A Review of the Tech Cocktail Startup Mixer

The Tech Cocktail crowd at about 7:28p; the event started at 6:30p.

Last night was the inaugural event of yet another out-of-town tech event coming to Seattle, Tech Cocktail’s Seattle Startup Mixer.  Tech Cocktail, originally the brain child of New York’s Frank Gruber, followed a similar formula to last week’s Seattle Beta — a Belltown bar and a handful of startups showing off their products or services on a laptop or iPad to any passerby that is interested, minus the poker chip-style voting.  In this instance, the bar was Belltown Pub, which is a tad bit smaller than Spitfire, where Seattle Beta was held.  The startups consisted of a few that have been around for a while (SkyGlue, CoCollage, and OfferUp), one that was at Seattle Beta last week (OrderSM), and four relative newcomers (Pikaba, BookieJar, Omnom, and Stagester).

The event featured the sponsorship of Ebay’s new e-commerce solution, x.commerce, and they showed up in full force with their huge orange X Bus (pictured below) taking up almost two lanes on First Avenue.  An interesting tidbit — the X Bus was previously owned by Denzel Washington, although the interior was much different than when he had it, with the exception of the mirror on the ceiling as you entered the bus.  Attendance was pretty good with maybe 100 people showing (I believe that Seattle Beta last week had over 200 attendees).  While attendance seemed a little light, the proximity of this event to Seattle Beta and the similarity in format may have been a contributing factor.  Who knows.  Regardless, it’s hard to coordinate events like this and get 100 people to show up, especially if you are from out of town.  So, the folks at Tech Cocktail should be commended.

x.commerce's tour bus, the X Bus.

On a side note, while I think that some of the events popping up around town and across the U.S. fill a gap in the startup ecosystem, I wish the new events would try to do something different or unique and would actually offer a greater service to startups.  We are getting to the point where many of the events are “me toos,” exact copies of each other, down to the drink tickets, the venues, and the format.  I love the idea of showcasing as many startups as possible, but it needs to be done in a systematic way that puts dozens of startups in one place, at one time, in front of an audience that can do something for them, like help them connect with partners or raise money, similar to what the Social Innovation Fast Pitch event did a couple of weeks ago.

Regardless, it’s always fun to see a handful of new products and share a beer and a chat with young, excited entrepreneurs.  The tour of the interior of the huge x.commerce X Bus was fun too.