"We launched with one server in a colo facility. Oops!”
I had forgotten about that, but it was certainly one of the better moments. Perhaps it's just my elitist engineer bias, but I find stories of technical screwups to be far more enlightening (don't do this, kids!) than stories about dealing with investors.
(since parent was deleted, replying to child post)
There was a huge spectrum of people in attendance, from age, business/technical leaning, optimism/ownership of their careers, and immediately perceptible aptitude within their area. The only area I can think of without such a spectrum was gender -- I'd reckon that 95% of attendees were male.
Personally, I don't really care about the business/engineering divide since I straddle both. Many people I met were the same way. Is a guy who does Ember.js and also does door to door sales a business guy or technical guy?
My personal, completely biased checkbox was whether the person had interesting things to say or not, irrespective of business/technical. I found duds and gems all over the spectum (duds for me, but not necessarily for others). Others will have gone in with different filters for meeting. Such is the nature of the beast when you have attendees representing a whole slew of verticals.
Colin and I bumped into each other and talked about world politics and ISIS before going our separate ways. Tarsnap was only brought up when the group got larger and we inevitably entered "so what do you do" mode.
"What you do" is an integral part of who we are, but it doesn't necessarily have to define us -- neither at conferences or in life in general.
