Yesterday we held the first ever Seattle Angel Conference. At the event, Illumagear, a scrappy Seattle startup with a vision for radically improving construction worker safety took home a check for $100K.
By all measures the conference, as Bob Crimmins told me after the event, goes in the “Win Column”. We had a terrific turnout, selling out the event. The room was full of energy and buzz. The participating companies all kicked-butt in their presentations. The food was excellent.
And most importantly we introduced a bunch of new people to angel investing, making the Seattle startup community stronger, which was our primary goal.
Curt Woodward at Xconomy Seattle did a great write up of the event and the winner, so I won’t bother recapping here.
But I do want to say this:
John Sechrest deserves the lion’s share of kudos for the success of this event.
John was the one who networked the concept around the Seattle area, starting last fall. John was the one who recruited others (including me) to volunteer to help out. John was the one who ran all of our meetings, including setting up logistics, ordering pizza & beer. John was the one who setup the website. John was the one who got sponsors and found the venue.
John did all of this because he had a vision and he had passion for making a positive change to the Seattle startup community.
Thank you John. Well done. You drove us to “ship our MVP” and now it’s time to start building the next Seattle Angel Conference!
Maybe now that we’ve proven it works in Seattle we can actually get some of the existing Seattle based entrepreneur and angel organizations to partner on it….
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Thank you. It was a great event. It was great working with everyone on the project. We definitely have people who are wanting to do the next one. I am looking forward to the process.
Thanks for letting me share your joy and satisfaction. It’s nice to be able to say “He’s my son !”
http://goo.gl/Bf4V7