Highlights from the first TECH cocktail Conference in Chicago

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Today I’m at the Loyola campus downtown at the TECH cocktail Conference. This is the first “tech” conference I’ve attended in a while, and I’m pleased that it’s here in Chicago with the local business perspective that sits firmly outside of the echo chamber. Plus, it’s the perfect combination of an impressive speaker list with a great track record and familiar faces I’ve gotten to know over the last couple years at area mixers.

Here are a few personal highlights from the speakers:

• Mike Domek of TicketsNow, a company that now does over $200MM in revenue (2006 figures), shared highlights from the early days of bootstrapping through to receiving funding and investing in scaling the business to where they are today. He said that too many people start with an exit strategy in mind, and encouraged entrepreneurs to start with a passion instead. Mike also entreated the audience to step out, take risks, and make mistakes.

• Corey Brown of Squidoo highlighted the benefit of speed when working with small teams. He touted Squidoo’s “competitive advantage of being 1/100th the size of everyone else” where they would iterate in the course of an afternoon when larger players would take months.

• Nick O’Neill of Social Times observed in the Social Apps & Widgets panel that if you build a business based on an application entirely within a walled garden like Facebook, you’re limiting your audience. Instead, start with a web site that can gather traffic from the entire Internet, use the Facebook app to augment it, and build the application across multiple social networks. Also, one panelist observed that we’re starting to see “application blindness,” much like ad blindness where users ignore areas on a web page that commonly contain ads.

Nick Fera’s Partner Ecosystem. Photo Credit Leora Zellman.

• Nick Fera, former CEO of Parlano, who was acquired by Microsoft, laid out a quadrant of the “Partner Ecosystem” that provided a well thought out framework for evaluating the strategic partnerships you go after while building your company. On picking strategic relationships between competitors, Nick said “We heard earlier today that 90% of these things fail, if you don’t pick a horse and ride it, you’ll never succeed anyways. Pick that horse and ride that horse.” (Note: I will post a photo of this later, unfortunately I could not obtain one myself while it was on the screen).

• Allan Cox brought the room to silence during the lunchtime keynote “Discovering Your Inner CEO” when he observed that as we build our careers, and sometimes our companies, start families, buy houses, and build a net worth, we discover in our forties that we’ve totally lost touch with what we valued most in our younger years. He also exhorted the audience to be alert to flashes of insight that get you excited but so often you allow to fade, either due to distractions or fear. “I’ve never taken counsel from my fears” -Stonewall Jackson

• I sat in on Jason Rexilius‘ talk on Cloud Computing and Scaling, and most of the talk was way more technical than my surface-level knowledge as a non-coder. He threw out some rather practical tips though that resonate with me being at XNet; The label maker is your friend. Label the front and the back of your server. Label both ends of your cables, and color-code your cables - one color for private network, another color for Internet-facing. A bit esoteric, but it surely stuck out to me.

• Gary Vaynerchuk said definitively on community, “It’s irrelevant whether you’re a traditional business or a new media business, it’s all about the community. The community is the entire thing you should care about 24/7/365. What you need to become is a rat. Real, Authentic, and Transparent. Because you can’t hide anymore, everything you do is documented.” The core of his message is that people, marketers, companies, everyone — needs to be real with their audience or they will be exposed and leave open a vulnerability for smaller players who are authentic to come up and usurp your leadership position. My thoughts: Your character is who you are when no one is watching. Gary observes that the times when “no one is watching” are getting fewer and fewer as people adopt social tools. This doesn’t make character any more important, but your actions are becoming far more public so character flaws and inauthenticity is now more exposed.

For a summary of the tweets relating to the event, see this Summize link.

Overall, the conference was a great event and a wonderful job done by the TECH cocktail crew. It was a bit like drinking from a firehose as so many speakers, panels, and topics were crammed into a one-day conference that could easily fill two days. But that’s good news — there’s no shortage of activities and speakers, and it sets the stage for the next tech conference here in Chicago.

And at that, I’m off to dinner and John Barleycorn for the TECH cocktail Mixer!