So Many San Francisco Tech Events

Things have been busy lately- very busy. Since moving from Boston in August, I've been immersing myself in the SF tech community. Although Boston has some great events (like Mobile Monday), it seems like SF has about 10 times the number of events. Over the last few weeks I've been to SF New Tech, Web 2.0 Expo, and Startup Weekend. In addition, there are are another half dozen events that made it on to my schedule. Whether you're job hunting or just looking to get involved in the tech community, here are my best of San Francisco tech events.

SF New Tech
This is consistently one of the best tech events in the Bay Area. From the venue, to the format, to the attendees, everything about this event is great. It is usually held once a month at Mighty in Potrero Hill. Presentations are 5 minutes with an additional 5 minutes of questions, and plenty of time for networking before and after. Even if you're not in the area you can watch the live stream through the website. The last SF New Tech featured Twittfilter, AdCause, and Pixelpipe among others.

Startup Weekend
This international event brings together developers, business people, and "cooks" who want to pitch their ideas, build a team, and work on a project over the course of a weekend. At the recent Startup Weekend SF over 150 people show up and worked on 23 different projects (including my own cheap parking mobile app). About 80% of the teams had a product to demo by the end of the weekend and many of them are currently moving forward with their projects. For a great recap of the weekend check out this blog post.

Plug and Play Tech Center
PnP is a tech incubator that has three locations around the Bay Area. The events they hold at the Sunnyvale location are a great place to meet people working on early stage startups. The guys who run PnP have their pulse on the VC community and help tech entrepreneurs understand how to found and grow their companies. Check out their monthly event calendar here.

If you're interested in keeping up to date on t the latest events check out this great newsletter. Also, feel free to let me know what interesting events I've left off.

Ready For Any Weather

It seems that this week everyone is talking about how an economic downturn will effect Silicon Valley. Case in point, today's NY Times article titled, "Credit Crisis Spreads a Pall Over Silicon Valley." I'll leave the financial health of Apple or Google up to the experts and say that Rearden Commerce is still growing like crazy. With a $100 million in fundraising this year, Rearden was recently cited by TechCrunch as one of the firms ready to weather a downturn.

Even more important than Rearden's $100 million is a business model with multiple revenue streams and a product that gives companies a platform to capture and reduce their business expenses. In tough economic times the impetus to manage employee spending only gets stronger. The dramatic growth of Rearden's customer and supplier base is a perfect testament to this. Additionally, Rearden's upcoming entry into the consumer market through a partnership with Chase (pdf) will further solidify the company's position as one of the tech companies ready to weather and even thrive in this tough economic climate.

Update 1/30/09: Despite Rearden's war chest and strong customer growth the comapny hasn't been imune to significant layoffs. In November the company had to layoff over 10% of their employees, including the majority of the marketing department, in an effort to reduce costs. Oddly, the compay is now reporting that they are hiring aggressivly including increasing R&D spending by 20%.