Just got back from crashing the Xobni party.

Xobni is a Y Combinator company which has managed to reach the point of external funding. I have no clue what Xobni does other than make a Facebook app that tells people to e-mail you instead of send a message—I installed it in my profile just before heading out so I could not be totally full of shit.

Basically what Y Combinator does is give people a tiny amount of seed money to create a company, because WTF, it’s super cheap to create a Web 2.0 company. That’s a pretty good low risk, high beta idea, I suppose, but you’d have to be pretty young to be a Y Combinator company since anyone old can just jet over to the ATM and withdraw that amount.

(As you can imagine, I was one of the oldest people there. My bank statement I picked up as I staggered up to my apartment says I could start two Y Combinators from my checking account alone and I’m pretty much the poorest, most financially irresponsible techie in the Bay Area.)

[My party observations after the jump.]

A number of the people I met I had snuck into the Facebook event; a few were at the Powerset Lunch 2.0; many I met at other parties. I didn’t recognize any of them at the time because I found where all the beer was and decided to get my non-money’s worth for crashing a party. That’s okay because none of them recognized me until someone told them I cofounded Lunch 2.0—one thing you can say about the San Francisco tech world is that everyone appreciates a good scam.

Yes, I was drinking heavily. And no, I wasn’t one of the two idiots wrestling each other—I’m not a wrestler or a drunk dialer, or a crier when I’m drunk; I’m pretty much the same asshole that I am sober, except my eyes don’t focus well—which partially explains my lack of ability to recognize people. To show you how bad it is, I introduced myself to Noah Kagan and he said, “You already introduced yourself to me last time we met.” It took about five minutes for me to remember that it was at another event where I imbibed too much alcohol in an effort to forget my latest (at the time) blog post.

(Heck, maybe I’ll get drunk tomorrow to forget this blog post. What a vicious circle!)

A lot of the Y Combinator people I met there were heading back to Boston on Monday so they’re not going into that veritable moveable feast that is Lunch 2.0 next week, even though Spock in the Valley and CNET in San Francisco are hosting.

If you are in the area, you should go. And if you’re not, you should start a Lunch 2.0 in your area. Sure it won’t get you invited to any of the cool parties, but it at least allows people to politely drop hints on whatever the geek party this week is worth crashing uninvited…

Back to all the Boston peeps. I eventually found out what that Cambridge connection was…

Shout out

This is a long digression to the point of this post which is I want to give a really big shout out to whoever told me that Paul Graham was involved in Y Combinator and that he was somewhere at the party. Because I might have said:

• What a flaming pile of bullshit Hackers and Painters is
• How libertarians need to pass an introduction to economics course before they open their mouth… or brag about using statistical pattern recognition to solve the spam problem.
• What I really think of functional languages like Lisp. Hint: Not good

As it was, the only Paul Graham faux pas I did was basically say Ruby on Rails is my bitch, which—let’s face it—it is. Though I suppose it’s in a big need of a future smackdown tomorrow when I sober up, just so that we can have another Geeksessions on “Does Ruby scale?” (Answer: Sure. But do you really want to be the crash test dummy for the rest of the idiot functional programming world?)

Or are we going to claim that Yahoo! Stores are still running Lisp?

Where was I?

Oh yeah. So crack open an ice cold Bud Light Mr. Anonymous Founder Person Without A Business Card for keeping me from a repeat performance of my “Dave Filo Story.”

On second thought…

Maybe I should have asked the guy to point Paul out to me, lest I fuck shit up at a future event and have “my Paul Graham story.”

You might think I could just look him up and figure which one he was. But, to me, all you white people in blue oxford button downs look alike.

And that goes double when I’ve been drinking.

[tags]Xobni, Y Combinator, Facebook platform, venture capital, party, drunk, embarassed, Lunch 2.0, scam, alcohol, San Francisco, Boston, Real Men of Genius, libertarian, spam, Bayesian, statistical pattern recognition, public good, blue oxford button down, functional programming, Ruby on Rails, Lisp, Noah Kagan, Paul Graham, Dave Filo[/tags]