Social Scene: Cloud Meetup

What do you get when you combine a hot tech sector with vegan food, drinks and a multiple number of entrepreneurs, investors and journalists?

The answer is VCJ’s first ever meetup event, which was held in late September at the Storek Building, a co-working space in the SoMa area of San Francisco.

Featured speaker and co-host was Jonathan Siegel of RightVentures, which owns the Storek Building. Siegel, who’s been a cloud investor and an advisor to Heroku, among others, talked about the enormous potential that cloud technology brings to the startup world. Other speakers included Scott Raney, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, and James Lindenbaum, founder of Heroku.

The attendees included mostly executives and entrepreneurs from a range of cloud companies. Most we’re young startup founders, such as Cole Flournoy from LetsListen, a cloud-based music sharing service. Similarly, Zack Rosen from Get Pantheon, a provider of cloud optimization services for enterprise customers, seemed to be a big hit among the attendees—someone jokingly called him the next Mark Zuckerberg. Other young, under the radar companies we met were Bit Casa, Panzura and Skydera and more.

Among the cloud companies that already raised a round or two of funding, some of whom we’ve covered previously, included Scality, Iongrid, Zetta Systems, ScaleXtreme and others.

On the VC side, we had folks from Battery Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Partech International, Vahalla Partners, Trinity Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners and Guggenheim Partners. The next day, Siegel said he already followed up with a few attendees. “We’ll see the reverberations from this event very soon,” he said.

We’re looking forward to the next meetup.