Marcelo Calbucci

After the Sampa service shutdown in mid-July and most my Sampa duties were over by mid-August, I was fully emerged into making StartupDay 2009 a great event – and it end up being a great event. The question was what should I do after StartupDay? I spent months talking to as many people as I could. The more I talked to people the more ideas I had, which was bad.


Until last week, I had decided to do a travel startup, which was a simple idea that I could execute well and test demand with minimum efforts. In parallel to that I was also working on TweepML and Seattle 2.0 and the first week my time was divided between those three projects I realized it wasn’t going to work.

By mid next week I had decided instead of doing 33/33/33 (33% of my time into 3 projects) I should be playing 90/10 – 90% of my time into one project, 10% on another.

Which projected needed to die? Which project would get 90% of my time?

Seattle 2.0 is an “established” business generating revenue. TweepML is a complete project, pre-revenue. Travel startup X hasn’t even started yet.

I decided to play safe (or smart, depending how you look at it) and grow the Seattle 2.0 into an even bigger media company. It seems whatever we do with Seattle 2.0 has achieved success. It could be me, it could be the people working with me, it could be the market demand, it could be a combination of these and other elements. I don’t know, but I know it’s working.

Over the foreseeable future I’ll be dedicating 90% of my time into Seattle 2.0, which includes the website and the events, and maybe expanding into a few more arenas adjacent to what we do already (you’ll need to stay tuned).

The other 10% of my energy I’ll continue to improve and grow TweepML.org. It’s doing really well already, so the more I keep my hands out of it, the more it will grow.

Summer is very slow in startup/tech events, but things started to go back to "normal" by mid-September and we'll have a full month in October. These are the events that I'm planning on attending so far:

• Oct/9 - NWEN Breakfast - I'm actually on the panel talking about Sampa failure. Come, do some networking and ask tough questions. I'm ready.
• Oct/13 - Dinner somewhere with others like me to talk about undisclosed content
• Oct/14 - NWEN First Look Forum - Looking forward to see cool new startups and their dreams.
• Oct/21 - Stack Overflow Dev Days - Let's learn some new tech.
• Oct/24 - Hydrocephalus Research Guild Gala - I know it's not about Tech/Startup, but Paul Gross, Sampa's CEO is behind it, so maybe you'll show up and support this non-profit.
• Oct/31 - I'll be roaming the streets of Redmond/Kirkland with my two kids knocking on doors and asking for candy.