Last Thursday’s event with Guy Kawasaki went very well. We figured we had about 530 people in attendance (in a room that only held 500) so it was literally standing room only. And that was a good thing since it’s going to facilitate something very cool (see below).

Guy presented on innovation. You can download his slides as a PDF document, and they include the customizations that he made just for Utah with his pretty funny jabs at MLM’s in the state.

Now to the very cool stuff: We charged everyone that attended $10. Mostly to make sure people actually showed up. Because of the generous help of Doba, the other sponsors, and Guy, we ended up with $4,000 that we collected that we didn’t need for any direct costs of the event. In the spirit of innovation and of entrepreneurship, I announced at the event that we’re going to donate that money to Kiva. Kiva facilitates microloans to small businesses in developing countries. I’ll be posting more about this, but I’m going to pick approximately 40 companies to give $100 each. Kiva currently has a repayment rate of 99.74%, so over a period of 6-12 months, the money should be repaid as these entrepreneurs are successful and then we can loan it out again. Hopefully, because of the attendees and sponsors of this great event, we can loan money to over 200 businesses in the next 5 years. Good stuff.

Finally, I want to again thank the sponsors who have helped out so much with this event: Connect Magazine and the Utah Technology Council. Thanks to the Salt Lake Community College as well for providing the facility. And last, but certainly far from least, thanks to Guy!

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