One of the best speeches I’ve seen in my life.

This has got to be the oldest VC entrepreneurial pitch in the history of mankind

Look at this market. It’s huge ! If only we could have just 1% of that, we’d be sooo successful !

The thing is, thought that these are just numbers. They mean nothing. The pitch is designed to create a feeling of euphoria and hope.

While it’s true that 1% of a huge market is profitable, the other guys that will take out 10% or 40% or 80% will eventually drive you out, cause you’ll be just noise to them.

I remember sth O’Reilly mentioned during the breakfast that Nikan org’ed: In the past we had 3% success with a drug and it was a failure. After we understand why it worked though, we’ll be able to claim 100% success for 3% of the population.

I think that it’s ok to be in a niche market. It’s just not ok to be a smalltime player in any market. There should be better uses of your time.

While designing your dream garden, there come moments when you ponder: would it be better if I removed anything or added anything ?

• Removing stuff takes bravery or neurosis. You have to take out things that you toiled to add in the first place.
• Adding stuff takes toil. You need to buy a chair, stand back and look at the result and decide if you have to remove it after all.

That goes to say that both Minimalism and Feature packing as goals are problematic.

Don’t put more buttons on the product than benefit the product and don’t remove the buttons that will be useful to the majority of use cases.

Finally, maybe you need two gardens. Or more. Certainly not more than you need to have. Each garden needs different kind of care and you can’t blame the seed maker when you fuck up on maintaining a garden you haven’t visited for years.

Chatting with a sales operator with a ‘cloud computing’ company.

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Will'
Will: Hi
Will: Welcome to Mosso
Will: How can I help you?
you: hi, Im looking at the feature list on your product and wanted to ask what you mean by 'automatic scaling'
you: does it mean that my virtual machine image gets moved to a more powerful server or that it gets copied across machines or .. ?
Will: It means that there are no limits to how large your account can be, for example if you have a spike of people in your website we can scale up your account dynamically so that you will receive no down time or loss in performance
you: yes ok, but does this mean that I have to write my application in some way or relying on libraries that you provide ?
Will: Not at all
Will: You don't have to do any thing special to your website
Will: we just mirror the data and put it on multiple machines
you: aah I see, so the architecture again presumes that there's only one machine with the master database yes ?
Will: correct
you: ok thanks bye
Will: your welcome

Since when are Application Delivery Networks (and in this instance single-location ADNs) stuff that provides ‘automatic scaling’ ?

Even in the case of Twitter for example, the bottleneck is apparently on the database.

I’m perplexed.

Over the past couple of weeks the OpenCoffee people had their eyes fixed on the Stream 08 unconference. This is one of the most private (secrecy through obscurity) events, organized and executed by wpp.

Originally noticed by Dimitris Athanasiadis via Twitter, it eventually dragged in the whole OC Athens group. So let’s see who we met:

Jeff Pulver

I first met Jeff at the Stream. He was with Dror Gill, heading to Athens and looking for a ride. He was very stressed about keeping us waiting (he must have apologized like 3-4 times for that, really kind). While we thought that he was an accomplished blogger, later on in Tziralis’ stuffy car we learned that he’s actually a greatly accomplished developer, serial (seeeerial) entrepreneur, even wrote the Pulver law and apparently a multimilionaire (which made things pretty awkward after I learned it).

Leaving the Stream venue, we got for a walk at the Acropolis, which turned out to be rather fun.

and later had lunch during which I was a complete zombie due to sleep deprivation, but anyway…

Another notable mention is Pablo a very cool hacker/ intellectual property worker, whose surname no one seems to know. Something tells me we’ll be hearing a lot about Pablo in the near future.

Jason Calacanis

The one and only Calacanis, second most influential twitterer.

Ok so seriously I don’t know what to say. We asked (kudos to Tziralis) him to come and give a psych-up speech at our OpenCoffee meeting, and Jason came and overperformed. Bigtime.

Thanks Jason ! :)

Actually of all the people at Stream, I noticed that he and Tim O'Reilly alone had what I call the Jesus effect. It's a borderline-disturbing glamour attack where the speaker has people sitting on the flour around him literally feeding on his words as they come out of his mouth.

Tim O’Reilly

actually we didn’t get to talk to Tim very much. We were glad to have him observe/comment/place questions on our presentation at stream.

But ! Later on Nikos Anagnostou (kudos) organized a bloggers’ breakfast with him where we got to chat about emerging tech mostly.

An unfortunate detail is that we were too kind to interrupt Tim, which we later learned he interpreted as a lack of questions (while we were really bursting with such) and tried to fill the gap by giving a speech essentially.

The last breakfast. Jesus at the center (the pale skinned guy).

Me and Tim. Best friends forever… I wish :D .

Panaghiotis Vryonis also has the video scoop from the meeting with O'Reilly

Get to his blog to see the second part

The greatest advancement from meeting these people was that now we have a very clear picture of what we need to do with OpenCoffee Greece. They mainly confirmed our ideas, but also pitched in quite a few ideas which had worked for them in the past

We feel wiser now.

Seriously.

We ended up replacing the parts of the equation from this presenation at Stream 08 with something less inflamatory.