Last Thursday over 140 entrepreneurs, investors, and startup rookies came together for Startup2Startup, a monthly invite-only dinner built around fostering the startup community. This month’s featured speaker was Adaptive Path founding partner and ex-Googler Jeffrey Veen, who walked the audience through some of the key aspects of website design and how to deal with associated communication issues.
Following Veen’s presentation, the attendees shared their thoughts and experiences related to design in intimate round-table discussions. The event’s co-founder Dave McClure painstakingly creates seating arrangements to ensure that each table has an array of attendees ranging from startup rookie to veteran, ensuring that discussion is both lively and informative (and strictly off-the-record).
The evening was an overwhelming success, highlighted by Veen’s engaging presentation that was both accessible and entertaining (you can see an intro video and his slides below, along with a full video of his presentation). As a bonus, Veen introduced the audience to one of his newest projects.
Dubbed Wikirank, the site tracks the popularity of Wikipedia articles, sifting through hundreds of gigabytes of Wikipedia’s publicly available traffic data and presenting it in an intuitive and attractive interface. With this data, the site can generate an at-a-glance view of what the world is interested in at any given moment. The site also allows users to create embeddable charts comparing the popularity of different topics over time. If you’d like to try it out, the first 30 TechCrunch readers to enter their Email addresses here will have access to the site’s private beta.
Next month’s Startup2Startup event will feature Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, who will be offering tips on building a great company culture and customer service (for which Zappos is widely acclaimed).
Here are the full videos of Jeff Veen’s presentation:
Part 1
Part 2
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