Jeff Clavier's Software Only

One of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web. Moi?

Well, I would certainly not have claimed it, but BusinessWeek has when putting together this list of usual, and not so usual, suspects that includes yours truly.

You see, what always troubles me having investors being “celebrated” is that our job is to help and support entrepreneurs, and make sure that the attention is focused on them, not us. Like I said when the list of 13 Web 2.0 Kingmakers was published, I feel that I have been extremely lucky to work with a number of really smart entrepreneurs, some (5) who sold their companies in early yet very profitable exits, a few (4) who failed, and a lot (close to 40) who are still working very hard at it at different stages of financing. But four years into investing in consumer Internet, they - collectively - and I still have everything to prove, especially in these most challenging times.

So thanks to BusinessWeek for the attention, and let's hope that in a few years I will have proven them right. It is obviously very nice to share the investor spot with peeps like Peter Thiel and Paul Graham. And many congratulations to my friends Loic "The Communicator", Ev "The Blogger", Matt "The Publisher", Joi "The Adviser", Kevin "The Poster Boy" and Gabe "The Traffic Driver" for this well deserved recognition.

While I am at it, many people have complained to me, over and again, that I had abandoned my blog. As I explained in this post a few months ago, I sort of have - in an extended sabbatical kind of way - but you can always find my rumblings of all kinds on Twitter.

Tags: evanwilliams, gaberivera, joiito, kevinrose, loiclemeur, mattmullenweg, jeffclavier

Announcing SoftTech VC’s $12M seed fund – the Return to the Dark Side

After 3 years of angel investing in 20+ Consumer Internet startups (and profitably selling 5 of them), I am very excited, and humbled, to announce the launch of my very own VC fund, SoftTech VC II, L.P. Some of you may wonder what is actually the difference between what I have been doing until now – after all I am still referred to as a VC by many – and this new $12M fund.

One major difference: I have taken the step (back to the Dark Side ☺) and have raised outside capital, from a mix of fantastic institutional and private investors. Angels invest their own money, VCs invest capital they have raised from others - as well as their own since it is market practice that Fund Managers also contribute to the fund’s capital. In most cases, it is extremely difficult to raise the first fund of a new firm. Despite great individual track records, it might take a year or two of effort to assemble a syndicate of Limited Partners (this is how people investing in VC funds are referred to) willing to back a new team.

When I left my previous fund (Reuters Venture Capital), I wanted none of that: my passion was working with early stage entrepreneurs, supporting them with time, cash and connections. And since I had zero track record in the consumer internet space, thinking that I could raise outside capital in 2004 would have been a total fantasy. That’s why, like so many entrepreneurs, I decided to bootstrap my own startup – using some of the family’s savings and generating cashflows from a few consulting gigs. It just so happens that the “market” I had decided to enter was early stage investing… in other startups. Last June, serendipity helped me decide, and eventually secure, the next logical step for SoftTech VC. As many friends in the angel and VC community were asking me whether I was thinking of joining an existing firm, or raise my own fund at some point, a few people hinted that they would be really interested in investing in a fund if I was to start one.

A few more discussions and one PowerPoint, later the core foundation of my new fund was there:

• invest in 30 to 40 seed stage startups
• average “bite size” of $250K, ranging from $100K to $500K
• able to lead, co-lead or follow other firms or angel syndicates
• focusing on consumer Internet, but with a great flexibility to enter new sectors opportunistically • open to a few non Silicon Valley deals
• capital efficiency, great teams, differentiated ideas and flexibility on “how big it can become” will be common characteristics shared by the companies we invest in
• working hand in hand with the best firms in Silicon Valley, and the usual suspects in the acquisition gang, to build a successful outcome for everyone involved
• I would be the sole Fund Manager of the fund, with the support of a fantastic advisory board: my friends Jon Miller, Josh Kopelman and Reid Hoffman

The actual size of the fund was the subject of an interesting discussions, tossing around different numbers that all would have made sense: $5M, $10M, $20M,… A number of factors led us (my investors and myself) to decide that $12M was the right amount, and a significant portion of the fund was subscribed in just a few days, with final allocations having been made a short time thereafter. You have two ways to look at how long it took to raise the fund: 3 ½ years of hard work since I started investing, or a few weeks. All this would not have happened without the support and wisdom of the great investors who decided to follow me in this adventure: Jon Miller, Reid Hoffman, Josh Kopelman, Geoff Ralston, Jim Bankoff, Mark Fletcher, MR Rangaswami, Loic Le Meur, Brad Feld, Frank Caufield and his firm Darwin Ventures, Tim Chang and the whole Norwest Venture Partners team. And no, I am not naming everyone – some investors want to remain “stealth” and I obviously will respect it. But thanks to ALL of you.

