Wow! I’ll say it again…Wow! Silicon Beach Fest just wrapped this past weekend and I don’t think there was a disappointed person who attended. For those of you that missed it, you’re gonna be kicking yourselves to not be able to say you were at the first… so start making plans for next year. We’ll be posting videos and pictures from all the events that took place at Cross Campus, so I’m not going to go through a blow-by-blow recap of what happened, but suffice it to say, it was a true gathering. It’s been amazing to see our entrepreneurial community develop in the past few years, and #SBF was a consolidating view of just how far it has come. Three days packed with events of the highest quality drew 1,000+ visitors to Santa Monica & Venice. But what was even more impressive than the number of attendees, was the dozens of venues, sponsors, startups and speakers that participated, and the hundreds of volunteers that helped it all come off smoothly. Whether you like the moniker of Silicon Beach or not, you can’t debate that the community is coming together and taking action. Thanks to all the support, we’re seeing more startups formed, funded, and more importantly, growing here in SoCal than ever before. Some of my favorite moments of the festival at Cross Campus…
LA Mayor-to-be, Eric Garcetti, giving an inspiring keynote about Silicon Beach becoming a platform of creativity & innovation. That's our mission at Cross Campus, so let's get out there and do everything we can to ensure that Eric elected... donations and volunteering is a good place to start.
Hank Leber, moderating our Branding panel, suggesting:
Tiger Woods should've just gone for it when his personal life went off the rails and gotten Harley Davidson and Durex as sponsors.
Seeing some fireworks between Ryan Williams, Francisco Dao, Don Hoang and Dave Martin talking influencers & flakes... moderator Shelia Marmon had her hands full!
Espree Devora jumping into the Viceroy pool, in her evening dress, to win a free month at Cross Campus... it's great to see how far folks will go to be a part of the CC community!
Listening to attendees argue about which panel was the best... "this one was great, no that one was great". It was clear that the entire festival was packed with great speakers that didn't disappoint.
Our hackers voting to keep Cross Campus open late on Friday night, and skip the parties, to keep coding (and then seeing them line up outside the doors at 9am the next morning to get an early start).
Panelist and Cross Campus advisor, Patrick Koppula, kicking off the Hackathon presentations with the Code Monkey Song (that he wrote the night before after being inspired by the work the hackers were putting in).
The amazing products created over the three days by all the teams of hackers and CTO coaches... and hopefully some them will become businesses because the quality was the best I've every seen in at a hackathon or startup weekend. Kudos to Team Infected on the victory!
Jason Crilly, founder of PageWoo and Hackathon organizer extraordinaire, calling for the Silicon Beach Mafia.
Jason, building on a comment by StartEngine founder Howard Marks that we need our own LA mafia like the PayPal mafia, gave us 3 simple rules for our new startup "family" in SoCal...
- Keep it in the family.
- Don't eat of your brother's plate.
- Bring new people into the family.
We're proud to have Jason, Holden Steinberg and the rest of the PageWoo team as members at Cross Campus, and even prouder to see all that they've done to not only build their company, but to build our community. So, as they say in the neighborhoods where I grew up in New Jersey... "Jason Crilly?... fuggeddaboudit, he's a friend of ours."
Thanks again to some of our other "friends" who made SBF @ Cross Campus a roaring success:
► Richard Perry Thomas & Brandii Grace
► Hank Leber & Tameka Kee
► Scott Alderton, Kevin DeBre and Heidi Evidente at Stubbs, Alderton, Markiles
► Randy Churchill at PwC
► Allyson Welch at Western Office Interiors
► Kara Johnson at Knoll
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