While we were all debauching in San Francisco, serious work was getting done down in the valley. My apologies to Rafe and Esther that I couldn't make it. But needless to say Ross was there to let us all know what happened.
Tonight's Rafe Needleman: Under the Radar social networking for business use event was a good one. I'm dead tired, so I'll post on the headline and panel participants today and get into the issues raised tomorrow.
LinkedIn announced they secured funding from Sequoia ($4.7m).
The structure of the event was great. Each of the presenters was differentiated, but chasing similar underlying dollars. LinkedIn's bottom-up model serving individuals. Spoke's top-down model providing business intelligence for sales. VisiblePath's infrastructure model of OEMing to traditional enterprise software categories. ZeroDegrees' model of both a bottom-up and top-down model.
Rafe and panelists (Esther Dyson, David Hornik (August Cap) and Pradeep Tagare (Intel Cap) shined, knew the topic and asked the right questions. LinkedIn won the panelist's choice, Spoke won the audience's choice (easy to do when you stack almost half of it with your employees, in case you were wondering why you couldn't get a ticket). As usual with social networking events there was a contrast of styles from the presenters, each representative to the respective service and business. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
I somehow suspected that something funny was going on. I assume that Spoke's lawfirm of Fenick & West - a true Silicon valley VC firm (Spoke has taken $10M in VC money so far and is about to announce another $15M.) Fenwick & West is where the event occurred.
And here I am with 
