When I signed up to go to Startup Camp 2008 I had no idea what I was getting myself into. You see, I came up with this cool concept of a dance video social network and a catchy name Hot Club Dancers and the Head Counselor David Berlind thought it would be fun to mention it and repeat my elevator pitch a few times. I believe, although I may be delusional, we were the most mentioned company of the conference, even though Chictopia was the winner of the best startup contest.

So I’d like to thank David Berlind (link to his blog) and Fritz Nelson (link to his blog) for shining the spotlight on my startup.

It really pays to be a good public speaker

Thanks to Toastmasters International and my home District 4 (for those of you in Bay Area), I became a pretty good public speaker in the last 18 months or so. For those of you interested in my particular club, you are welcome to visit ICC ArtICCulators. We meet every Thursday at India Community Center in Milpitas, CA.

As Startup Camp is an “Unconference”, attendees had the opportunity to create their own sessions. I saw an opportunity to teach some people presentation skills. With that in mind, I signed up to present “Presentation Skills for Introverted Techies” and I had a small audience of about 20 listeners who hopefully learned something valuable. This was especially timely because we had a best startup contest. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to compete due to being on the waitlist. Nevertheless, I helped at least 5 contestants to improve their elevator pitches and to refine the value proposition.

Startup Camp session recordings

I recorded that session, along with a lot of other parts of the conference on my trusty little Zoom H2 recorder. As soon as I post-process it, I’ll post the links here and on the wiki.

Networking for success

I talked with many fellow entrepreneurs and walked away with more business cards than I have of my own, so I have my work cut out to make the Hot Club Dancers site the success it seems to be destined to become.

Sun heats up Hot Club Dancers

What was also interesting is that I realized my need for a high performance computing render farm. Conveniently, Sun had a hardware expo. There are some REALLY good toys available now for unbelievably low price. I also had a good chat with Sun’s network.com people and how they can help me with my rendering needs.

Unexpected events

OpenSolaris had its release launch party. I had my video equipment. The results will be posted on Hot Club Dancers.com.