I headed down to Waterloo this morning to moderate a panel for the Communitech Leadership Conference.
The panel featured Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, author and entrepreneur Chris Anderson, venture capitalist Rick Segal and entrepreneur/investor Chris Sacca, who used to be head of special initiatives with Google.
Armed with a long list of potential questions, I started the panel, and then proceeded to stand quietly on the sidelines for the next hour while the four panelists took over with a conversation that ranged from Twitter (Sacca is an investor) to the low-cost of doing a start-up, cloud computing, 50+ Internet users (since leaving Monster, Taylor founded Enos.com, which is focused on the Baby Boomers) and what role Google plays within the tech landscape.
Needless to say, it was the easiest moderating job that I’ve ever had the privilege of doing. The fact I got to listen to the panelists gave me ideas for all kinds of potential posts.
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The keynotes by Chris, Chris, and Jeff were great as was the panel discussion. Thanks for moderating Evan.
During the panel I definitely saw a little bit of tension brewing between the two ideologies regarding startup funding. In the Y-Combinator/Micro venture funding camp was Chris Anderson (his keynote dealt with the marginal cost of Internet as a distribution channel heading towards zero) and Chris Sacco (who has funded more than a few Y-Combinator startups) and in the Large sum traditional venture capital spending camp was Rick Segal (a VC partner) and Jeff Taylor (the founder of the first .com to do a Super Bowl ad).
I really wanted to see that conversation played out.
It truly is hard to see which type of funding works best – but I have a feeling that y-combinator type funding works best when you can take advantage of a couple young coders who are psyched their idea even got into Y-Combinator. Although I have seen some cool startups come out of Y-Combinator, I feel that many of them are arbitrage plays, and few have goals of creating a sustainable business – where Venture Capital size funding is required.
Wow – that sounds like it would have been a fantastic session.
Sorry to have missed it!
Did anyone *blog* more about it?