I am used to always direct any bit of attention I get from the media to the real heroes: the entrepreneurs I have the privilege to work with, building great companies, capturing markets and having fun at the same time. I am therefore super psyched to introduce the first four investments of SoftTech VC II. Yes, four. Been busy this summer, between forming the fund, selling two companies (Yay Kaboodle and Maya’s Mom!), and getting these four to the finish lines.

I will write a post about the fund’s investment areas of interest later this week, and want to share a quick background to these new investments:

• SocialMedia.com was co-founded by my good friend Seth Goldstein, and has been building an infrastructure and an ad network targeted at social network application developers. The company will help these developers manage, market and monetize their applications.  After just a few weeks, last Friday’s revenue on Facebook alone, was over $10K - most of which was distributed to independent developers.
• Active Athlete Media’s focus is active consumers who participate in sports, and the advertisers desiring to reach this passionate audience engaged in the sports they love, on thousands of mid to long tail websites. To date, I had been reluctant to jump into a sport-centric community (passion centric communities will still have a strong representation in the new portfolio). However a monetization solution like Active Athlete’s, which has been steadily growing and generating revenues, became very attractive in order to set foot in the category.
• Satisfaction Unlimited announced its funding mentioning me as an angel investor just last week, but I am pleased to point out that it is actually SoftTech VC II that made this investment. I have known the co-founders of the company, Thor and Lane, for a long time, and saw their concept of a People-Powered Customer Service being refined and improved over the course of several meetings through the summer, and could not pass on it.
• Grouply is one of these “The World Needs” companies where one day I decide that a product or service needs a fresh start. There are hundreds of millions of users of message boards, email lists, forums and online groups products like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups, and they have not evolved for a long long time. Grouply will help solve that by enabling users to easily adopt a richer and more powerful experience for their existing online groups.

One of the key factors that have influenced my decision to get on this journey is the sheer number and quality of many of the companies that I have had a chance to be introduced to. I feel extremely lucky to have the best job in the world, and to be given the opportunity to take my passion to the next level.

Introducing Kongregate - my first investment in the gaming space

My most recent investment, Kongregate, announced its beta launch last night alongside the closing of a $1M seed financing. I am delighted to be part of a strong syndicate of angel investors, led by my good friend Reid Hoffman, backing gaming veteran Jim Greer and his team. Even though I don’t like these types of analogy, you could argue that Kongregate is a YouTube for casual games developed in Flash (today).

Developers will be able to upload their work on the site – maintaining all IP, rights, etc. – and will get exposed to the community who will review, rate and eventually rank the game based on how much it is being played. They will eventually get a cut of the advertising revenue generated by Kongregate, though in the short term exposure, user feedback and popularity will be the most significant benefit they extract. One of the hooks offered by Kongregate is a set of APIs that allows developers to create contests and statistics that will be saved in the player’s profile.

To date, during the alpha phase of the service, about 300 games have been uploaded.

Users don’t need to be registered to play, but some of the more advanced features like maintaining personal statistics, chat rooms and contests participation are reserved to site members (membership being of course free). In an interview with Red Herring’s Ryan Olson, I mentioned that one of the motivations for gamers is ego/bragging rights about beating a level, hitting challenges and being on the top score leaderboard (the need for consumer services to satisfy one of the seven sins is a notion I learnt from Accel Partner’s Kevin Efrusy) . There is also the opportunity to hang out online in one of the many chat rooms available on the service, where you can interact with other gamers as you are playing.

The screenshot below shows one of the popular games of the moment, The Fancy Pants Adventures (which has been played over 50,000 times). You can also see the live chat on the right hand-side, and if you scroll below the game, you find all the rating, reviews/comments and recommendations about other games that might be of interest.

