Michael Slater I feel lucky to have been able to attend last week’s Startup Camp and Foo Camp. These are unusual, invitation-only events, with extraordinary collections of people. Getting an invitation requires some mix of accomplishment, connections, and luck. <p>I feel lucky to have been able to attend last week’s Startup Camp and Foo Camp. These are unusual, invitation-only events, with extraordinary collections of people. Getting an invitation requires some mix of accomplishment, connections, and luck.</p> <p>They are exclusive events not for the sake of exclusivity, but because they only work at a limited size. <a href="http://oreilly.com/about/">O’Reilly Media</a>, which hosts the events and foots the bill (there’s no registration fee), gets to pick the attendees from its diverse range of colleagues and contacts.</p> <h2>Startup Camp</h2> <p>This was the first-ever Startup Camp, created by O’Reilly’s venture fund, <a href="http://oatv.com">O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures</a>. <span class="caps">OATV</span> set up a two-day program, with a variety of startup veterans to give talks and lead discussions, and invited startups to apply. We were fortunate to be one of the <a href="http://www.oatv.com/foo">7 startups accepted</a> — doubly so because getting into Startup Camp provided a much-sought-after invitation to Foo Camp as well.</p> <p>The companies invited to Startup Camp spanned an incredibly broad range, from custom jewelry for tweens (<a href="http://whirlybelle.com">WhirlyBelle</a> from Replicator) to open-source server management software (Puppet from <a href="http://reductivelabs.com">Reductive Labs</a>) and open-source synthetic biology (<a href="http://ginkgobioworks.com/">Ginkgo BioWorks</a>).</p> <p>The presenters included Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty (O’Reilly), Bryce Roberts (<span class="caps">OATV</span>), Esther Dyson, Evan Williams (Blogger, Twitter), Marc Hedlund (Wesabe), Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Mark Fletcher (Bloglines), Dave McClure (500 Hats), Howard Morgan (First Round Capital), and Kathy Sierra (Creating Passionate Users).</p> <div style='width:650px; float:left:padding-right:10px'> <p><img src="/foo_camp_08-1.jpg" alt="" /></p> </div> <p>Since this was an off-the-record session, you won’t see much reporting of the content, and I can’t add much to that either. Keep it in mind next summer if you find yourself leading a new startup and want to apply.</p> <p>Dave McClure’s <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-foo-camp-2008">Startup Metrics for Pirates</a> presentation is one talk whose slides have been made public. And the “Entrepreneurial Proverbs” session was inspired by older blog posts by the two presenters, <a href="http://evhead.com/2005/11/ten-rules-for-web-startups.asp">Evan Williams</a> and <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2006/03/entrepreneurial-proverbs.html">Marc Hedlund</a>.</p> <h2>Foo Camp</h2> <p>As exciting as Startup Camp was, it was a prelude to the much larger Foo Camp.</p> <p>Foo Camp was created by Tim O’Reilly and his colleague Sara Winge in 2003, and John Battelle wrote one of the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/01/09/bus2.feat.geek.camp/">first articles</a> about it. The name nominally stands for Friends Of O’Reilly, and it is also a play on the use of “foo” as a stand-in variable name in programming examples (a practice that, incidentally, dates back to the 1960’s). Tim wrote about <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/06/foo-camp-takeaways.html">why Foo Camp</a> last year.</p> <p>The business rationale for Foo Camp is that it gives the O’Reilly team the opportunity to talk with hundreds of leading-edge thinkers, as they look for ideas for books and conferences.</p> <div style='width:650px; float:left:padding-right:10px'> <p><img src="/foo_camp_08-5.jpg" alt="" /></p> </div> <p>There’s actually camping at Foo Camp: while many attendees stay at local hotels, a lot of them camp on the back lawn, and inside the office buildings, at O’Reilly. (For me, it’s only a five-minute drive, since O’Reilly is in my home town of Sebastopol, CA.)</p> <p>O’Reilly aims to have about 250 people at Foo Camp, which requires turning away a lot of past attendees so they can invite lots of new people each year.