One Crazy Week, Part 2

In part 1, I talked about December 11th at the Rice Alliance IT & Web 2.0 Venture Forum and the day’s experience. Shortly after the event wound down, we headed over to Saute Bistro, the new restaurant from local tech community member Kevin Lacobie of Agoric Source.

As I posted earlier, this Happy Hour brought to you by Startup Houston, the Houston Technology Center and GreenCamp Houston ’08 was a multipurpose event:

• One-year anniversary of the happy hour;
• Post Rice Alliance cool down and social; and
• GreenCamp Houston ’08 kickoff party.

As expected, this was a very diversely attended event and a great time was had by all. Halfway into the party, Marc Nathan of the Houston Technology Center and I raffled off 4 tickets plus parking for this afternoon’s football game between the Houston Texas and Tennessee Titans (and what a game it was). The winner of our raffle was Victor Koosh of Caesar Systems, an elevator pitch presenter from the Rice event earlier. The tickets were generously donated by our friend Bill Arend, Regional Manager for Oracle for which we are very thankful.

This last quarter, we have been lapse in honoring the happy hour for several reasons, both intentional and unintentional. On the unintentional side, both Marc and I are one-man wrecking crews with tons of things in the hopper. Couple that with Ike and you get a hiccup; planning for this just fell to the side. I did have some ulterior motives in not pushing to get this event done as I felt that we had been infiltrated by serial networkers that were neither tech, entrepreneur or investor. This was bound to happen and I think that the hiatus along with the advent of the InHouston group meetings has effectively cleared this up. Please don’t mistake this as effrontery to anyone looking for connections. I like that group but do not believe that they offer value to what we are trying to accomplish.

With this event behind us, Marc and I have committed to resetting the 2009 schedule so that no dates get missed…this goes for the Open Coffee meetings as well.

In part 3, we move to Saturday and GreenCamp Houston ’08, which was a rousing success…you should’ve been there but if you weren’t, we will be doing this again…and soon.