Last night was the inaugural Startup Dinner in Atlanta. As I mentioned in a previous post, Startup Dinner had a previous life as a series of networking dinners that Coty and I ran. We lost steam about a year and a half ago. I’ve decided to start these dinners off again and move forward with a regular schedule (probably monthly). Many of you who signed up for the dinner probably didn’t realize it was last night. That was intentional due to the high demand I’ve seen. I started inviting folks until we had the number we needed.
Our first dinner was pretty interesting. In attendance was (in left-right order in the picture above):
Yeah, the number of invites was pretty small. I wanted to keep the kick off dinner small so we didn’t spin out of control. Next month I’m hoping to do 2 tables of 6-8 people. Based on how many people have signed up for the dinner, we’ll need to keep this pace so that everyone has a shot of coming to dinner at least 2-3 times a year.
Already from this first event I’ve learned some things that we’ll institute next time. At the opening of dinner will be a 2-3 minute intro of each person around the table. We tried to do this last night but everyone’s company/activities were so interesting that we started digging right into them. Curse of the entrepreneur, I suppose.
If you’re interested in attending a dinner, sign up here but only if you are an entrepreneur or an investor of some sort (angel or VC). Other folks (vendors, service providers, etc.) are strictly banned from this event. Nothing against you folks but I’m working on startup/entrepreneurial community building and not creating a venue to sell your products/services. There are already plenty of venues for that.
Also, if you attend dinner this isn’t a venue for you to do sales (like what happened after SoCon) and it isn’t a venue to raise money. So don’t come to dinner prepared to pitch. Instead, come to dinner expecting to meet great folks and see if there is an opportunity for you to help out a fellow entrepreneur. By having a stronger local community, we’ll all have an easier time starting up companies.
Check out the handful of pictures I took at dinner here.
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