</p> <p>Among the well-known entrepreneurs and technologists attending this year were Jimmy Wales, Joshua Schacter, Steven Souders, Adrian Holovaty, Tom Coates, Scott Berkun, Ze Frank, Dries Buytaert, and Caterina Fake. That’s just a random selection of the better known names. There were dozens of other well-known folks, and dozens more inspired, creative folks who have lower profiles.</p> <p>Most of O’Reilly’s editors and conference directors were there, as well as many of its authors. <a href="http://oatventures.com/investments/">OATV’s portfolio companies</a> were also well represented.</p> <div style='width:650px; float:left:padding-right:10px'> <p><img src="/foo_camp_08-2.jpg" alt="" /></p> </div> <p>Foo Camp popularized the “unconference” format, in which the attendees create the program. The sponsors provide a chart with a grid of rooms and meeting times, and the attendees fill it in as they desire.</p> <p>The unconference format is best known from the proliferation of <a href="http://barcamp.org/">Bar Camps</a>, which were inspired by the early Foo Camps. (More geek humor here, as in foobar.)</p> <p>When this format was new, people were often hesitant to propose sessions, but no longer. The schedule board was 80% full within minutes. There’s so many parallel tracks, and so many fascinating people, that you can only see a fraction of what goes on and meet a scattering of people.</p> <div style='width:650px; float:left:padding-right:10px'> <p><img src="/foo_camp_08-3.jpg" alt="" /></p> </div> <p>One of my favorite sessions was on <strong>The Future of News</strong>. Both news, as journalism, and newspapers, as businesses, are in a period of dramatic change and stress. Presenters included <a href="http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/netnative/bio.asp#bio100435">Monica Guzman</a> of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/john_markoff/index.html">John Markoff</a> and <a href="http://nickbilton.com/">Nick Bilton</a> from the New York Times, <a href="http://www.stevenlevy.com/">Steven Levy</a> from NewsWeek, and <a href="http://public.resource.org">Carl Malamud</a>.</p> <p>Other interesting sessions I joined covered topics including ubiquitous computing, curation vs. crowd-sourcing, pragmatic thinking and learning (Andy Hunt), personal genomics (Esther Dyson, 23andMe), and aggregation vs. copyright.</p> <div style='width:650px; float:left:padding-right:10px'> <p><img src="/foo_camp_08-6.jpg" alt="" /></p> </div> <p>Tim O’Reilly debated Michael Arrington on whether it is important for Microsoft to develop its own search technology, or if getting it from Yahoo is a reasonable strategy. Danny Sullivan moderated. And yes, that is an inflatable elephant.</p> <p>Here’s the pair of blog posts that inspired this session:</p> <ul> <li><a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/05/why-search-competition-isnt-the-point.html">Why Search Isn’t the Point</a>, by Tim O’Reilly</li> <li><a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/25/the-importance-of-a-competitive-search-market/">The Importance of a Competitive Search Market</a>, by Michael Arrington</li> </ul> <h2>Retrospection</h2> <p>I have no doubt that this event serves O’Reilly well, but it nevertheless is a great contribution to the community. Rarely is such a diverse collection of extraordinary people brought together under such casual, low-pressure surroundings.</p> <p>Looking back on Foo Camp, there are so many people I wish I had been able to spend time with, and sessions I wish I had attended. I’ll just have to hope for another invitation in years to come.</p> <p>As someone who spent a decade running conferences, I at first found the unconference format unsettling. The completely self-organizing nature of the event means that its quality is determined entirely by the attendees. But with a crowd like this one, that’s a good thing.</p> <h2>More Foo Stuff</h2> <ul> <li><a href="http://laughingsquid.com/foo-camp-2008-photos/">Laughing Squid’s Pictures</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/sets/72157606108716088/">Joi Ito’s Pictures</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/14/foo-camp-2008-shangri-la-for-geeks/">Michael Arrington’s article</a></li> <li><a href="http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/07/14/FooCamp2008.aspx">James Hamilton’s article</a></li> <li><a href="http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2008/what-i-learned-at-foo-camp-08/">Scott Berkun’s article</a></li> </ul> 2008-07-24T01:00:49-07:00

6513

5019

Startup Camp and Foo Camp

2008-07-20T17:00:00-07:00

0 0

2009-04-03T13:17:01-07:00