The Real McCrea

Yesterday, my company, Plaxo, hosted the ever-more-popular Lunch 2.0 at its shiny new headquarters. Total crowd was well over 300, certainly one of the largest yet. It was really a fun gathering, with DJs, demos, free t-shirts, Popeye’s fried chicken (and California Pizza Kitchen, and ToGo’s, and Round Table), and an ice cream sundae bar!

I think a lot of people who had heard of Pulse, the new social network from Plaxo, got their first chance to see it, hear about it, ask questions, and to play with it at the “Check Your Pulse” stations. Joseph Smarr rallied the crowd with his calls to “keep the social web open,” and for users to demand ownership, control, and portability of their own data.

Jeremiah Owyang has some nice coverage and great pictures here.

Here are a few of the pics I took…

Pete Curley, Product Manager for Pulse, who Says Captain Morgan isn’t Really your “Friend”

DJ and Product Manager, Hong Taek Kwon

The Mysterious Floating Fork

Todd Masonis, Co-Founder and VP of Products, Assembling the Ice Cream Sundae Bar

I’ve been looking for signs of Bubble 2.0. Until now, I’ve just seen rising mood, more parties, and more traffic on the highways, but nothing that constitutes the return of the madness that gripped Silicon Valley (and the world) in the late ’90’s. Until now…

Here are the definitive signs:

1) Tech IPOs are in the news, including VMware, which had, according to the front page of the San Jose Mercury News, “an opening-day surge that exceeded even Google’s historic 2004 launch.” Bubble hallmark: focus on the instant riches made possible by trading on the very first day a stock is public.

2)  Mainstream media treating entrepreneurs as the new rock stars. This week’s edition of Newsweek features 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg on the cover. There’s nothing better for inflating a Bubble than the thought that someone fresh out of college can turn an idea into an IPO and become a billionaire. It sells magazines, and it sells stock, and it attracts more people to the game who are looking to get get rich, quick.

3) Office spaces becomes scarce, but the landlords start accepting equity instead of cash. I had hoped we would not see this scary sign for at least another 12 months, but according to today’s Wall Street Journal, it is already happening again:

“Amid the revival, some tech companies have started using an old dot-com property tactic: paying their office landlords with stock options. Internet startup Riya Inc., for example, says it’s paying its landlord partly in stock for a 5,000-square-foot commercial space in San Mateo, Calif.”

Sounds like it’s time for me to sit down and write the “How to Know Your in an Internet Bubble” guide that I’ve been meaning to write. Wasn’t sure there’d be a need for it this soon.

This weekend I checked Newsweek’s website a few times, looking for the latest issue to be published. I had been interviewed on background for a big piece on Facebook, which I assumed would be the cover story. Late Saturday, there was still no sign of the article, so I googled to find out the publication schedule for the magazine, and found, in a click or two, that new issues hit newstands on Mondays.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from looking again online on Sunday, and I was rewarded with the opportunity to find and read the cover story a day before anyone could get it on their local newstand.

Nonetheless, I decided to also pick up a hard copy this morning, so I altered my route into work by a few blocks and stopped at Mac’s Smoke Shop in downtown Palo Alto. To my surprise, they still had last week’s issue on display. I asked if they had the new issue in the back, and the manager said, “no” and that they have been having trouble lately with the distributor. Since Mac’s is half a block from Facebook headquarters, I’ll bet they’ll be a few more missed purchases this morning! Not a great moment for traditional print media.

…but instead we ate Powerset’s (thanks!), at Lunch 2.0, the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of Web 2.0 networking. Media outlets with represenatives at the event included the San Francisco Chronicle (coverage here), the Wall Street Journal, and “Gawker” — we know who you are ;^).

When Joseph and I got back to our office, two major media outlets were waiting to speak with us about Pulse and the super-hot topic of walled gardens vs. the open social web, based on the buzz that got started late last week from my beer-fueled leak to Robert Scoble at Facebook’s Lunch 2.0 event in Palo Alto.

And don’t forget, next Wednesday, Plaxo plays host to Lunch 2.0, with the first public demo of Pulse!

I’ve seen several articles recently comparing the current times in Silicon Valley to the heady days of the Great Bubble, using a cliche reference to the Prince song that equates partying and 1999. Is it an apt comparison? Are we in the midst of “Bubble 2.0”?

Well, the good times have certainly returned to Silicon Valley, and once again, San Francisco has turned into a hotbed of startups and startup-related parties. But I remember the sequence of events that created the Web 1.0 bubble all-too-well, and do not believe we are in the 1999 phase. I’d say it’s more like 1998.

Why? Although we’re seeing a lot of merger and acquisition activity, so far we have not seen a collapse of sanity guarding the IPO window. We are just in that giddy phase where a lot venture capital is sloshing around, and an increasing number of entrepreneurs are able to flip their startups into acquisitions by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and the media companies. And just maybe the lessons learned the hard way in 2000 and 2001 are fresh enough in our memories to prevent a complete replay of the Apocalypse over the next two years.

The momentum for Lunch 2.0 continues. I’ve never seen so many pizzas disappear so quickly! There must have been over 200 people in attendance. Met Anjali Athavaley from the Wall Street Journal there, a potential partner or two, and at least one potential hire. And, as far as I know, I did not leak any news by accident (this time)!

Next week: Lunch 2.0 at Plaxo!

Yesterday I got a call from our PR firm in New York, letting me know that my company (Plaxo, where I head up marketing) was in the Wall Street Journal, the print edition. I fished out my copy (yes, I’m old school enough to get it delivered daily), and there it was. A reprint of a piece from the Wall Street Journal’s blog. Which was largely about a piece on Wired Magazine’s blog. Which was largely inspired by a piece that was in Robert Scoble’s blog. Which was based on a coverasation that I had with him at a Lunch 2.0 event at Facebook. My, how times are changing…Oh, yeah, and we also got some exposure on Valleywag.

Robert and I had a really lively conversation last evening, which started inside the walls of Facebook, but then spilled out into the open space on the sidewalk of Hamilton Avenue. To support my thesis, I had to make references to an upcoming announcement.

 “Monday?” said Robert, “You just announced it now. I’m going to blog it tonight!”

 And, indeed, he did, both in text and video. I’ll refrain from getting into the details (and what parts he got right and which parts are a bit off), but I found it a good and provacative read:

http://scobleizer.com/2007/08/02/the-latest-shiny-social-object-an-opencontrollable-social-network/

I had the pleasure tonight of strolling downtown in Palo Alto to the headquarters of the “hottest company in silicon Valley,” Facebook, for their creative spin on “Lunch 2.0.” Lunch it was not. More like “beer bust 2.0,” but certainly nobody was confused. The crowd, as I expected, was huge.

Highlights included a conversation between our (Plaxo’s) chief platform architect, Joseph Smarr, and Mark Zuckerberg, and a conversation with Robert Scoble that started early in the evening, continued toward the end of the event, and then spilled out on to Hamilton Avenue. I’ll refrain from characterizing it here, but I thought it was a quite provocative debate about walled gardens versus the “open social web.”

Ever since my Internet epiphany in October 1994, I have believed the web to be a new medium, a platform for all kinds of expression and creativity. So, why have I waited until now to start blogging? I don’t have any really good excuses for why I waited.

But I do have now a motivator to get me started, finally. It’s Pulse, the new social network from Plaxo. (Disclosure: I’m the head of marketing at Plaxo.) With Pulse, I can now know that the people I know (who also use Pulse) will see my postings — and soon will be able to comment on them in non-anonymous conversations within Pulse.

So, now I guess I have to finish making this blog something worth visiting!