I have been looking into the different segments of the gaming space for a few months, trying to understand the trends and opportunities that my kind of investing might have. I have been fortunate to meet and discuss with a number of CEOs in the space, including the talented CEO of Boonty, Mathieu Nouzareth, who gave me a great primer on this industry a few months ago. Kongregate was almost the ideal first investment opportunity for me since it bridges the gap between gaming and passion-centric communities, one of my main area of interest. I am very excited to announce that first dip in the gaming space, which has proven to be fascinating so far – even if traditionally it has not been one to generate spectacular returns for investors. We shall see!

I have been asked if users would develop games "for real", therefore increasing the amount of content on the site. My answer is essentially that 1) based on the current set of uploads, we see a lot of amateur game developers uploading interesting demos or actual games, and 2) a user will typically play a given game over and over (and over) in order to beat levels or succeed on challenges. The need to massive daily uploads is therefore less critical than on an audio or video site. Traffic and usage patterns will have the final word on that question at the end of the day.

 

More:

• The official press release
• A great interview of Jim Greer in Gamasutra
• Coverage from TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Reuters,…

Interesting Web 2.0 conferences and events

The busy conference season is upon us again (just cleared TED 2007 which was an absolute blast), and I want to mention two events where I will be speaking in the coming month:

WEB 2.0 EXPO / APRIL 15–18 (Moscone Center, San Francisco CA)

The Web 2.0 Expo is a spin-off of the highly popular Web 2.0 conference (now called the Web 2.0 Summit), that will feature a large number of Web 2.0 companies exhibiting their products, as well as a multi-track conference that will be preceded by a number of workshops. A big shout to my co-chair of the Search SIG Dave McClure for co-organizing this event.

On the 15th, I will be running the workshop Starting Up 2.0: Strategies for Pitching, Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup with my good friend Rob Hayes from First Round Capital. If you have attended some of the Camps (BarCamp, TagCamp, MashupCamp,…) I have run a number of sessions about Angel/VC financing, trying to give participants insights on the funding cycle. We will have 3 hours to cover the startup process, and there will be a lot to talk about. We will keep the scripted part of  the session to 2 hours tops so that we can make sure that we address as many of questions of the audience as we can. Feel free to send me an email or leave comments on this post if you plan to attend the workshop, and have specific issues you would like to see addressed.

On the 15th, I will participate to a the Panel on Venture Capital 2.0: Bright Future or Broken Forever?. Since there will be six of us on stage, and we are all very opinionated, it promises a fun debate. I am really looking forward to the conversation with David Hornik, Chris Moore, Josh Kopelman, Michael Eisenberg (who we don’t get to see often enough out here). Mike Arrington will have the "interesting" task of keeping us on topic and/or schedule.

SOFTWARE 2007 / MAY 7–8 (Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara CA)

My friend MR Rangaswami has organized the Software conference for a number of years now. We met a long time ago when I was still an enterprise software investor, and have kept in touch to compare notes on the evolution of systems in the enterprise world. MR has asked Ismail Ghalimi – the CEO of Intalio, organizer of the Office 2.0 conference and talented IT Blogger – and yours truly to run an Enterprise 2.0 theme at Software 2007, which will span across 4 panels (titles listed below are work in progress):

• What does Web 2.0 mean to the enterprise beyond the technical alphabet soup
• Enterprise 2.0: Meet the companies
• Office 2.0: Meet the companies
• Enterprise/Office 2.0: the CIO point of view

Our goal is to set the scene in the first panel, establishing what 2.0 means in the enterprise context and where we have seen actual usage from corporate clients. “Meet the companies” will feature 4 startups building products in a particular segment in the Enterprise/Office space and will both their product vision and their market development strategy (against the incumbents). We will wrap up the discussion with a panel of three/four CIOs and get their views (“So what ? Who cares ?”) on this new generation of applications and services. I will post the formal program and names of participants in these sessions in due course.

Readers of Software Only can get a $300 discount off the regular price by clicking on this link.

UNDER THE RADAR: WHY OFFICE 2.0 MATTERS / MARCH 23 (Microsoft Campus, Mountain View CA)

I will also be attending (but not speaking at this time) the Under the Radar event on Office 2.0 put together by Debbie and Alison over at DealMaker Media. It will be interesting to listen and meet 32 company CEOs in the office 2.0 space. Readers of Software Only can actually get a discount by registering through this link.

