If you're not local to the SF Bay Area, getting here is up to you. But after that, Mike Masnick and the rest of the Techdirt crew will meet you (and up to 1 guest) at the famous
Bucks of Woodside -- where all the cool kids go for breakfast with VCs. We'll chow down a few flapjacks while half-listening to you and then tell you that your startup is not at the right stage for us (or not quite a good fit with the rest of our portfolio), but that we love your business ideas and if you get some traction our door might still be open for a later investment round. After you've recovered from this standard VC rejection speech, we can shrug it off and say we were just practicing for a real VC meeting.
After our breakfast at Buck's, we'll head down to our office, and you can witness the blogging machine that is Masnick and hang out in some nondescript cubes (or maybe a conference room?) in a fairly typical startup environment. We'll bring some Nerf toys and toss them around while throwing out random suggestions for how to monetize a me-too web service in a unique way. We'll probably come up with about two dozen really cool domain names -- and maybe even register a few of them if they're not already taken. Just when we've run out of ideas, we'll meet up with some folks who have experienced the heydays of Silicon Valley before the Great Recession.
So lunch with Mark, Rich, Eric or Andy is your time to actually ask some serious questions about starting up businesses in a practical way. (Or you can chat about the state of intellectual property law with Masnick and Eric.) The location of lunch will be decided based on how all our schedules match up, so we can only promise one featured guest at lunch, but we'll certainly try to get more of them to join us.
The next stop will be Techdirt's favorite amusement park,
Malibu Grand Prix, where we can race some mini-cars or take a few cracks at the batting cage. We've got some ringers for the racetrack, but we promise we will let you win a few laps before the day is done.
We'll also throw in the Techdirt Crystal Ball and supporter badge with this package -- as well as a highly coveted Techdirt T-shirt. Below are some bios for our featured lunch guests.
Mark Fletcher
Mark Fletcher was the founder and CEO of the news aggregator website, Bloglines, and a Vice President of Ask.com until June 2006. Ask Jeeves acquired Bloglines on 8 February 2005.
In February 2005, Fletcher won one of the annual Rave Awards, presented by Wired magazine. Fellow nominees in the Tech Innovator category were Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, Adam Curry, Bill Healy and Zhang Zuoyi.
Previously, Fletcher started the free mailing list service ONElist. ONElist merged with eGroups, which was later acquired by Yahoo! in June 2000 and is now called Yahoo! Groups. Fletcher was also a software engineer at internet appliance maker Diba, Inc., now owned by Sun Microsystems, and at Pixel, Inc.
Mark obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego.
Eric Goldman
Eric Goldman is an Associate Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. He also directs the school's High Tech Law Institute. Before joining the SCU faculty in 2006, he was an Assistant Professor at Marquette University Law School, General Counsel of Epinions.com, and an Internet transactional attorney at Cooley Godward LLP.
Eric teaches Cyberlaw and Intellectual Property and previously has taught courses in Copyrights, Contracts, Software Licensing and Professional Responsibility.
Eric's research focuses on Internet law, intellectual property, marketing, and the legal and social implications of new communication technologies. Recent papers have addressed topics such as search engines and online marketing practices.
Eric received his BA, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in Economics/Business from UCLA in 1988. He received his JD from UCLA in 1994, where he was a member of the UCLA Law Review, and concurrently received his MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA.
Andy Kessler
Andy Kessler is a former hedge fund manager turned author who now writes on technology and markets.
His first book
Wall Street Meat: Jack Grubman, Frank Quattrone, Mary Meeker, Henry Blodget and me was published in March of 2003, followed by
Running Money: Hedge Fund Honchos, Monster Markets and My Hunt for the Big Score , published by HarperCollins in September of 2004.
Running Money was added to the New York Times Business Bestseller list on November 7, 2004. Then came
How We Got Here which you can find as a free PDF
here.
July of 2006 saw the release of
The End of Medicine , about Silicon Valley invading medicine and doing to doctors what ATMs did to tellers.
Andy is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page and has also written for The New York Times op-ed page, Wired, Forbes Magazine, The Weekly Standard, LA Times, The American Spectator magazine and techcentralstation.com and thestreet.com websites. He has even written a piece of fiction for Slate - bet you can't find it.
Rich Skrenta
Rich is a computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur. In 1982, as a high school student at Mt. Lebanon High School, Skrenta wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines. It is widely believed to be the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer virus ever created.
Skrenta graduated from Northwestern University. Between 1989 and 1991 he worked at Commodore Business Machines with Amiga Unix. Between 1991 and 1995 he worked at Unix System Labs and from 1996 to 1998 with IP-level encryption at Sun Microsystems. He later left Sun and became one of the founders of the Open Directory Project. He stayed onboard after the Netscape acquisition, and continued to work on the directory as well as Netscape Search, AOL Music and AOL Shopping. After his stint at AOL he went on to cofound Topix LLC, a Web 2.0 company in the news aggregation & forums market. In 2005, he and his fellow cofounders sold a 75% share of Topix to a newspaper consortium made up of Tribune, Gannett, and Knight Ridder. Currently, he heads a new startup company, Blekko Inc, an internet search engine.
He was involved in the development of VMS Monster, an old MUD for VMS. VMS Monster was the inspiration for TinyMUD. He is also known for his role in developing TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. In 1989 he started working on a multiplayer simulation game. In 1994 it was launched under the name Olympia as a pay-for-play game by Shadow Island Games.
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