Mountain View Mania Continues

So, last night we had this perfect storm of pitch events, tech meetups, and a wild party in the Microsoft Technology Center. One of our partners, 500 Startups, held their Mexico Demo Day at our BizSpark Lab. It was full on startup day yesterday.

Today, Mountain View Mania continues with a live feed of the 500 Startups Demo Day, featuring a few of our Microsoft BizSpark members, including Goran Duškić. 

Goran is an interesting cat. He's from Croatia. He founded a company called WhoAPI, which is a kind of Twilio for domains. He writes really good blog posts about what it means to be a founder. He's working on a book about how to start a startup and build it to a full business. He's done this before. He's a feature of the Zagreb startup scene. I met him once last year when I was touring Eastern Europe looking for hot startups. He's a good guy. 

The last time I talked to him was last week, in front of the Red Door Cafe in Mountain View. The guy has been through a lot. He got some funding from Dave McClure at 500 Startups and then invited his whole team from Croatia to follow him to Mountain View. He considered using my apartment as his headquarters, but then we both decided that having six people in my apartment for three months was going to be tough on the neighbors, and my carpet.

But what happened after they moved here was very interesting. Not soon after he arrived, Goran got really sick with mono. He has no idea how. Maybe he caught it on the plane. He has just moved his five developers and co-founders here. He's sick in bed. He's doing calculations on his back recovering. He's got plenty of clients waiting to use the service, but they need to build. He basically runs his startup from his sick bed, even getting everything ready for raising a round of financing. That's guts. 

A BizSpark member does good. He recovers, they are building, and Goran is ready to take his team home after Demo Day today and turn on the service for his backlog of clients. 

So, that's one reason you should watch the 500 Startups Demo Day live stream. Another reason? It's almost all BizSpark startups. In fact, when we last did the math when they announced this class, we worked out that 33% of this class were members of BizSpark. So, if you are following the BizSpark program, you might enjoy watching this live stream while you are at work today. 

The other reason is that the live stream will remind you that the spiritual nerve center of entrepreneurship is in Silicon Valley, but it travels globally. If you are also a local startup anywhere in the world striving to be a global business, you should look into our Microsoft Bizspark program, which provides free software licenses, Azure cloud hosting support, visibility and access to hacker and developer events worldwide. Get on it. 

And keep being your own relentless.