Twittering or not twittering, that is the question

Much has been written on, about and around Twitter – with a clear acceleration over the past… three weeks ? Essentially the traffic on the site, and the number of mentions in the blogosphere seem to be highly correlated – which is not surprising since a lot of the Twitterati are also highly visible bloggers.

I had not paid much attention to Twitter during my 6–months blogging break, but discovered it two weeks ago when hanging out with my friends Scott Beale and Robert Scoble – who have been twittering away for some time. I jokingly told Scott that I would never use “that” but I did twitter quite a bit at Ted 2007, and since then.

What works for me with Twitter is the fact that I can fire one comment, one thought, one message, in 30 to 60 seconds. And not bother with presenting, formatting or developing that idea – because, or I should say thanks, to the 140 characters limit. I have always had difficulty at writing posts of less than 200 to 500 words, and so that artificial constraint is actually interesting. Obviously, the editorial value of these 140–character messages tend to “vary greatly”, and I would expect only a small number of close friends and/or associates to be interested in that “stream of consciousness”.

What struck me, or at least surprised me, what the speed at which Twitter got its mention in the New York times, was called the blogging killer, had its first mashups, and created a passionate debate between fans and opponents. Talking about mashups, Twittervision is really way cool, and could easily be applied to photostreams.

So it is something new and important happening in front of us, or is it a fad that will burn out that much faster ?

I say who cares? If it is truly useful to some people (like Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt), it will find its (killer) application amongst other publishing and collaboration tools. And in the meantime I have added my own Twitter badge on this blog.

Disclosure: I have no interest in Obvious Corp, the makers of Twitter.

Looking back at three years of Web 2.0 investing

Almost three years ago, I left the fund I was a general partner of and decided to switch my investment focus from mid-stage enterprise software to (very) early stage consumer Internet. Dotcoms as they were, since the Web 2.0 meme had not been cornered yet. Since I had limited investment track record in that space, it was clear that raising a fund – may it be from traditional limited partners or high net worth individuals – would be impossible, or so close to it that it was not worth trying. The alternative (like any bootstrapped startup) was to start investing our own cash in some of the companies that were building a new generation of services for the consumer.

Why the consumer? Because I still could not figure out how to make angel-type investments provide any meaningful leverage/return in the enterprise software space, whereas interesting things were being built for the consumer on a capital efficient basis. So efficient that these companies sometimes managed to launch their service and even generate revenues on very limited outside investment - because hardware, bandwidth and (open source) software costs had decreased by one to three orders of magnitude. And since the burst of the first Internet bubble had drastically lowered salary expectations of early stage startup employees, overall startup costs decreased to a point that a friends and family, or angel, financing of a few hundreds of thousands dollars allowed a company to reach a number of key milestones.

Three years ago, we were busy inviting the same group of friends to a bunch of social networks. Some people were reading blogs directly on web sites or through the first generation of feed aggregators, and all VC bloggers could sit around a dining table. My initial interest in user generated content – text, pictures, audio and the very beginnings of video – led to my involvement in Buzznet (photo sharing), Truveo (video search) and Feedster (RSS search). Around the same time, I came across Userplane (private instant messaging network) for the first time – but did not engage for almost a year. I also made a conscious decision to attend a lot of conferences, events and other geek dinners. This allowed me to meet casually a number of the CEOs I would end up investing in: Dogster’s Ted Rheingold, Edgeio’s Keith Teare, Rapleaf’s Auren Hoffman,… And this blog – started in June 2004 – led me to meet another group of entrepreneurs: Kaboodle’s Manish Chandra, Maya’s Mom’s Ann Crady and Wikio’s Pierre Chappaz just to name a few. A large number of deals also came through referrals from angel investors or firms I have worked with several times.

And then there is the strategy that brings it altogether, putting each companies in a nice set of well defined buckets. I started with 3 buckets: Search, Social Media, Infrastructure. And evolved each bucket with the investments I made, and the ones I passed on. But that will be the subject of other posts in the next couple of days.

The slide below is a list of the companies I have invested in, most in cash, a few in kind, sometimes both. I have also listed two advisory boards I am/was part of: Netvibes, that I met a few days after they had closed their angel round, and MyBlogLog, that was acquired by Yahoo in January 2007 before we closed the angel round that was in the works. Were also acquired – by AOL – Truveo and Userplane, respectively in January and August 2006.

