I've been a long-time follower of Dan Rua, and I've even had the pleasure of meeting the guy. His business, Inflexion, is venture capital - they invest in biotech and technology startup companies. It's a great thing for the state of Florida to have funding like that available locally.
However, for smaller, "early stage" companies, venture funding is not really the way to go. There are phases to these things... and that's not Dan's business.
We had a great event last night. Some fun talks and some serendipitous moments. We even had one guy from Orlando, never heard of BarCamp, came up and started talking to us and then did his own talk.
Back in April, a bunch of local theatre folks got together to have dinner and meet up. Tonight was the second installment in what seems to be a 3-or-4-times-a-year event, held in local theatre spaces. The April 6th pot-luck was hosted by Mad Cow Theatre downtown, and today's was held in the lobby of the Orlando REP.
Since the beginning of Florida Creatives, the people have always clambered for a place to post and seek jobs. In the past, I have used the FLCreatives blog for this purpose, or some folks have used the Google Groups list: those days are over.
In about 10 hours a group of likeminded folks will get together for good coffee and conversations with friends and strangers. We do this once a month at the Lake Eola Panera Bread.
