Just getting back from another short but good trip to SF.  I always enjoy visiting the Bay Area and I always learn a ton.  A couple quick observations.

1. I met a company with 5 people that is building extremely popular software and competing quite nicely against heavily funded startups and even some public companies.  When you talk to these guys about how they started, they basically said “we saw an interesting trend and thought we’d give it a shot”.  Very matter of fact… not much market research or over-analyzing why they would win vs other players.  They just built stuff, tested it with customers, and quickly became experts.  It was a reminder that the competitive advantage of startups is speed and the ability to learn and iterate.  And in some markets, getting early scale first brings huge advantages later.

2. I met another entrepreneur who came out of an old Y-combinator class.  We talked about a bunch of fairly recent Y-Combinator companies that are making real progress today (companies like ReMail, HeyZap, and Air BnB). I’m bullish on models like this and TechStars and I’m pleased to see that the companies coming out of these programs are only getting better over time. BTW, the company I met in #1 was turned down by Y Combinator, which goes to show the quality of the teams.

3. I also was able to catch up with a friend of mine who leads product management for Meebo.  He brought me up to speed with the ways that Meebo is expanding beyond simply multi-service chat and into more of a real-time content sharing platform through it’s Meebo Bar product.  It’s cool stuff, and reminds me again that the ability to experiment often and evolve quickly is what makes great web startups special.  He also mentioned that he was one of the “old guys” at the company (we are roughly the same age).  Maybe there is just a correlation between youth and that type of company building.

Overall, I just liked the guys that I spent time with these past few days. Some are old friends, but others are people I’ve only just met or met once or twice before.  They were nice, smart, humble, and hungry.  That’s what makes this job fun.