I attended the Second Chance Tuesday run by Judith Clegg and Michael Smith at Royal College of Physicians last night in London. A superb networking event except for poor catering. Then again, I set the bar high with NW StartUp 2.0, which any event organiser will find hard to beat. Northerners are much better at hospitality than Londerners, but Londerners continue to pull the crowd putting Northerners (especially me) to shame. Enough of comparisons, let’s get back to the story..
It was an exceptional opportunity to hear the story of two classic web 2.0 entrepreneurs Felix Miller and Martin Stiksel, CEO and CCO of Last.fm respectively, interviewed by Rory Cellan-Jones of BBC. I am not going to repeat the story here, as it is very well documented and it will not take long for a business school to produce a detail case study. When you do, please remember to upload to www.edocr.com for interaction.
However, I will say the following. The founder duo sold the company to CBS for US$280 million, and does not plan to invest that money into startups founded by others. They are entertaining many ideas they had whilst setting up and running the company, and may pursue those ideas in addition to growing Last.fm.
Among the crowd, there were few known faces: Stephen Morrisey from Clipstar from Daresbury Innovation Centre (I would not have been there, if Stephen did not happen to mention about the event last week), Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK (hey, Mike got the exclusivity for next NW StartUp 2.0 – its up to him to write about it though), Simon Grice of Mashups (I will talk about edocr at Mashup Demos), Daniel Waterhouse of 3i (met first time but known him through e-mails).
In addition, I met bunch of new people, some known through the web and e-mails, these being: Richard Marsh of Oxford Capital Partners, Ben Holmes of Index Ventures, James Brocket of Calibre One, Andrew Romans of Georgetown Venture Partners, Jonathan Moss of Ballz.com, and James Vinall of LastMile Communications. I had to dash back as I took the last train to Manchester.
I also discussed with some of the above VCs the possibility of speaking at one of the NW StartUp 2.0 events. I used the opportunity to warm up VCs about edocr. It’s still early days for us. But I must now start thinking about producing the business plan.
Technorati Tags: Second Chance Tuesday, Last.fm. Judith Clegg