Dave McClure organized an excellent gathering at the first Startup2Startup dinner tonight.  The evening started with a great presentation called “Speed: the ultimate startup weapon” by serial entrepreneur Mike Cassidy.  Then each table had an organized round table discussion on critical startup topics.  The guests at each table were prearranged to ensure a good mix of veteran entrepreneurs, first time entrepreneurs, angel investors and VCs.  This was followed by casual mingling.  The whole evening was fun, educational and very collaborative.  I saw some old friends and met some great new people too.

I was excited to log into Download.com today and see that LogMeIn and Xobni were both featured in “Download News and Updates” (back-to-back).

An Outlook add-on getting big buzz (Xobni Story)

I joined Xobni after 4.5 years of running marketing at LogMeIn.  I love to see both companies featured on Download.com together!

On similar note, this appeared in the Xobni forum today:

it would be great to be able to turn off animation of the app – so that when you click it just “pops” to the next screen instead of pushing (wiping) across – I access my email using logmein remotely and the animation makes it painfully slow to use.

It’s a very exciting night over at Xobni.  We just pulled the trigger on the Xobni public beta launch.  This coincided with a great article hitting NYTimes.com announcing the Xobni launch:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/technology/05xobni.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Of course the Microsoft Yahoo fallout is stealing some of our thunder, but it’s still amazing for a 14-person company to get our launch covered in the New York Times.  Huge kudos to Sutherland Gold for getting us the New York Times (Jeff Bonforte was right – they are awesome).

The biggest credit goes to Matt and Adam for founding a great company and the rest of the engineers for executing an awesome product.  We still have a lot of work to do, but we’ve had an amazing private beta with very passionate and helpful users.

On the marketing side, Xobni already kicked up a lot of interest before I arrived.  My goal has been to ensure that we harvest this interest and build on the great momentum.  Now that we’re publicly available for anyone to download, we should really be able to optimize conversions.

I expect great things from Xobni and I’m proud to be part of this incredible team.