It is common practice for startups these days to keep a stealthy profile even several months after raising a round of financing, and this has delayed the (almost) full disclosure of my portfolio until… tonight. I want to point out however that I have always made these disclosure in private when required, for example when an entrepreneur has contacted me about a company that would be overlapping or competitive to one of  mine.

PS: Peter Rip has an interesting piece: Web 2.0 - Over and Out, in which he suggests that the Web 2.0 hype has peaked, and now the real work begins. We'll also address that aspect in future posts.

GoogTube is happening for $1.65B - and I understand why Chad could not attend tomorrow's Search SIG

It is all over the news so you don’t need a rehash: the rumors were true and Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65B in GOOG stock. There are several remarkable facts in this acquisition, and I only have a few minutes in between meetings (before meeting a company involved in online video something, just as it happens) to mention them:

• Copyright issues, pirated content and YouTube often appear in the same sentence – and now that Google owns the company, you can only bet that they will be solved one way or another.
• Google gets another foot in content hosting, after Gmail, Blogger and GoogleBase. They are not only about organizing the world’s information anymore – just in case you wondered.
• YouTube will remain a separate operation, even physically, which seems to indicate that the risk of messing up the secret sauce post-acquisition has been considered.
• From a pure deal perspective, Sequoia Capital (which also backed YHOO and GOOG) adds another icon to the list of successful exits they have had. Their 30% investment in YouTube for $11.5M has turned into $500M in less than two years – a 43x multiple, or more if the GOOG stock gets a pop over the next 30 days.
• Now that the leader (46% of the online video market) has been taken out, I can’t wait to see what happens next – especially as Yahoo was rumored to be involved in the deal until the last minute, and I am sure that Fox, Viacom, AOL and the others were not too far behind.

I have had a lot of questions over the past 48 hours regarding the timing of tomorrow night’s Search SIG on The growing online video ecosystem. No, I was not aware of anything going down but I thought it was a good time to step back and discuss the developments of that industry. And I am not surprised that Chad Hurley declined to join us because of "his crazy schedule" . I look forward to seeing you all planning to attend, and have a great conversation about what happens next with Om and the rest of our panel.

PS:

• Best logo goes to my friends at PaidContent
• The official Google statement is here

Mo' money to build a bigger Dogster niche

A year ago (give or take 10 days) I wrote about Dogster Inc. – the maker of the highly popular dogster.com and catster.com – turning profitable, an unusual fate among Web 2.0 companies. It was still a very small business, but gave co-founders Ted Rheingold, John Vars and Steven Reading a foundation to grow their company at the pace free cashflows were being generated. Up until then I had considered Dogster as an amusing parody of other social networking sites, and suddenly realized that there might be much more than met the eye.

A few metrics caught my attention: the size of the user base, the consistent growth, a promising ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and a CPM which was higher than I expected, thanks to an advertising program that was more than pure banner and text ads. These metrics doubled in a few months, allowing the company to scale its operation to 10 salaried employees while increasing its cash balance. The other thing increasing was the list of brand advertisers interested in reaching out to this thriving community of passionate dogs and cats lovers, including the likes of Disney, Target, PetSmart, Clorox/FreshStep, Gap/Old Navy, Warner Brothers, Nintendo and VPI Pet Insurance.

As the company turned in its first six-figure revenue month, it became clear that the small Dogster “niche” was turning into a real business. The economics of that market are indeed significant: 63% of US households have cats or dogs (160M pets total), yearly spending is around $36B, and advertising budgets on pet products are in the billions of USD. It also became clear that the solid organic, and profitable, growth of Dogster could sustain a bit of a booster in the form of an outside financing – which leads to today’s news.

A couple of hours ago, CEO Ted Rheingold announced on the Dogster blog that the company had closed a $1M Series A financing from a roster of angel investors – mixing successful Internet entrepreneurs and experienced investors. As a matter of disclosure, but you already guessed, I am thrilled to be involved in this great syndicate (*). Joining the Dogster board as the representative of Series A investors is Michael Parekh, an active angel investor – and blogger, who in a previous life founded the Internet Research activity of Goldman Sachs. The official press release is here.

