Hello, my name is Mike Gowen.

Community Next Wrap-up

Congrats to Noah for such a great success with Community Next. The speakers and panels were great, and the conference was fun, intimate and light-hearted…which I think are three essential traits of a successful event. Here’s a few pics of the entire trip.

When Alex and I arrived, we checked into the hotel and headed straight to the two most important places in the area…the Googleplex, and In-and-Out Burger. We looked like little fan boys taking pictures next to the Google sign, but I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity. After a powernap it was off to the VIP dinner which, in my opinion, was the best part of the entire event. If you’re planning an event make sure you create some way for people to spend an extended and intimate period of time with the speakers. At first I was skeptical about the assigned seating but it turned out to be a great idea. In fact, it gave me an idea which I will share when the time is right I had a few great conversations with Markus Frind, founder of Plentyofifsh, Ted Rheingold, founder of Dogster, David Chapman, CEO of Zoints, Denise Kalos, VP of Corporate Solutions at O’Reilly, Hiten Shah, founder of CrazyEgg, Joe Suh, founder of MyChurch, Greg Cohn of Yahoo, and the lovely Cindra of Business 2.0 magazine. Sean Suhl from Suicide Girls was also supossed to be at our table, but unfortunately never showed up. After the dinner we all headed over to Blue Chalk for an opening reception sponsored by Yahoo.

The next day we met Brian and Xavier in the lobby, grabbed breakfast at Denny’s and headed out to Stanford for the conference. Aside from the lack of wifi, the day was great. As I expected, Jeff and Jake from Threadless blew everyone away with their presentation, and the information gathered from the final founders’ panel was invaluable. Drew Curtis, founder of Fark was absolutely hilarious, as was James Hong, founder of Hotornot. Since this is just a wrap-up, I’m not going to go into detail on each presentation. However over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be commenting on various nuggets of info I gathered. Noah also mentioned that the entire conference was going to be posted in video form. I’ll update this post as soon as that happens.

The conference ended with a final reception at Old Pro. I had to catch a flight back to Miami and be at the Walk for Autism Research by 9am, so I felt it best to not have a drink (or two, or ten). Instead I headed straight for the airport. My flight back was quite possibly the worst flying experience I’ve ever had and the lack of sleep really took it to another level. I finally arrived in Miami sometime after 6am. I drove home, took a quick and semi-lucid shower and headed to Key Biscayne to meet Carlos at the Walk for Autism Research. To be continued…