The Gong Show

Calacanis and Arrington’s respective announcements about the TechCrunch 20 conference are interesting. It’s a smart move by jumping in front of the growing anti-DEMO-payola parade. I love to see anything that features cool technology, and I’m sure Calacanis and Arrington will assemble a stellar judging panel.

I do have one concern. Check out this except from the description on the post by Calacanis:

2. We will have around 250 people at the event.

250 people, that’s 12 people per company presenting… seems so limited/exclusive to me. They could easily hold the event at Stanford’s MemAud (holds 1700 people) on the cheap. Bummer.

I bet there are 250 VCs in the valley willing to pay scalpers’ prices for admission to see the 20 hottest companies in the opinion of Calacanis/Arrington. Maybe this is an intentional choice on behalf of the organizers in order to make the conference more “elite.” I hope not. It could also be that their desire to throw the event in SF is a significant limiting factor to capacity.

Anyway, this is just an implementation detail that I’m sure these guys will work out as their idea snowballs. Aside from the attendance issue, I really like the spirit of this idea.