July 2013 Open Coffee Postscript

There was a moment during the actual pitching proper last Saturday’s Open Coffee event that I looked at Matt and AR of JGL and said, “I love this…I love it!”

It was one of the many times when someone in the audience had the the RIGHT contact or the RIGHT information and then just generously offers it to the pitcher who needs it.

This encapsulates the whole point of Juan Great Leap: collaboration and learning. The JGL Open Coffee format pushes this to another level: there is no “sage on the stage” or a central source of information. It’s just entrepreneurs and entrepreneur-minded people helping one another out.

As usual, last Saturday was very, very different from every other Open Coffee event we’ve had. The pitches were very varied.

Mano Abello got the “first pitch” honors and started the ball rolling.

Animator/entrepreneur Dennis Sebastian shows off his awesome animation short and asks for collaboration on marketing original Filipino content:

In a very peculiar sequence of events, we then get three people pitch different travel-related ideas back-to-back-to-back.

Then, we get our very first 4-people pitch when the folks at Minda-Now! make their pitch and collect feedback for their awesome idea/advocacy.

Next we had dessert entrepreneur Christian elicit a lot of feedback from fellow-restauranteurs in the audience.

In another back-to-back, Florence and Barney close the pitching proper by pitching their social enterprises

Finally, we had Zar Castro of talk about the awesome 47 East site.

 

Here’s one interesting observation from last Saturday: It’s becoming a family affair!

Take a look at this pic.

That’s THREE father and son pairs in Open Coffee. I think this is very interesting and stems from two factors. One, I think there’s a felt need for entrepreneurial parents to expose their children to entrepreneurship and startups. A big number of entrepreneurs I know feel that our traditional learning institutions don’t exactly give the right “real world” exposure to entrepreneurship and startups. So parents feel that they need to strongly “supplement” their children’s learning.

The other factor is that there are more and more young people getting interested in startups. The three teenagers here weren’t dragged in kicking and screaming. They WANTED to go. (In fact, one of them pitched) In fact, maybe a fifth of the people who went to this one were students. That’s awesome.

I’m ALREADY excited for the next one.