Dogster will be using these funds to accelerate the development of new features, hire a number of new employees including a kick-ass Marketing Director, launch a number of new properties in -ster, build new distribution partnerships like the VideoEgg or Userplane one, and more generally have additional means to engage and support our users.

Staying true to the values of the community as it grows 4 to 5–fold over the next 12 months is certainly going to be challenging for the team, but I have total confidence in their ability to bring the company to the next level. Congratulations for the success to date, best of luck for the future.

Now, esteemed reader, give us a hand: think of 5 of your favorites dogs and/or cats, and point their owners to the registration pages of Dogster and Catster.

And yes: Woof!

Oh, I was SO waiting for that headline: “the bubble is back, the new sock puppet got funded”. Greg (Linden), have you noticed the “profitable for 3 quarters”, “positive cashflows”, “making money” mentions ?

(*) Just to list a few of these angel investors: Joshua Schachter - del.icio.us./Yahoo, Adam Beguelin - Truveo/AOL, Michael Tanne – Wink, Jim Young – hotornot, Mike Arrington – TechCrunch, Mike Jones - Userplane/AOL, George Sarlo - Walden Funds, Frank Caufield - Darwin VC, Aydin Senkut - Felicis Ventures, Robert Simon - Alta Partners, Brad Feld – Mobius Ventures,… and more.

More:

• Yes, it is true that Dogster had several funding avenues, and the team elected to only raise a $1M round that ended up being oversubscribed (a lot).
• A great coverage is developing: Matt Marshall on VentureBeat, Liz Gaines on GigaOm, Dan Farber on ZDNet, Bambi Francisco, Tom Taulli on BloggingStocks.
• Rafat is already betting on a CNet take-out. Dude, please let me pay long term capital gains on an exit for once.
• Here is the TechMeme thread.

A few data points on Digg from Kevin Rose at the Future of Web Apps

Kevin Rose is presenting at Ryan Carson’s Future of Web Apps in San Francisco. He spent quite a bit of time covering the functionality of Digg, and briefly shared a few interesting data points:

• Starting in October 2004, Kevin funded the initial build of Digg by himself, paying co-founder Owen Byrne (who he found through eLance), $10/hour for his development work. Then, and still now, Kevin acted as the product architect of the service.
• After launching via Kevin’s blog, the growth of the service led to increased capital requirements to build a scalable back-end. One of Textamerica’s founders, and friend of Kevin, provided angel funding to the tune of $50K.
• The rapid growth continued and required some “serious” funding – matetializing as a $2.8M investment led by Greylock’s David Sze.
• Digg hit scalability issues upon the launch of version 2.0. Throwing in a bunch of servers did not have any effect, it was necessary to re-architecture Digg’s database layer to optimize it.
• Digg has 15 employees, of which 3 PHP developers and 4 guys in charge of operations and scalability. There is a cool picture of the whole crew on the Digg site.

More: As usual, Wikipedia has quite a complete coverage of Digg, and Richard McManus recently published an interesting interview of Kevin (part 1, part 2).

Congratulations to Netvibes on their $15M raise

I am late to it (been busy with the aftermath of my own news) but I have to congratulate my friends Tariq Krim, Pierre Chappaz and Freddy Mini for closing Netvibes’ Series B of 12M EUR (or $15M). Per TechCrunch:

NetVibes, a Paris/London based company, will announce a $15 million round of financing on Monday. Existing investor Index Ventures joined new investor Accel to lead the investment, which is one of the largest this year for a European company. The valuation was not disclosed.

I missed the angel financing round that involved Index Ventures, Pierre, Marc Andreessen and Martin Varsavsky but Tariq has since asked me to join his advisory board. The growth of Netvibes in users and traffic has been stunning, and I am delighted to be involved in helping build the company.

Actually, Freddy – the COO and future expat in the Valley to build the co’s business in the US –  is going to attend the forthcoming TechCrunch party this Friday. Feel free to look him up and say hi if you want to chat with a Netviber. Or send me an email and I will introduce you to Freddy. Just to make it easy, a picture of Freddy is on the right of this post.

Don’t look for me at TechCrunch VII. Unfortunately (well not that unfortunate), I will still be on hols for a few days when it takes place. Have fun, you all 700+ lucky bastards attendees.