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I am sitting on the train in Paddington writing this, just about recovered from the previous night’s excesses after celebrating winning best startup at startup camp the day before. We were invited to attend startup camp by Sun Microsystems as we are involved in the startup essentials program and are bit of a poster child for what Sun is trying to do within the startup community.

The event spanned two days the first day having the morning dedicated to some very good speakers from large companies all with interests in supporting the startup community. Speakers included David Axmark (MySQL Co-Founder), Steve Garnett (Salesforce.com) and Dave Armstrong (Google) who talked about using Google Apps. We then had the second half of the first day and first half of the second day dedicated to round table sessions on a whole range of subjects. I found the whole experience very interesting and took part in a number of the sessions either listening or in the case of the ‘how to scale your website’ sessions I ended up extolling the virtues of a whole wide range of open source projects which fav.or.it has used.

Competition

The last part of the event was the Best Startup contest which required all entries to pitch to all the other attendee’s, 19 companies took part (including ourselves) and had to endure pitching for 5 minutes to groups that rotated between companies. Every 5 minutes an alarm would sound and each group would ‘hop to the left’ and I had to rewind myself and start again. I have done a lot of pitching in business environments (very hostile at times) but this has got to be the hardest ever. I think everyone was exhausted by the end of it.

The scoring was done by handing out a wooden penny to every conference attendee and at the end of all the pitching they had to go hand their penny to the startup that they wanted to win. I must say the competition was pretty fierce and some very strong products were on show. All the contestants were herded into a room to have pennies counted. I was reasonably confident at this point of winning (as I had walked around to see the piles of pennies others were building up.) but was a nervous 10 minutes as they went through asking everyone what they had.

When it came to me I was happy to announce that I had 3 more pennies than the nearest competitor. As the winner we receive a rather chocolaty server from Sun Microsystems and £500 vouchers from eoffice plus free entry into the next mashup event so all in all a pretty good haul for a weekends work.

Thanks to everyone involved in running the event and especially to Sun for sponsoring the event and hamiltons for supplying us with hardware on such short notice.

After Dark

One last thing. Startups really do like to let their hair down, I had several very entertaining evenings especially going to the Langham (a VERY very posh hotel) at 2am (because our hotel bar had closed) with the guys + girls from techweb who were over from the US. I will let the picture here sit as evidence of the general level of behaviour, as you can imagine the other clientèle were not amused by our antics.

Startups In General

It is a strange coincidence the weekend that I go to startup camp it all kicks off about how startups should treat their employees. Jason Calacanis was roasted alive for writing this article. TechCrunch in the form of Duncan Riley attacked him without any care or ‘thought‘. At which point Mike A backtracked the TC viewpoint. The end result? A lot of discussion on what is right and wrong about making your employees work 28 hour days and depriving them of a social life.

I have to side with Jason / Mike / Scoble (and others) because I firmly believe that without 1000% commitment I would not have got ‘best startup’ without compromising my home life. That is a fact of life, you cannot build a startup and work 9-5. I employ those who believe in the cause and give everything, if they didn’t they would be out the door in a second. Harsh? yes, but everyone who enters a startup needs to be fully aware of what they are getting into, and most importantly they need to make sure the end reward (given that it is a gamble) is that they make something at the end of it along with the owners of the company.