I watch a lot of stuffy drama with my wife. The Bronte sisters, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, etc. A classic recurring scene involves tuxedo-clad upper-class elite mingle with champagne in hand — often the whole story seems to take place in interludes between these parties. They always look so glamorous and exciting: it’s a world in a constant state of partial inebriation. It seems so strange and foreign. But recently I realized: it’s not foreign at all. Exchange the tuxedos for ironic T-shirts, replace the champagne with vodka, and that’s a classic Silicon Valley afterparty.
They’re called “after-parties” because they’re always after something — typically a conference. There are so many of them, it’s just so hard to keep track. A thousand conferences with a million people from all over the world, listening to people drone on about some bullshit on stage, passing out business cards like unwanted free candy. All that is killing time for the real event: the party after the event.
The problem, however, is there are only so many venues to host a party — and only so many variations on how to give out free booze. The result is all the parties just sorta blur together. So when an afterparty comes along that truly stands out — it’s an achievement. And Evernote’s party certainly stood out.
Evernote is such a great company. They’re inspirational in many ways — a laser focus on delivering an amazing product, transparent communication around their most prized internal data, and a surprising patience to achieve their current 38M-user success. But now I can also add: throwing a fantastic conference and an even better afterparty.
I was there primarily because we’re an Evernote partner (and Evernote is one of our favorite customers), so my job was to evangelize the Evernote Trunk (watch me in action here) and model our sexy Expensify fleece jackets. I’ll admit, I came with low expectations — I’ve already been to that same conference center probably a dozen times before. I launched Expensify there at TechCrunch 50 in 2008, then demoed again at TC50 in 2009, and then Finovate a couple imes, and then a bunch of other random things. I figured I’d seen it all.
But Evernote had the place set up nice. I think this is because Evernote isn’t trying to turn a profit on the conference — they’re just trying to excite users, and they spared no expense. Great partners, comfy seating, and surprisingly good food. I mean, take a look at the Evernote logo, and then take a look at the sushi in the middle of the bento box below. Look familiar?
But the party — dude! Free street food trucks! A live rockabilly band! Vintage arcade games! (Which is funny, because when I first started playing those games, they had a different name — “new” arcade games…) I introduced Matt to the joys of Joust, Missile Command, Pole Position 2, Tron, etc. I mean, he hadn’t even *heard* of Centipede. The kids these days… After a few hours deeper and deeper into the bottomless liquor, then food at some random place in SOMA, and then more liquor, I called it a night as they continued on.
While taxi’ing home it occurred to me that this is what those BBC dramas illustrated, just modernized. Like Bronte’s London, Silicon Valley is built on a culture of partying. Why live anywhere else?
I gave a talk this week at DreamForce called “The Entrepreneurial Instinct” (they picked the title) largely about the importance of trusting yourself and doing your own thing, and expanding on the ideas in this TechCrunch guest post. One of the attendees wrote me with this question:
