What brings you to Tech Cocktail?
Eric: I'll start it out. We founded Tech Cocktail
Frank: So we thought we'd show up.
Eric: We thought we'd show up for the event we founded. It kinda all started over lunch at Potbellys on Wacker downtown.
Frank: It was a nice lunch. Similar lunch as what we have at the Olive Garden.
Eric: We both decided there weren't enough events happening here in Chicago and Frank thought about the same day and we were like, how about that? He goes, well, I've got this domain name TechCocktail and I said, heck I like it. I dunno, it just kinda grew on us and the first event we did in July it was about 250 people and now I don't know how many we have. We had about 400 RSVPs. So it's just blown up, it's all community driven, all the blogs. That's what it's all about.
Frank: The biggest thing is our project has been very limited and look what we can do with limited marketing budget, very word of mouth.
Eric: By limited you mean zero dollars.
Frank: I mean we have sponsors to help us with the event like, a lot of them are here tonight, but as far as actually getting the word out it's all been word of mouth. We're just pleased with the overall response, ya know. It's been amazing.
Eric: Yeah. I mean you'll notice too the sponsorship that we got are all companies that we want to showcase. And basically that's enough to donate a little money to help us with the beer and the drinks and the food and everything.
Frank: With the ultimate goal of just having a good time and get to know the people within the community.
Eric: Yeah that you never would have met before.
Frank: Right
Who is a Tech Cocktail attendee?
Frank: If you take all the tech people, you put them in a shaker, you mix them up, what do you have? You have a cocktail, right? It's basically a mixer, that was the whole idea behind it. We have people that are bloggers, we have people that are just technology enthusiasts, we have coders, developers, marketing people, people in sales. We've also got a lot of entrepreneurs. We had venture capitalists as well. So it's defiantly a mix. We even have people that are just interested in photography that want to just post pictures of Tech Cocktail on their blog. We have people coming to film the event all the way from Minnesota.
Eric: Like Technology Evangelist
Frank: Yeah, it's amazing. Our response has been great.
Who came the furthest for Tech Cocktail?
Eric: This time I think it might be you guys. Last time we had some guys from Ohio. Actually, yes, I'm sorry. Jeff Pulver and actually my friend Rick both came from New York city. They flew out for the event.
Frank: Yeah, New York city, yeah, that's pretty far.
Eric: So we had Jeff who's one of the founders of Vonage and my friend Rick was my roommate in college and a good friend of mine so we have two New Yorkers down here.
Frank: Yeah
Eric: And actually, Don Loeb from Feedburner flew out here from San Francisco.
Frank: I think he probably wins it. That's a long flight.
Eric: Yeah, that's a long flight.
What is next?
Frank: The world.
Eric: There will be a Tech Cocktail 3. I mean, it's probably January, that's about right.
Frank: Yeah, January, February like... We're going to try and do it every quarter, keep it going, keep the momentum going. I think if we do too many, you know, you lose some of the enthusiasm behind it.
Eric. Yeah, I think what we want to do right is we want to do a big event every quarter and then enable other people to do smaller events every month throughout the quarter, and then you have a community. Everybody taking an ownership or a piece of it.
Frank: And we've seen that, with this event we've had a lot of different meet-ups spinning out of it. One of the key sites TechSocial is kinda a Chicago based event tracking site, and so he's been kinda following all these different events and we've seen more events pop up recently. There's one coming up in the end of October, right?
Eric: Yeah, well the beginning of November, Tech, uh, the Beta group is meetings. So that's a new meeting starting, actually starting this month called Chicago Beta and it's a division of San Francisco Beta and these other ones. It's basically about 45 people last time that are looking to build companies. So there's all these little events popping up which is what we wanted to do.
Frank: We want to get people together and to meet people and to start new things and keep the momentum going. It really amplified the signal in the midwest. I think potentially there's other areas that could also benefit from this type of thing.
Eric: Yeah, and we've got like Washington D.C., Boston, Austin Texas. Great tech communities, no one bringing them together. So if we could enable people to do what we've done there, that would be great. And then it's like, I mean I was talking to some guys I know on the west coast and they were like, that is an awesome idea for every place but Silicon Valley.
Frank: Yeah, Silicon Valley's over saturated. I mean, I was just out there last week, while I was there for a week there were events every day. Which actually is great, but for us it would be tough to, you know, amplify.
Eric: It's just like, there's no many events there and nothing anywhere else. We want to be helping people do things everywhere else.
Frank: Because there's a lot of technologies in these other areas as well, that's the thing. If you're not talking about it or listening to these people, it's not happening.
Eric: There's a lot of companies here that may never have gotten talked about to the level they will from us having this event and that's the point of it, to say amplify the signal, say there's companies here too that are fantastic. They don't get all the media play that the Silicon Valley guys do, but they're building a good, solid company and we want to help showcase that.
Frank: We're really having a good time doing it.
Eric: Yeah, it's a great time doing it.
What motivates you to do Tech Cocktail?
Eric: We just want to get the community together. I mean people may second guess that and say, oh no they're not trying to just do that, that's just too nice but really that's what we're trying to do.
Frank: Yeah. One of the other things we just recently did is we launched... He gets to take our glasses...
Eric: I'll keep the camera though...
Frank: One of the other things we recently just did, we launched a job board because, actually after the first event we got kinda inundated with resumes and people are trying to find other developers, or product managers, or whatever. Marketing people, you know, sales people. So we said, you know, this is too much work for us to manage, so why don't we just put it on a board. And there's been a lot of board that popped up, but we're like you know what, if we have it at this event and we have people that are going to these events then helping to build that board, get it going, it could have legs. We launched it, it's at TechCocktail.com\jobs, so if you just go to TechCocktail then \ jobs you'll go to it. We actually call it Tech Cocktail Specials because, you know, you might find a special. Special job.
Eric: That's good, I mean it's super low cost, and uh, super low cost. The idea is if you want to kinda help find a good person and contribute to the next Tech Cocktail you can help us with the job board. It's almost like sponsoring the event too. You also find some good people.
Frank: Exactly. it will help find and connect people and also get us out of the way.
Eric: Yeah, right, right, right. This event actually, all our sponsors, I mean, we're breaking even on the event today and everybody had a great time. So, thanks to those guys we've got Chicago Entrepreneurial Center, MK Capital, chicago.com, Digital Boot Camp, coaster.com, our headline sponsor is MidPhase hosting. They did the limos. They're great but they've been with us since day 1and they do what we had to do. And such a great range of sponsors and without them we wouldn't be able to provide free drinks and food and everything else, so I mean, they make it happen. And all the people.
Frank: So many, who knows, many next month Minnesota, I don't know. Not in the winter though.
