StartupCafe

It’s hard to believe, but our little blog is celebrating its 2nd birthday next month (9th, to be precise – this was our first post).

Headline: We’re throwing a party for our 2nd birthday. It’s our way of saying thank you to the whole startup community!

We’re delighted to announce that CloudSoft, Kotikan, Fanduel, MBM Commercial and Skyscanner are the generous startups that are sponsoring the party.

There will be free food and a very healthy free bar tab.

Date: 27th May (next Friday)

Venue: Assembly, next to Negotiants (map)

Who’s invited: You! If you work in a startup, or want to be in one, come along!

Mark it in your diary – now

A little message …

Now that the party announcement is over, we want to just say something about our journey in the past two years …

When we started, our ambitions were humble and simple. We wanted to create a single place online where people can find out about startup events, news and each other. We wanted to create somewhere which made the Edinburgh startup scene seem a little smaller. Most of all, we wanted to create somewhere that has a bit of personality – to help celebrate every little achievement for those suffering those long hours and sleepless nights.

We receive a welcome by the community that was so overwhelmingly positive that it spurred us on to blog furiously.

Over the past two years, we’ve posted over 500 blog posts (this is 506th), we’ve received 871 comments, 70,000+ page views, and gained a new team member or two. We’ve been mentioned regularly in the Edinburgh Guardian blog, appeared on the Guardian Tech Podcast and even graced the couch of the Valley Girl! Not bad for a little local blog supported by free time and coffee.

Behind the numbers, we all admit, the high-points of writing the blog are those little mentions that you didn’t anticipate. Like the time when someone recognises you as a blogger in the street, or that other time when someone told us they found their job or ended up at some event that they heard about through our blog. We’re always delightedly surprised when we find out that we’ve managed to help someone out. We hope that we can be better and more effective at doing so.

Personally speaking, we’ve all grown and changed directions in the past two years. Bela moved from Edinburgh to work for a startup in London; Thomas has moved to London too, from CompSci to business development, Jess has gone from mobile gadgets to running an incubator, Hilary graduated and is now full time supporting startup businesses at the University, while I have been transitioning from academia to MD of my own startup. But the one thing that hasn’t changed, has been our commitment to the blog.

The Birthday Party

For our 2nd birthday party, we wanted to do something a little special. One of the things we noticed was that in London, whilst there is a healthy startup community where there are regular meetups between the bigger and smaller startups (and their founders), we’re sorely lacking the same intensity of that community feeling here. As a result, we wanted to take this opportunity to make a step towards getting some of those startups to talk to each other (outside of the techie commune of Techmeetup).

CloudSoft, Kotikan, Fanduel, MBM Commercial and Skyscanner have all generously sponsored the event, so we really hope as many of you can make it along. Not only should you expect the usual good company and banter, there will be free food and booze all night. We know its hard to work for a startup, so we want to take this opportunity to make sure that you have a great night out!

Thank you! 

Last thing to say in this post is that we’ve loved the support that everyone gives us and couldn’t ask for anything more. Seriously, thank you.