Jan Senderek

Exciting SF

Most friends know that we have an exciting week in SF ahead of us - good time to write a quick post about our last trip to San Francisco when we attended TechCrunch Disrupt.

It was just a few days after Nico and I handed in our dissertations and finished our degrees at UCL that we were already looking for the next best chance to move on for some time. After constantly being told for more than half a year that a startup like ours needs to be in the the valley, we decided to do exactly so. We used the chance and bought a Startup Alley ticket for TechCrunch Disrupt. I can highly recommend getting these tickets since they are much cheaper than buying single visitor tickets (if you are two) and on top you get a table to expose your startup for a day. Pretty good deal. Check this Eeve to see what this day looks like from the view of a startup.

TC Disrupt was very successful and exciting, many great speakers, but most of the time we used to meet new people and reconnect with friends. That’s what these conferences are for anyway. For the Startup Alley we picked Monday, the first conference day, to use the excitement of the start of Disrupt. Picking the first day was a good decision, but beware all startups out there intending to go and expose at TCD: be prepared for a lot of noise from more than 50 startup competing for every single visitor’s attention. We were definitely a bit foolish to think that having a little banner, a laptop and ourselves in Eeve shirts would be enough. If you go there, make sure to have the biggest and loudest booth with the either best or weirdest giveaways. However, the best part of our day in the alley was Mike doing a surprising interview with us (link to clip). All in all the conference was a success and a lot of fun. Thanks to Mike from TechCrunch we even had the chance to go backstage for a while! 

In total we stayed about two weeks in SF. We had a few other meetings, received a great tour on the Google Campus from Gabor. The rest of the time we mostly used to work from either our amazing Airbnb or some cool hipster places on Valencia such as The Summit or the Epicenter. At nights we partied with Qwiki, Amen, Firespotter or the super awesome troops from Vox.io. Good times. 

It will be less partying this time, but I can’t wait to hop on this plane tomorrow and get another week of full power San Francisco with the Eeve team. 

Thank you, Steve

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. -Steve Jobs.

The world has lost one of a kind, most likely the greatest technology and business leader we’ve ever seen. Thank you, Steve. Rest in peace. 

We are just at the beginning of the photo explosion.

So anyway, for you entrepreneurs out there, here’s a wakeup call: you want to ride one of the trends that still has massive room to grow? According to one estimate, 10 percent of all the photos ever taken were photgraphed in just the last year. (Worth the read here) We are just at the beginning of the photo explosion. A company designed to serve different aspects of this trend can still be a great idea, and will be for quite awhile, I suspect.

- Tom Anderson on Techcrunch

That’s what I’ve been preaching for the last couple of weeks/months. The photo evolution has just started due to the recent penetration of smartphones and faster mobile bandwidth. Compared to Internet, it’s like the late 90s now.