Turbo140 Splashes Onto the Scene at OAF LA

From the demo-style format to the group of ACTIVE angel investors - it's immediately apparent that the Open Angel Forum Open Angel Forum was conceived in the mind of an entrepreneur rather than a bored retiree who is tired of fishing everyday... In summary, what an event for Turbo140 to make its first big splash in the world, less than two weeks following our beta launch! For a poetic take on the night, I highly recommend Scott Walker's blog.

Los Angeles OAF #2 began with a top-shelf spread, including kobe burgers and great wine. After an intro from @Jason who was sporting his new bayonet freshly delivered from Afghanistan, each angel (around 15) introduced themselves (including some of their recent angel investments). Based on what I've heard, read, and experienced - I would wager that not many angel groups would be able to discuss their RECENT investments at the level of the angels this past Tuesday at Mahalo headquarters. Especially given the space of Turbo140 -- internet, SAAS, social -- this was a perfect crowd for me to demo our site Turbo140 for micro-gigs and outsourcing your to-do list. As Jason has long believed, don't tell me; show me! PowerPoints are useless in this OAF format, and as I've come to appreciate -- demoing your service is an efficient way to explain to your audience what your company is all about in ways that slides cannot.

The five-minute demo went great -- not only is our site tight with killer design, but we avoided the dreaded "fail whale" as the gig posted to Twitter. The demo was then followed by a five-minute Q&A. Besides the networking and any potential investments that may come from OAF, the Q&A was an invaluable part of the night. Where else can you have some very smart investors and world-class entrepreneurs thinking critically about your product and business model? Many of the questions we had thought of, but others we had not. Both the validation of some strategies and insights into others will prove extremely valuable as we augment and scale our site.

Without question, OAF was everything that I had hoped for! But one very cool unexpected outcome of the night was the bonding with the five other startups who also presented - FaceChipz, Belgrave Trust, Kidzmet, MeeGenius, and OneLogIn. By the end of the night, we had bonded to the extent that it felt like we had gone through a full TechStars program. I have no doubt that we'll stay in close contact and help each other out as we proceed to conquer the world!

A final thanks to everyone at Open Angel Forum and Mahalo. In addition to Jason and Tyler, there are a lot of people putting in long hours to make these events extremely valuable for everyone involved!