Sam Parr opens HustleCon 2014 to 400 entrepreneurs with 15 speakers lined up: ten 20-minute talks with Q&A, five lightning talks where slides auto-advance every 15 seconds. He thanks sponsors O'Reilly Media and Channel 4, which is filming a documentary, then introduces Jess Lee of Polyvore.
What's happening? How are y'all? Good. So it's pretty crazy being up here. I can't believe we pulled this off this fast, but I'm really thankful that you guys have all came here. Yeah, we have, we've sold about 400 tickets, so this place is gonna be pretty crowded throughout the day. But thank you all for coming. It feels like we're in a room full of friends, so I really appreciate the great energy. Uh, and by the way, my name is Sam Parr, so I'm the guy who's been emailing the hell out of you for the past 3 or 4 weeks. So, uh, it's great to finally meet you, and welcome to HustleCon. Woo! Yeah. So this is the second time we've hosted this event. The first one was last year. But a lot of people don't realize that we didn't launch this year's website until June 6th, which means we sold about 380-so tickets and sold out this big theater in about 7 weeks. So again, thank you for being part of this. Today's really, really gonna rock. I'm pretty exhausted today because I was up late last night. I was checking out the guest list of all the speakers and all the guests and all you guys, and I was pretty shocked at some of the people we have here today. I noticed we have founders of billion-dollar companies all the way down to interns at small-stage startups, and it kinda hit me that what's great about HustleCon is that we're bringing together a community of people who are shamelessly resourceful, shockingly ambitious, and scrappy as hell. And so if you took the precious time out of your day to come here, please make an effort and go out of your way to befriend as many people as possible, absorb as much energy and knowledge as you can, and try to smile as wide as your face will allow, because today's going to be a lot of fun. So again, thank you, thank you for coming. And here's how the day's going to play out. We've got 15 speakers today. 10 of them are going to be giving 20-minute talks that are full of actionable tactics on very specific topics, followed by a 5-minute Q&A session. As the 20-minute speakers are having their talks, make your way down over here to Eric. He's going to be near this exit sign. And so as the talks are going on, make your way down if you have a question, and Eric will hand you a mic at the end of the talk, and you could ask your question. But like I said, please try to come down before it's over. This way, right when Jess or whoever's speaking is done, you're ready, queued up, queued up to go, so it's gonna go really smooth. In between each of the 20-minute talks, we're gonna have 5 lightning talks, which is when the speakers have 20-minute slides that change automatically every 15 seconds. The topic is the speaker's choice, and the idea is for the speaker to enlighten us, but doing it very, very, very quickly. Also, download the Bizabo app, 'cause it has a schedule, and you'll also be able to get updates on what's going on, and you'll know about if anything changes last minute. And after the event, we're all gonna be heading down to Southern Pacific Brewery. It's about half a mile down the road, and we could have a really big ol' kick-ass party. So I hope everyone can make it. And also, before we begin, huge thanks to O'Reilly Media. They provided breakfast for us this morning. They also have a ton of books out there, and they're throwing a big conference called Strata. So if you're interested in that, which you totally should be, 'cause it's awesome, go out and talk to them. Oh, and finally, Channel 4, and it's a station in the UK, They're doing a documentary and they're looking for entrepreneurs to pitch their startup idea. They're gonna be hanging out in the lobby. It's gonna air in the fall to about 3 million people in Europe. So if you're interested in doing something like that, which you probably are, go and talk to them in the back. You'll know who they are. They're one of the few people here that are— have a really thick English accent. So, are we all ready to get started? So our first speaker is Jess Lee. She's the CEO and co-founder of Polyvore.
