Dot-Com Again? Behind the Scenes of L.A.'s "Twiistup" Networking Phenomenon

Geek meets tech socialite and parties like it's 1997

Comments (0) By Gendy Alimurung Wednesday, Oct 15 2008

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Macadaan also brought in video-game fanatic Steve Wiebe, who attempted to break his own Donkey Kong record at the party. To Macadaan, all these guys represent the entrepreneurial spirit.

And people came.

Orly Olivier

Twiisted: Macadaan, left, and Jordan

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The Web company Good Reads showed at Twiistup before it was named one of Time magazine’s Top Ten start-ups. So did GUI Media, which AOL acquired shortly after the party. Mint.com, a personal-finance site, went on to win first place at the influential TechCrunch40 party in San Francisco. TechCrunch emerged several years ago as a blog about start-ups and quickly turned into an empire. “It’s one of the most powerful blogs,” says Macadaan, with something close to awe. Its founder, Michael Arrington, is Web 2.0 royalty.

Normally, you’d spend a couple of thousand dollars on a pass to a convention and spend three days walking around, only to have the best part of it be when you’re talking in the hallway, meeting people. “Dial down on the exhibition. Dial up on the conversation and do it all in one night with food and cocktails? Love it! We’re trying to disrupt the conventions.”

Twiistup is becoming so well-known that it’s spawning its own curious phenomena. People are attaching themselves to the event and having smaller parties around it. They are merging parties around parties.

Silicon Valley parties are notoriously full of engineering nerd guys, and the people who throw the parties have been known to hire women from modeling agencies to attend. Or they contact singles agencies. Hey, ladies, we’re having an event with a bunch of rich technology guys. Wanna come?

“Not every engineer nerd likes that Hollywood-party feel,” Macadaan muses. “They think it’s too fluffy, or not underground enough. It is a concern.”

These parties are partly about recapturing some of 1997’s excess and sexiness. The Viceroy offered Macadaan a free pool cover, but it was, he says, an “ugly wood one.” Macadaan forked up $12,000 of his own money to cover it in transparent plexiglass. “My wife thought I was crazy. But when I found out they could do LED lights that changed color and glowed? Aw man, I said, I’m doing it!”

The next Twiistup will be in January, on the same day as Macadaan’s new concept, Mokkup, a kind of “get reacquainted with your creativity” series of workshops. He wants to put manager types in a room with creative types, storyboard artists from The Lord of the Rings, say, and give all of them paper and pencils and a problem to solve and see what happens. Afterward, the party proper. He doesn’t yet know what he’ll do to top the last one. Bring on the llamas.

Twiistup technology, media and entertainment parties, www.twiistup.com.