Yesterday I went to the Entrepreneur Round Table at the Alliance of Angel. This is the new thing Alliance is trying to do: connecting entrepreneurs to entrepreneurs. Before it was all about connecting "angels investors" with entrepreneurs.
The event was ok. I had some mixed feelings about it. The venue is good (there offices), the food and drink ok. There was about 1 hour of networking before the round table started and it was a bit packed so you couldn't really circle around. I talked with Jordan Mitchell (Others Online), Max Ciccotosto (Wishpot) and a few others faces.
The most interesting part was the rate of entrepreneurs to angel investors of 100:1. Since there was just about 100 entrepreneurs there, the only angel investor was Geoff Entress. It was a funny situation after the Round Table ended, I went to Geoff to say hi (since we always meet at events like these anyway) and before I could blurb one or two phrases there was a line of about 10-15 people (a.k.a. desperate-entrepreneur-trying-to-raise-money) waiting to talk to him. I felt pressured at let him talk with them and a bit sorry for him. He'll probably be getting a dozen or so business plans, by end of the week.
The Round Table itself was Andy Liu, CEO and co-founder of BuddyTV, and Sharelle Klaus, CEO and founder of Dry Soda, and Geoff Entress, Principal at Madrona, moderating it.
Now, who has ever attended a round table about knitting and roadsters?
Oh, right, that never happened.
Besides Andy and Sharelle being entrepreneurs, the similarities ended there. There business model was completely unrelated to each other, the way they raised money was different (and it had to be), their product had no correlation. Any could clearly see that difference by the questions being asked, "What do you think about carbon-footprint on bottled water?", Sharelle being on top of her game would answer that, but she failed miserable at "What kind of affiliate deals you did on your Internet site early on?". She was mute.
You get the point.
As an entrepreneur with a very busy schedule (mostly working on creating a product and a company) I find myself irritated when I waste time with things that I shouldn't have. I didn't feel the AoA event was a waste of time, but it could have been (much) better if the theme was around a specific industry, business model or a more narrow topic.
I gave this same feedback for another person organizing a similar event that I attended. If you want to create connections between entrepreneurs there has to be a common ground with these entrepreneurs. For me, and I know this might sound arrogant, but I want to learn from people that built or are building Internet companies, preferably with a "freemium" business model and doing Web 2.0 user-generated content. Sodas? I drink those.
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
