I’m very proud of StartupDay and I call it the best startup conference around!

I know I’m somewhat biased, but if you look at the speaker list for StartupDay 2010 you’ll see Jennifer Cabala and I manage to get the cream of the crop. Together, these folks generated billions of dollars of value, created many web sites with tens of millions of visitors and they are giving a Saturday of their lives to tell you how to do the same. Don’t waste any more minute and register for StartupDay 2010 before it’s too late (like last year, we’ll sell out again)


Some of these folks rarely speak at events and conferences, like Monica Harrington (Intersect, Picnik), Sunny Gupta (Apptio), Hadi Partovi (iLike, Facebook), Keith Smith (BigDoor, Zango), Vivek Bhaskaran (Survey Analytics) and Jan Miksovsky (Cozi).

And many other speakers, although you’ve might have heard of them, are flying from the Bay Area and other places to give you some well thought out advice based on their successful (or not) experiences, including Garry Tan (Posterous), Jeff Lawson (Twilio), Dave McClure (500 Startups), Shayan Zadeh (Zoosk) and Rashmi Sinha (SlideShare).

To top it off, we’ll have Ben Elowitz giving the closing keynote speech. Ben is a true serial entrepreneur who not only built the biggest online retailer for engagement rings, Blue Nile, but it’s also building a media empire with Wetpaint. He’s also a fun, engaging and smart person.

If all that is not enough for you, then you should also check out the Advisory Room where you’ll be able to meet one-on-one (aka, privately) for 15 minutes with lawyers, accountants, VCs, angel investors, entrepreneurs, marketers, and more. No pushing and shoving to get their attention.

I think you got it. Just register today.

September 11, 2001: The day all my problems disappeared for a few hours

Jeff Barr left a FB update telling his story of where he was when he hard the attacks of 9/11 were happening and inspired me to tell my story of 9/11 here. It’s mundane, but it will be good to record it here for me to look back someday.

I was sleeping in my house in Redmond, and the phone rang at around 6:45AM. It was very early for my standards at the time and as my wife picks up the phone, it’s my mom calling from Brazil. My wife, still sleeping, listens to my mom tell her the US is being attacked by planes and tell us to turn on the TV.

My first reaction is that my wife or my mom were mixing the message, and there was no plane attack. Once we turn the TV we see images of the towers with lots of smoke. It felt strange.

I headed to Microsoft -- at the time I was working on MSN Search -- because we had a very important strategic meeting with the Office and Internet Explorer team.

During the entire meeting, everyone was semi-silent. It was very strange. I remember feeling that all the big “issues” we had seemed so small. At one point it just felt wrong to be even working and talking about our tiny problems when thousands of people died on a terrorist attack.

It actually didn’t get much better on the following weeks, because there was the Anthrax scare and one suspicious package with white powder was found inside Microsoft. At one point we started to think that MSFT could be a target for an attack. It didn’t help that Microsoft security overreacted and was scaring the shit out of the employees with all kinds of “tips” on how to be safe.

I’m sure there was a lot more happening that day that I can’t recall.

I’ve Joined Conceivian!

I’ll make this short and sweet. I’ve joined a new company in Seattle called Conceivian. I’m pretty sure you have not heard about Conceivian yet. First of all, Conceivian is a startup on itself, 7-month-young. The next questions in your mind should be what will I do at Conceivian and what does Conceivian do? Well…

Conceivian is a Startup Lab. We convert ideas into products and businesses. We will build, grow and operate startups. We’ll also work with large tech companies providing rapid prototyping and innovation solutions.

I’ll be taking the role of Chief Startup Officer. I’ll be working with investors, entrepreneurs and enterprises to screen and evaluate projects and ideas we should put our energy and resources behind, as well provide strategic, technical, marketing and business development support on our projects.

I’ll write a lot more on the weeks to come. Our vision, strategy and execution plan is shaping up pretty fast, and I’m very excited about this opportunity.

Saqib Rasool is a veteran entrepreneur and he was the man who founded Conceivian and defined the core mission of the company. We have a small (and growing team) of very smart and passionate folks, and we have another dozen folks working with us providing services to us and to our companies on many different areas.

Help solving my Google Docs + Google Apps for Your Domain issue

I'm sure I'm not the only way with this problem, and after searching for it I can't find any solution for this problem, so I thought a blog post might be helpful.

If you have Google Apps for Your Domain, like I do, you know you have two instances of Google Docs. One is for when you go to http://docs.google.com/ and the other one when you go to http://docs.google.com/a/yourdomain.com. My problem is that I started using the default Google Docs long before I had Google Apps for Your Domain. However, now, every time someones shares a doc with me, it lands on my custom domain Google Docs.

That on itself wouldn't be a problem, except that Google tells me I don't have access to that document. I have to sign out and sign in again to see it. This is very annoying.

Question: How do I get all invites to marcelo@calbucci.com not to go to the custom domain Google Docs?

I don't want to disable the Google Docs service on my control panel, because I don't know what will happen with the dozens of documents that live there (because someone invited me already).

tips?