Sun Startup Essentials was officially launched in the United Kingdom on the 5th December 2007, but leading up to that point I had been immersing myself in the UK startup commmunity since August 2007, attempting to understand the size of the market, how large the opportunity was and the usual corporate requirements before you invest time money and momentum into a project.

My first meeting was with Manoj Ranaweera who was an MBA student with one of my sun colleagues and at the time was running a few startups across multiple sectors, it was from here that my life went down hill !!! He brought me into an amazing underground world, that bred passion, drive and no barriers things would happen and if they didn't then try again, get money from elsewhere persevere. So I started to understand that I had to work with small nimble companies who could make a decision and help influence others in their network around decisions as well, coming from within Sun's Corporate ISV team meant I worked with software vendors on 2-3 year long projects implementing into public sector, Financial services and telcoms....as you can tell decisions took a long time. Thus my mind was set this was the job for me I had to prove the market existed and then persuade my European director and Corporate director that the UK was a go country to launch and would be ready in less than 3 months !!!!

Reflecting back, some of the first people I met in those 3 months are people I would call my closest friends now they have helped me through work times, personal times and been there in the fun times as well, without naming names as its like the oscars Ill miss someone but they know who they are and it has always been a pleasure to work with them.

So how did SSE all start ? (Sun Startup Essentials)

An initial investment into going to London every week, doing my day job then attending events at night for 3 months and also setting up the infrastructure and channel for SSE to launch, led me to grey hair and a stone in weight gained, but it also led to delights as FOWA 2007 !! Myself and Matt Hoseanne with our channel partner Acardia setup a small stand, with some bean bags, sweets and plasma screens playing games on the Wii, the usual event material we then chatted to attendees for the next few days to gain an interest level around SSE, and pre signups as well, this event was to be the start of an amazing roller coaster ride.

It was here I met Nick Halstead who was hunkered onto another startups stand, in his usual style he had negotiated a deal to be there and was doing great stuff, I also met the Moshi Monsters team who hadnt even launched, Seedcamp winners which I had been part of already pre launch, alongside Oracle,Google and Yahoo as mentors, also there were the very young Huddle team, Ruumble, the cool Flexiant drinking team and of course it ended with Diggnation causing mayhem.

What did I learn in those few days ?

I would require a lot of energy, the ability to drink a lot and also be able to super multiduper task as well as things happened so quickly I would have no idea what was going to happen next. Startups across EMEA were abundant, they purchased low cost machines and had no idea about backups, data storage, replication, clustering or how to optimise things it was just buy, build, deploy and make it work the rest they would work out later, oh yeh they also liked a lot of sweets, beer and pizza.There was this thing called social media, lots of applications and tools to help enable rapid development and communications, Java wasn't hip, Ruby was, MySQL was cool and free whilst Oracle was the devil and best of all large suit wearing corporate types werent hip either unless purchasing beer :-)

Next Steps

Having arrived back at home exhausted, I felt alive and knew that I was about to embark on a chapter in my career that would prove to be the most exciting and fruitful but there is a but.... a large one. How the hell was I going to meet, greet, sell, upsell, downsell, network, drink and do all the things I had to not only for the UK but I had to launch in other countries as well to keep the momentum flowing, I had no idea !!!

Coming next, StartupCamp, OpenCoffee, Top Cats, Mini Bar, Startup Essentials Pizza bill and our lovely SSE supporters