SacStarts Starts in Sac
Welcome to a new blog - a welcome addition to the technology community in Sacramento.
Entrepreneurs Scott Hildebrand and Adam Kalsey have started SacStarts and here's what they have to say:
Introducing SacStarts 3 Jan 2007 The dinners that Scott and I have been organizing have been growing. We’ve met a pretty amazing group of people and the dinners have resulted in good business connections for a number of participants.As Scott and I looked at what we wanted to get out of the dinners, the idea of building a startup community started to grow. We realized that all the entrepreneurs, small tech companies, and great tech folks in the area didn’t have anywhere to go to connect with each other. There’s events and organizations for larger companies and even a big-ass $150/year professional organization for entrepreneur types. There’s nothing wrong with those organizations and some of our participants are members of them as well. But they don’t fit the informal feel that we’ve come to admire from groups like Stirr and the Barcamp movement.
So we decided to do something about it and SacStarts was born.
We’ll be continuing to run the dinners (the next one is Thursday, February 22nd, RSVP on the site) and we’ll be adding on. A common complaint among people at the dinners is finding high-quality people to work with, so we’ll be launching a job board. The web site has a simple social networking component to it that will grow. There’s a couple of blogs that will focus on local tech startup news. And look for some larger events in the future.
If your business is looking to reach local startups and engineers, we also have sponsorship opportunities available. Just ask me about them.
I’m excited about the future growth of the Sacramento startup community and I’m hoping that SacStarts can help foster that growth.
Scott and Adam have both been very supportive of our efforts at the Sacramento Executive from the beginning. Scott, since we met at a Tuesday Group dinner long ago and Adam as the best commentor we have. These are two young, smart, entrepreneurial guys with lots of great ideas and passion to bring to the Sacramento Technology community. We need to embrace them and offer them all the support we can muster and all the advice they ask for. But we also need to listen to them because they are the voice of the future.
Great idea, great start and you have our full support, Scott and Adam.
Gillian Parrillo
Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive
Comments
Thanks, Gillian and Pierre for the kind words and the link.
We're seeing some real excitement among local startups and some great ideas coming out of the area. I'm hoping the recent acquisitions of a couple of local startups will encourage more investment in the area.
We've recently announced our first non-dinner event. In early June SacStarts will host BarCamp Sacramento, the first of its kind in the area. BarCamp is an unconference -- there won't be the pre-determined agendas, big-name speakers, or trade-show floor you usually associate with conferences. At BarCamp, every attendee is also a contributor. We start with a big empty grid or times and rooms. The first morning everyone with an idea to share or a question they want the group to ponder signs up for a slot. Without a conference track committee, the events at BarCamp become
Posted by: Adam Kalsey | January 21, 2007 10:18 PM
Wow! Thanks for the great post :) Very often I'm surprised at the kind of startups and talented people there are in the Sacramento area, I just didn't know they were around but apparently they're everywhere. It only takes the right kind of community and events and people start to join the party. It's funny that before we all had to go down to the Bay Area for these kinds of events, and now people are coming from all over to Sacramento.
Barcamp should be really exciting, and hopefully we'll get some cool tech demos and maybe see a startup or two do a first-time public launch. Here's the link for more info on that: http://barcamp.org/BarCampSacramento
Posted by: Scott Hildebrand | January 22, 2007 11:49 PM