Working in a start-up is much like working in a coal mine. I’m not saying there are the constant threats of cave-ins, gas explosions or an inevitable case of black lung, at least not literally. The two are similar in that you can feel underground and isolated until you take the long elevator to the surface and see a little sunshine. The sunshine I speak of . . . conferences, such as the Web 3.0 Conference that will be held in Santa Clara October 16 and 17.
I am looking forward to seeing friends whom I have not seen for months, friends who will be showing off their newest version of the coolest things, sharing war stories from sales calls, software bugs, user feedback and venture capital meetings. I’m looking forward to getting to sit back and remember that start-ups are fun because of the challenges, and not in spite of them.
As part of the Web 3.0 conference Marc and I are sitting on a few panels. Marc leads off with “From Web 2.0 to 3.0 - Tales from the Trenches” on Thursday morning. I follow up with a panel entitled “Semantic Startup 101 - Successes, challenges, strategic decisions” in the afternoon. Marc bats clean up on Friday with “Infrastructure and scalability issues (computing in the cloud etc)” which should be one of the lynch pin panels. The scalability panel is immediately before lunch and I suspect it will spill over.
The conference should not be all work and no play. The Meetup that I organize, the Palo Alto Semantic Web Group (PAWS) is having a mixer at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, which is after the conference. The mixer will be blended with a round table discussion about early semantic success stories. Andraz Tori of Zemanta will be the speaker and lead the discussion about both technical and business success strategies.
I am looking forward to seeing you all at the Web 3.0.
