces. Result: vetted, serial entrepreneurs dressed mostly in button down shirts, mixed last night with Web 2.0 budding entrepreneurs in a sweltering gathering at Local 16 in the trendy U Street section of Washington D.C.
I arrived 30 minutes into the event and it was already well on its way to meeting its 600+ projected attendees. Some NVTCers seemed a bit out of their element for a moment as they considered the crowd of young Webbers before them, but that lasted, for about 20 seconds before they plunged in. Consummate networkers, they didn't hold back. Some wanted even more Web 2.0 companies to be present, others saw value since they could offer their expertise from years of hard knocks experience to new business people that still haven't quite realized that they need a market and execution strategies together with great ideas. The Web 2.0 side of the crowd seemed to talk among themselves quite a bit, but were not shy either. They are ambitious after all and they saw the potential of finding funding sources.
For my part, this gathering was a chance to see known faces from the NVTC and listen to new ideas of people pushing the edges of the web [Jeremy Epstein, FOJ Blog and Shawn Scott, Geekycyberdad]. The most interesting story I ran across was actually from an 'old' company, StackSafe. Talking to Loren Burnett, the President & CEO, he told a great story of having a tech team, talking to 30+ companies in the IT sector and finding an unaddressed gap of virtualization for IT testing. Now, three years later, with press in Forbes and InformationWeek among others, the company, which released its Test Center offering in January of this year, has signed its fourth client. Now that is the kind of story I like to hear about.
Because of the blending of the groups, there seemed to be more diversity in the crowd, particularly in gender. Some attention has been given in the past weeks to greater diversity in ICT arising because Web 2.0 is drawing more women, and this gathering showed the fact of it. [Cheryl Dickison, R2i and Peter Hause, Integer]
Will cross border business generate from TwinTech? Time will tell. But with the gathering continuing well past 9pm, there was certainly a lot of talk going on, and fun going on [Richard Lipski from the Washington Post]. And I look forward to the next merged party that Peter and Bobbie throw together.
To read more about who was there and what they thought of the event, see Zach's article about the evening. And to see more great pics, check out photographer Nick Strocchia's pictures from the party (client iStrategy Labs).
Thanks for the link in the article. I was wondering when that picture was gonna pop up. I'm looking forward to the next meetup in September. Hopefully we can connect again!
Posted by: geekycyberdad | August 02, 2008 at 05:59 PM