Thanks to everyone who made it out to Babson College for the 2010 Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, & Entrepreneurship! We had a great crowd, representing all slices of the innovation community here in New England. And we heard some new, off-the-cuff perspectives from some familiar faces, as well as talks from emerging companies and organizations that are making a splash in healthcare information technology, medicine, startup investing, personal computing, smart energy, and much more.
A top 10 list isn’t enough to capture all the highlights. So here are a dozen takeaways the Xconomy team has from the day, in no particular order.
—Everything I need to know about dating I learned from oneforty founder and CEO Laura Fitton at our Angel Tsunami panel, where she talked about the tribulations of raising early stage funding. “Angel investors are like dudes,” she said. That was a nod to the flakiness of investors who committed to giving her cash but then disappeared completely before the checks ever made it into her hands. Here’s another parallel between investors and boyfriends, she said: “An investor who’s interested in you will act really interested in you,” she says. So if he’s not calling you and is hard to get a hold of, he probably wants no part of the deal.
—Those at our State of New England Biotech keynote chat didn’t seem disturbed by the rash moves made by life sciences stockholders. “What we’ve learned at Alkermes is that volatility is very valuable. So people who buy our stock low have the opportunity to sell it high—again, again, and again,” said company CEO Richard Pops.
—The energy industry is experiencing a bubble just like Internet companies did—and it’s called global warming, our keynote speaker Bob Metcalfe said. How does he know? “Al Gore and I inflated the Internet bubble together, and he’s back,” says Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet and a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners. He also said solving the energy crisis won’t reduce the amount of energy consumed: “We are going to be using more energy, clean and cheap energy in squanderable abundance, if the Internet is any guide.”
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—Xconomy CEO Bob Buderi sang a song to the tune of Adam’s Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song” on how the New England innovation ecosystem stacks up with the Bay Area. He also
