“So what does Grid7 do?” I’ve heard and responded to that question at least a hundred times but never had I anticipated that question coming from Guy Kawasaki this weekend. We spent the past few days up in Palo Alto attending the Churchill Startup Panel and the Techcrunch August Capital Party. I’m a big Guy Kawasaki fan and caught him as he was packing up his things after the event and walked out with him.

After we snapped a quick photo in front of the lobby, he saw our nametags and asked “so what does Grid7 do?” It was a bit surreal pitching to the “guy” who literally wrote the book on startups. In the thirty seconds we had as we walked out to his car I was able to rattle off a quick spiel on the JumpBox and how we feel it’s going to revolutionize deployment of software as a service. I wish I could say it blew him away and that he wanted to meet with us to learn more and write us a check the next day, but the fact is when we got to his car his only words were “so how do we get out of this parking lot?” ;-) Anyways, it was cool to meet him. I knew he was charismatic but he was suprisingly humble and approachable in person. Having followed his blog every day since it launched and finishing the Art of the Start not long ago, it was one of those strange asymmetric relationships where I feel I know someone well who has zero knowledge of who we are.

We learned a ton this weekend. There were about 700 people at the Techcrunch party (here’s the public flickr tag) and in talking to everyone we gained important insights that are now challengeing some fundamental assumptions we had made about our business in a good way. A traditional conference would probably have had more business value but this event was definitely fun and was the social function at which to be seen. We met a handful of startups doing amazing things, hung out with cool people like Noah Kagan, Lorenz Sell and Paul Nixon, found some potential partners and mingled with people like Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington and Dave Winer. We did the entire weekend (San Jose, Cupertino, Palo Alto, Half Moon Bay, San Francisco back to San Jose) on a single 10gal tank of gas in our rental Ford Focus. We didn’t win any style awards and I couldn’t stop thinking that the turn signal sounded like a Snapple bottle cap, but the fuel efficiency was astonishing. Thanks to Mike Arrington and the Churchill Club for putting on two great events.