Shanti’s Dispatches

Okay, this post might be a bit boring / narcissistic for some people’s tastes - but if you haven’t been to one of these shindigs here it is layed out from one dude’s perspective.

Tickets were $10 which I got from a Googler friend (shoutout to anxman) and drinks were free (woot woot).

Getting There

August Capital is about 30 minutes away from the city without traffic. The drive was quite pleasant — nice scenery, etc.

Google Maps told me to make a U-Turn at Saga Ln but you actually just make a left there and go up the hill to August Capital, Benchmark, etc.

The Line to Go #1

Taking a leak proved quite cumbersome. While I was entering the party, a guy who looked like Ross Mayfield (probably wasn’t him) in a hawaiian shirt was stepping outside, mentioning how he needed to find a bush.

While standing in the whiz line I bumped into Josh Knowles, a Phoenix-area Ruby on Rails developer who I had met previously at Refresh Phoenix.

Phoenix Connection

Next I met up with several other Phoenix entrepreneurs/developers:

Kimbro Staken and Sean Tierney, who were there demo’ing JumpBox and Joshua Strebel of Obu Web.

While we were taking a picture with the four of us, Julia Allison, heretofore unknown by any of us, decided she’d also like to be in it with us.

Of course we happily obliged. Sean says those pics will be up on Grid7.com at some point.

Snip: edited to protect the innocent.

The “Million-dollar Members Only” Episode

A bit later in the evening I was standing by the margarita station and saw someone who seemed a bit out of place for the party. Sporting a cool black jacket & british accent, he looked like he could be a member of a punk rock band, not a startup entrepreneur.

Upon introducing myself, another buddy of his showed up, who had two nametags on. I didn’t recognize their startup / company, but one of the nametags rang a bell — Alex Tew, creator of the Million Dollar Homepage.

Now, I’m sure this is kind of an awkward situation for this guy. For 99.9% of the planet, making a million dollars from, let’s face it, a pretty simple webpage, would be seen as an incredible accomplishment.

But for the TechCrunch party scene, it’s not quite as monumental.

I personally still think it’s really fuckin cool - the ~20 year old doesn’t have to work a day for the rest of his life, if he doesn’t want to. And being an entrepreneur with a million bucks in the bank must certainly be a different experience than when you’re starting a company right out of school and living off of ramen noodles.

He was also the first out of the gates with, in hindsight, an ingenious idea that was executed brilliantly.

I called over Joshua Strebel who I know would get a kick out of meeting Alex. A few minutes later Joshua led a 10-minute long conversation on Member’s Only Jackets, because, apparently, Alex was wearing a jacket that looked very “Members Only”.

I asked Mr. Tew what he thought about all of the knockoffs of his idea, e.g. 1000 tags etc.

Tew responded (paraphrasing):

They’re all shite. It’s the kind of thing that can only be done once mate, y’know?

So true, mate, so true.

Michael Arrington’s Followers

I’ve heard the Arrington line can get as bad as 20-strong. It wasn’t that bad last night — at most I saw maybe 5-10 startup entrepreneurs playing man-groupie to the ever-powerful TechCrunch Founder & Blogger, Michael Arrington.

Hey — I don’t blame em. Web 2.0 lore is rife with stories of startups being featured on TechCrunch and subsequently getting inundated with calls from Venture Capitalists. (Scribd, for one, launched that way to phenomenal success.)

Photo credit: “Scott Beale / Laughing Squid” - laughingsquid.com.

Apparently a very attractive asian lady was in Arrington’s tow throughout part of the night as well. (not sure if that’s her pictured above or not…)

Other People I Bumped Into

Trip Adler - co-founder of Scribd

Babak Nivi — co-writer of Venture Hacks, a must-read blog for any startup entrepreneur

I’ll definitely be attending next time if I can get my hands on some tickets. The free-flowing drinks and bumping into some old pals definitely made the trip down to southbay worth it.

JumpBox, a local Phoenix-area startup, just launched this week. It was founded by two Phoenix entrepreneurs — Sean Tierney and Kimbro Staken.

I was quite impressed when Kimbro & Sean demo’d the app at Refresh Phoenix the other week.

If you have a web application that a customer or client needs to have onsite, JumpBox could be your answer.

It lets you build a server from scratch - say a default Fedora Core 4 Linux OS with Apache/MySQL/PHP installed and preconfigured to your specifications. You then load your application software and custom configurations onto the server.

Next, using JumpBox tools (which I understand are still undergoing refinement) - you basically make a clone stamp of that entire OS disk image.

You can then deploy that disk image to any server that supports Xen Virtualization. The image can be hosted at a data center, onsite, remotely, etc.

The trend lately has been for hosted webapps to host of all your data on their servers and make it available via API, etc. (Basecamp, Google Docs, Mailroom, etc)

I can see JumpBox shining for deployment of those applications that are notorious for their dependency hell and nightmarish setup complications. (*cough* Trac)

Simple Subversion, Trac & Other Open-source Team Tools
I would love to see a JumpBox stack that featured:

• Subversion
• Trac
• CruiseControl or some other continuous integration tools

Slightly OT: until it gets easier to setup a Subversion/Trac/etc. stack (perhaps via JumpBox), I would highly recommend checking out Unfuddle. (especially if you just love the simplicity and headache reduction, generally speaking, of hosted webapps)

They are a fully-hosted service (featuring liberal amounts of AJAX and built in Ruby on Rails) that can power your Subversion, Ticket / Bug Tracking, and Project Milestones needs.

More at JumpBox.com.

Just in case you were considering moving here to the lovely town of Phoenix, Arizona, let me tell you about the weather a bit.

Obviously we all know it can be scorching as heck out here during the summer months.

But it also never, and I mean never, rains in Phoenix for about 9-10 months out of the year. Literally, until last night, it had not rained in probably 6-8 months. And when it did (way back in the day), it might have been for only 5 minutes.

And then, last night and today … it just doesn’t stop. For almost 24 hour straight, on and off, it finally came down like a madman.

Anyway, enough boring weather talk. I’ve got some Ruby on Rails coding to do!

Looking forward to meeting up with the gang at Refresh Phoenix tonight.

Hopefully tonight I can put a few more faces to names / vice versa.

Shout out to James Archer, James Britt (who runs Phoenix.rb which I was unfortunately unable to attend last night ), Joshua Strebel of obu Web Technologies, Brad Webb of vSocial, and the man with the plan who’s done an awesome job of organizing and putting together Refresh Phx — Aaron Post of 30 Second Rule.

Update: Turns out I was unable to attend. Bummer - hopefully next time! (Catching up on some much-needed sleep, however, was indeed the bomb though.)