Yesterday was our fourth annual XSITE conference, and our biggest to date, with 500+ registered. It was a glorious day out at Babson College. Thanks to our hosts and all of our sponsors for making it happen.
We tried to bring together a mix of big companies and small startups, first-time entrepreneurs and public company CEOs, investors and innovators, over a wide range of industries including software, Internet, healthtech, energy IT, and transportation.
Impossible to recap it in any comprehensive way, but here are 10 highlights that stood out to me (not counting plenty of private conversations and networking moments, of course; stay tuned for a separate post with pictures from the day):
10. “If you have a great product, that’s all you have to do.” That was Phil Libin from Evernote, talking about the confluence of app stores, cloud services, open source infrastructure, and social media that has led to a “geek meritocracy” in tech products. (Not everyone would agree with this statement, of course, which Libin acknowledged. But he said it is more true than ever.)
9. “Apple.” PayPal chief scientist Mok Oh, on which company—Apple, Google, Facebook, or Amazon—would be worth the most in 10 years. (Nabeel Hyatt of Spark Capital picked Amazon, while tabbing Google as least relevant, though still a big player. Veddy interesting.)
8. “Metrics are people, too.” That was entrepreneur-turned-VC Nabeel Hyatt quoting Eric Ries (I think) about the importance of balancing data-driven analysis with creative design aspects, in building consumer-tech products and companies. That might very well be the next evolution of the lean startup model, popularized by Ries.
7. “You have to convince really smart people to do a really stupid thing.” Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot, talking about recruiting top talent to a startup. Working at HubSpot, he said, is like doing
