An amazing thing happened today - Sydney OpenCoffee - the tech meetup that spawned TechNation Australia, had it’s 400th member sign up. Amazing, because when it first started I wouldn’t have believed we’d hit 40, let alone 400, members.

I should say at this point that I’m a little hesitant to write about Sydney OpenCoffee because, as many of you know, I’m the founder.

That having been said, the meetup group lives and dies on the participation of community members. As “founder” all I ever did was organise the first meetup and then the rest of the community took it from there.

Had no-one showed up on the first day I would have dropped the idea. But about 10 people came and the group has grown from strength to strength. These days my role is limited to sending out reminder emails and to making sure I go to as many events as possible so I can meet as many of you as I can - but that’s it - so with nothing to gain financially from reporting on the meetup, I think it’s OK (let me know if you disagree)

So what’s so good about OpenCoffee?

1. I believe now that there are 400 members there’s no denying it’s the largest tech startup community in Australia.
2. It’s definitely the largest regular meetup of people in the community  - every 2nd week 25-30 people (often different people come on different weeks) meet in person, not online.
3. It was started when there were no real regular events for people trying to get involved in the tech startup industry in Sydney.
4. It gave people the chance to hear from leading tech industry people for free. For instance: - 
   1. Mike Canon-Brookes from Atlassian spoke about starting up,
   2. Mike Culver Amazon Web Services Evangelist spoke about AWS and took our members complaints and feedback with him back to Seattle
   3. 2 of Australia’s leading VC’s - Mike Zimmerman (TVP) and Mark Richards (Accede Capital) - spoke about investment from a VC’s perspective
   4. Mark Toohey spoke about the legal side of starting up a tech business
5. Word from industry veterans was that OpenCoffee managed to do in several months what other community groups had failed to do in years.
6. It didn’t ever rely on the usual suspects. 2 Thursday’s ago, approximately 30 people showed up at 8:30am in the Sydney CBD to have a chat about tech startups. There was a mix of tech / business/ investment people. It’s not a geek-fest (they definitely have their place though), it’s a place for anyone and everyone who’s interested in the tech startup industry 
7. It led to the Startup Australia Wiki and TechNation Australia - 2 critical resources for the startup community and I’m going to go out on a limb and say it also helped pre-build a community which Elias and the Silicon Beach crew have leveraged to create a vibrant online tech startup community.

The 2 most important things are, though: -

1. It helped struggling tech entrepreneurs meet with other people who were struggling with the same issues.
2. It introduced me to hundreds of amazing and interesting people in the local startup community

There were a couple of key people who drove the group in the beginning - Richard Hayes, Jeremy Crooks, Mark Toohey were critical in the start, and still are. Brian Menzies came on a bit later. Malcolm Lambert did a lot of good work too, including organising Big Coffee as part of the National Innovation Festival. There were more people who were regulars, but these 5 guys gave up their own time regularly to meetup outside of hours and plan what needed to be done to grow the local tech community through the OpenCoffee vehicle.

I should make it clear that I didn’t come up with the OpenCoffee concept. It was actually created by investor/entrepreneur Saul Klein and has been replicated all around the world (now in 83 cities). The purpose was to have a regular, informal event during business hours. No names tags, no formalities, just a regular spot for people to chat but it had to be during work hours to make people treat their startups like a job.

I can’t explain strongly enough to people around the country, in other cities outside of Sydney, how good the format is for growing a local community. It’s easy to set up. You don’t have to call it Open coffee. All you need to do is give it a name and a place, let people know it’s on and they will show.

There’s really no excuse for not running one in your neck of the woods. (tell me if you start one up and I’ll even promote it here on TechNation Australia)

For those of you in Sydney - the next meetup is this Thursday. You can check out the details HERE.

Congratulations to all 400 members of Sydney Open Coffee. You’ve made a massive difference to the local tech startup industry.