The are almost too many tech events in the calendar these days to mark any particular one out as being worthy of note. I say almost because, on the global stage at least, TechCrunch Disrupt (Ok, Ok, but still…) remains up there because of how much other media attend and, well, just it’s general awesomeness. Into this small basket you could also put, for instance, Le Web, Founders Forum in the UK, DLD, The Lobby Conference, the tech elements at Davos and maybe even TED. What few of them are doing however, is celebrating new blood. You tend to see the people who have made it, not the one’s about to make it (apart from Disrupt of course). To that end one rapidly emerging event which is doing a very good job of bringing together the Valley, New York, Asia, Europe and emerging global startups like South America is the simply named “F.ounders“. And it’s coming to New York on June 14/15, and will be attended by our very own editor, Eric Eldon and co-editor Alexia Tsosis.
They’ll make up around 150 of the world’s fastest growing tech company founders gathering in NASDAQ’s Market Site in Times Square. Paddy Cosgrave says he is moving founders to New York to bring together “high growth companies on track to IPO or otherwise in the next 24 months.” There’s that new blood coming through.
Joining them will be tech stars including Dennis Crowley (Foursquare), David Karp (Tumblr), David Goldberg (Survey Monkey), Alexander Ljung (SoundCloud), Roger McNamee (Elevation Partners) Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) and Steve Case (AOL, Revolution).
You might not have heard of F.ounders as it barely has a web site and you can’t apply for an invite. But it’s been described by Bloomberg as “Davos for geeks”. TechCrunch was more to the point: we called it badass. Perhaps because of that we managed to get a special concession: We got them to agree that TechCrunch readers can ‘apply’ to attend by emailing attendees [@] f.ounders.com. No guarantees, but good luck…
Last year’s event was held in Dublin, Ireland. Bono lead a pub crawl, Riverdance put on a private performance and the Irish President hosted drinks in her residence in her last day in office. Rumours that a TechCrunch European editor led a few late party-goers in a 4am guitar-led rendition of Wonderwall in the lobby of the hotel have never been confirmed.
F.ounders Dublin is held annually in October, alongside The Dublin Web Summit.