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I’ve seen a lot of posts about the Collision Conf over the past week, not sure I will be able to add new insight. But given how many people have been asking, I wanted to share my experience as a first timer. ...This post ended up being much longer than I anticipated so for those who don’t want to read it all: it was tiring, we met a lot of great people, raised some money, had fun, going next year. For those that want the details, keep reading... -Almost 40k people is a LOT of people. The constant noise and chaos was tiring. A few of the after parties may have also contributed to the fatigue. -There were a lot of really good ideas…and some not so good ones. Likely surprising to no one, most had AI in their description regardless of whether it made any sense. For those wondering, we did not, and a few people stopped to talk to us simply because us not mentioning AI helped us standout. -Unfortunately, survival for many of these startups will likely depend less on the quality of their ideas and more on their ability to raise the necessary cash…which brings us to a big reason why we were there. Competing with the tens of thousands of other startups for the attention of a couple hundred investors was not easy and required a ton of up-front work. We and by “we” I mean my excellent partner Mike Rodenburgh, harassed people through the Collision app, LinkedIn and email well before the conference. The end result was a handful of meetings, one of which has already resulted in an investment. What we did not wait for is an investor to magically walk past our booth and declare that we’re the exact type of startup they’d been looking for. -I also want to say a big thank you to our friend Rob Whitla, who helped organize an invite only poker game for investors and us at the National Club giving us an invaluable opportunity to be the only startup at a table of investors for hours of poker and drinks. This is an example of the effort you need to go to get in front of the right people. -Speaking of people, perhaps one of the things that surprised me the most was how many amazing people I met. While everyone has their own challenges, many were quick to offer support, information, access to their network, etc. in an effort to help. There was also a real willingness to partner and find creative ways of working together. I know that we won’t be able to pursue all the ideas/partnerships that were discussed, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if one or two do translate into something more meaningful. Either way, we have definitely made some new friends. All this to say, we’re very glad we had a chance to go this year, I really appreciate all the new people we met, and we will see some of you next year in Vancouver. P.S. thank you to Chris Greenfield and OneEleven for the amazing party to close out the conference. Collision Conf, #restech #fintech #startup SquareKnot Analytics WebSummit LLC #surveys #marketresearch #mrx #surveypanels #budgetapp