Today was the first day of the Launch Conference, put together by Jason Calacanis. Over 1,000 attendees watched startups present their products to a panel of judges.
The first to present was no other than Joel Spolsky himself, introducing Careers 2.0, a new career site for the StackOverflow crowd. Different from your typical job hunting site, Careers 2.0 focuses software developers and takes an unique approach to presenting the candidate’s abilities. At the end of the presentation and even at the end of the first day, judges and the grand jury were enthusiastic about the site.
See below a snippet of Joel’s pitch:
And below is a snippet of Joel’s answering questions from the panel:
Internet Connection That Works!
Those who have been to conferences before know that one thing is certain: internet connection sucks. Well, Launch was different. As Jason Calacanis himself explained “We figured out how to make Wi-Fi work at a conference. Make it wired” and so every seat had access to an ethernet cable with high-speed connection. I never had an issue, wish all conferences could offer this.
Angels at Work
As the first day of the conference comes to an end, a few good surprises! Two companies got angels excited enough to make on stage commitments. Green Goose walked away with $100K and Volta got Dave McClure to almost jump out of his seat as he exclaimed “I will write you a f… check!”.
Not bad for a first day huh? I’ll write about some specific startups in more detail later. Let’s see what surprises the second day will bring!
Stay tuned…
UPDATE: The full video of the first day is now on youtube, you can watch a better version of the talk above on Launch Conference official youtube channel.
Startup Web Guide 