So its January 2008, Im back from my first holiday in years feeling stressed I have 3 months to prepare an event for 300+ attendees and I need to start selling Sun hardware and storage but also look at the next set of launch countries for Q2, which in itself means I have to negotiate with 3 business unit heads in each country to get them to buy into the programme and dedicated resources, budget and time to the programme, hmmm pizza and beer required. Looking back at my diary for Q1 of 2008 I was spending on average 17 days out of 20 away from home on the road, meetings, promotion and living in hotels, handing over my old role and creating my new one. Stressful but at the time such a buzz and high, new words, new technology and so many new people and lots of ideas but so little time.

So this was the time in startup land where Mashable was the underdog, Techcrunch was the daddy I remember speaking to Pete at the time and negotiating with his team around a startup focused review which we then did later in the year as Startup Essentials sponsored review, which ran for 18 months or more and enabled global startups to gain coverage on Mashable, called Startup Review we were the first to help enable startups gain coverage.

Techcrunch led the pack in terms of clout and opening doors, things havent changed really in terms of what a startup is always looking for, Investor and an article in Techcrunch the two still beg the same question or word, WHY ? For the first quarter of 2008 I was attending events and being asked if I could enable introductions to investors from Sun, it took at least six months for the community to understand and accept that Sun wasn't going to be an investor in companies this time round, not like in 1999 but instead it was looking to help enable them with technology, engineering, marketing and business developments, the fundamentals of a startup to enable it to accelerate was reducing its IT spend, and helping it to bring in a strong pipeline of business.

Click on the link to see what was available in the programme and how it worked, the core element I worked on was that if a startup required an introduction, help, PR/Marketing etc whether they would be purchasing off me or not I helped as much as I could, believing that this would help spread the word and enable some great introductions which in the end was the best model to go down with the fastest introduction to a sale of over £20k was done in 2 hours !!!!!

Sun Startup Essentials SSE Datasheet

So I hit the road running, having negotiated my first large deal with Last.fm who I had been working with for a while to help move them away from Dell standard pizza boxes to a whole new infrastructure that had scaleable growth in terms of computing power and storage, SSE as a programme had been running for 12 months already in the US and China within 12 months I had delivered the largest growing startup account through last.fm which was fantastic for me in terms of the PR we gained from doing joint customer story, but not great for me in terms of goals, as it was based on customers not revenue boo hoo !!!. One of my funniest incidents is going in to meet the founders and teams on many occassions but after a while it was suggested that I didn't wear a suit and tie due to its unnerving nature and for those that know hence the man in the shirt was born, flowery attire.

Looking back at the number of events attended, talked at, waffled and drank beer its a wonder that Im alive and not in rehab, geek girls, mini bar, fuel, startupcamp, webmission, nextweb, picnic, open coffee, facebook garage, Internet world and then channel partner meetings, CNE meetings about more countries launching, sponsor partners to help drive more benefits for the startup community and also a new girlfriend who wasn't sure if I was real or not and a son who I had 50% of the week and thus worked my schedule to be with him....chaos. But in 2008 what this all meant was opportunity the amount of startups and growth was accelerating not just in the UK but across Europe with Sun also changing its stance as well it would go on to create a Web 2.0 sales team globally to help capture this market faster.