Tech parties often get a bad rap. At one recent event, the organizers paid for a 600-pound tiger in a cage and a monkey trained to pose for Instagram photos. Another party for a prominent Googler featured mounds of manmade snow in 70-degree weather. But not all corporate parties are the epitome of Silicon Valley excess.
In fact, historically the best Valley parties have left a huge mark on the industry.
The Importance Of Creating Connections
When people think of tech industry parties, the Startup and Tech Mixer may come to mind. Founded by Ari Kalfayan and Apple alum Andrew Vecchio, the Silicon Valley event has rapidly grown from a 75-person house party to a 2,500-person tech event. Mixing TED-style talks with mechanical bulls and in-door jousting, the Mixer was recently unflatteringly described by Valleywag as “the tech party so obnoxious it doesn’t seem real.”
While your chances of bumping into the mythical “brogrammer” stereotype may increase at an event like the Startup and Tech Mixer, Kalfayan and Vecchio are clear to point out that what they were doing with the event was to take a typically startup approach to the idea of tech parties. In other words, they took a problem (how to connect people in an often disconnected place like Silicon Valley) and tried their best to answer it.
“What we realized was how hard people work in Silicon Valley, and how often they are inwards-focused and don’t have the time or opportunity to connect with other people,” says Kalfayan.
Certainly it’s one of the big ironies of today that the people helping to create the social networks and other tools designed to help us connect can often be antisocial themselves. While there’s not necessarily any problem with being introverted, it can result in missing out on many of the serendipitous events that result in truly memorable innovations.
“When we’ve said [in the past] that the Startup and Tech Mixer wasn’t a party it’s because we didn’t envision it being about people getting drunk or hooking up or doing any of the other things associated with nightlife,” Kalfayan continues. “For me, a party is forcing everyone into one big room, handing them a drink, and saying, ‘Connect.’”
