How TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco changed my life

About 6 weeks ago, a good friend of mine asked me if I have ever considered going to the US with WHY own it. That same day I found out that the TechCrunch Disrupt is taking place in San Francisco in September. I told Julian from QUOTE.fm that I was thinking about going to the event and two days later we bought tickets for the startup alley.

Here we are. Two German startups from Hamburg, QUOTE.fm and WHY own it. The TechCrunch started on Monday, we were assigned to the startup alley on Tuesday. Exciting times.

The lineup of speakers was amazing.

Monday

First speech I watched on Monday was by Jack Dorsey, Founder of Twitter and Square.

Here some of my notes:
- Companies have various founding moments.
- You need people with the attitude to change course to have impact.
- Revolution has values, leaders and pushes people to do the right thing.
- Have an impact on the world.

Working in the collaborative consumption field, I was looking forward to the panel of AirBnB, TaskRabbit, brit.co and Lyft. Surprisingly this panel wasn’t as good as I thought it would be. Even more surprising, when the audience was asked to ask questions, nobody stood up. So I did and asked how they reached their first 10k users …

check out the headline: “Airbnb, Brit + Co, TaskRabbit, And Lyft Founders Share How They Nabbed Their First 10K Users“

After that talk, Dave Morin from Path opened up to drop some numbers. Path has 3 million downloads with an active user rate of more than 50%. China is their second biggest market.

There was a lot of hype about Jessica Alba being on TechCrunch. Together with Brian Lee she talked about her company Honest. Saying that people are asking for better and higher quality products that are affordable reminded me a lot of Avocado Store.

Tuesday

So on Tuesday we arrived with our roll-up banners, stickers and business cards. Built up our stand and were looking forward to show people our products. QUOTE.fm just launched its iPad App and the international update of WHY own it was just approved by Apple.

Of course there were 2 talks that I couldn’t miss. Kevin Rose in the morning and Mark Zuckerberg after lunch.

Kevin Rose talked a bit about the beef between Y-Combinator and Google Ventures. The 3 things I took out of his interview were the following:
- Focus on the company.
- Edit the team.
- Healthcare & education.

There were a couple of people passing by at the WHY own it stand. Not as many as I expected, but it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.

At lunchtime Daniel (exebs) invited me to go have lunch at the AirBnB office, with was pretty mind-blowing. Amazing what those companies are doing to keep their employees happy.

After lunch Mark Zuckerberg was interviewed by Michael Arrington:
- He believes in mobile.
- Mobile with get his stock back on track.
- Mobile: more users, more engagement (time), more money.
- Mobile is like TV.
- Ads have to be more integrated into the product in order to perform better.

The rest of the day I was at the stand talking to various people coming by. I got some good feedback and met some interesting people.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I watched Travis Kalanick from Uber. Amzing guy.
- Competition is fun.
- If tho’ the guy is sleeping, I’m going to kick his ass.
- Europe.
- 98% of business angels don’t help (even tho’ they say so).
- You have to be fighter. If not, do something a little less disruptive.

Vinod Khosla from Khosla Ventures:
- Likes being the first.
- Focus on hiring the right people.
- Health care.
- Willingness to fail will lead to success.
- If you succeed, it has to be consequential.
- Give accurate feedback to entrepreneurs.
- Entrepreneurs don’t get the right help.
- Entrepreneurs need mentors.
- Think: “How can we get 5 times bigger”

Key Learnings

Was it worth it? Of course! Even though I haven’t meet as many people as expected, I’m coming back to Hamburg with a lot of inspirations. I cannot recommend a stand at the Startup Alley tho’. It makes only sense to be on stage! Thus apply to the Battlefield!

The two best advices I got from two developers. One was working for Twitter and Google and is now doing his own thing. He gave me a lot of feedback to WHY own it and said I should just focus on what I’m doing and investors will show their interest pretty quickly.

Another developer said something similar. The really good people are not going to these events. They are either at the office or at home. Therefore meetings with people should be organized beforehand.

That said, I decided to make a rule for myself: In future I will only visit such events, if I’m either on stage or have at least three confirmed meetings per day.