New York has the same effect espoused in this article- to endlessly drive you to ever higher echelons of wealth. But the effect is less-pronounced due to other factors, at least from my experience.

While the very wealthy are always close by in New York, there is still great diversity of income. Sitting in my grungy office in Tribeca I am surrounded by the multi-million dollar lofts of hedge fund managers and the like. But I can’t walk to my office without passing the deathly-thin homeless lady with a cat who spends her days outside of the NY Dolls strip club.

For me this helps to give me perspective of how well off I really am. In Palo Alto you gain perspective by going out kite-boarding, in New York, you just walk down the street.

The New Hybrid Designer- Chris Messina, Emily Chang, Richard MacManus
The designer is taking over some traditionally developer focussed tasks in web companies. – things like ajax These hybrid designers have to be problem solvers. curiosity- want to learn, sending emails, proactive, updating the whole team, encouraging. They should be able to communicate with developers- speak the same language and terminology for coding. Using agile development is a good way to give up control and let people do things. Platform/environment/frameworks: css>symantec markup>microformats/rss.

When starting out planning the site and the navigation, don’t use sitemaps use taskflows to plan from a single function out. Don’t mockup in photoshop and lay it out in there. Make sure you utilize user testing as early as possible.

Building Web2.0- Zack Urlocker, James Hamilton, Alistair Croll, Hooman Beheshti, Mike Culver
The new model of web app hosting is 100% automation, reimage if something breaks. More small slices. You can always re-architecture once a site takes off. In regards to slashdotting- things that can help are more intelligence in infrastructure and experience/scale over time. Caching- edge resources/proxies. Application networking- know what traffic is.

Venture Capital 2.0- with Jeff Clavier, David Hornik, Josh Kopelman, Chris Moore, Michael Eisenberg and moderated by Michael Arrington
This was a very entertaining panel- you could just feel how Michael was holding back from ripping into these guys too much. Pretty much everyone on the panel paid lip service to doing smaller rounds (in the case of VCs <3M). They also wouldn’t respond to Arrington trying to provoke them to admit that the VC business model isn’t made for doing early/smaller investments. The did say that seed rounds of financing were primarily to validate assumptions, and hopefully see if a model was scalable and repeatable.

I had raised a question to the panel on what changes VCs are going to make to compete with some of these early stage funds. But they kinda hemmed and hawed and dodged it. Talking to Michael afterwards he did appreciate that question and was interested in seeing more of 30elm which was nice.

A few interesting comments- Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital in Philadelphia said that most companies he funds either in valley or he moves to the valley. Jeff Clavier also said he only invests within an hours drive from Palo Alto. He is looking for passion in the entrepreneurs he meets and finds the leadgen business to be hot right now.

Build to last or Built to Sell: Is There a Difference- Mena Trott, Joe Kraus, John Battelle, Jay Adelson
Make sure you have passion & a specific goal. Businesses have developed from making the individual more productive to making groups more productive. Make sure you put your biz model into beta same time as you put your product into beta. This enables you to show real traction earlier.

Launch Pad- inpowr, Webex, Spock
I thought today’s launchpad was pretty lame. Webex had no business being there- and the other two presentations lacked charisma.

Last night I started the week at a party held by Greg Galant, a Brooklynite and the host of one the podcasts in my subway rotation- Venture Voice.

To me the party had a bit of a Hollywood feeling. No, not in the level of glitz or glamor (the 4$ drinks actually mad a nice break from New York). But the feeling stemmed from the fact everyone is working on something- it may not be what they were working on last time you talked to them and it won’t necessarily be what they are working on next time you talk with them. The question is “what are you working on right now.”

This is pretty different from the way most of the world works- having a “job” (or “boj” as my mom calls it). It’s different as well from the New York tech scene. We don’t quite have the number of companies, and most entrepreneurs spend at least a few years on something before they move to something else. I can see this being both positive and negative from different points of view- and it taps intrinsically into the greater debate of are you building a company to flip or to be a viable entity of it’s own. I think 30elm could be around in ten years- and be a keystone company in it’s industry- it seems apparent that “Valley” tech doesn’t always promote this idea.