Thanks for a great first OpenCoffee Club

Wow. Thanks to everyone who turned up today for London's first OpenCoffee Club - our friends at Starbucks were overwhelmed when more than 75 of you turned up. They told me they sold 6x more drinks this Thursday morning than usual, so we expect the red carpet treatment next week :)

If you missed it, no worries, its on at the same time and same place next week - 10-12 in Starbucks inside Esprit, which is at 178-182 Regent St - just sign up at Meetup or come along.

It was so cool to see such an diverse mix of entrepreneurs, developers, marketers, investors (VC and angel) and media all in the same informal space - not pitching, just sharing ideas.

There were some really promising entrepreneurs and businesses. Hopefully people made some good connections. I really hope that we can keep up the open atmosphere and help one another improve our businesses - feedback is so important, and in an informal setting can be even more powerful.

One of the coolest things for me was meeting Clementine and Rebecca, two 23 year-old entrepreneurs who had built their online business on less than a shoe-string and were just clearly really excited about what they were building.

There's some coverage of the event by Mike, Robin and the Guardian's Organgrinder.

Some of the comments from people who came along:

"it was an amazing crowd - entrepreneurs, VCs and journalists from London and surroundings. Result - awesome networking with very clued in people" (Hakon, entrepreneur)

"Excellent - v high signal/noise ratio, and everyone had a 'can-do' attitude which I love..." (Marc, entrepreneur and R&D supremo)

"Good chance too catch up with everyone and get acquainted with some new faces. I see a great future for these meetings, I mean where else do you get to demo your app to several great VCs over coffee. See you there next week!" (Damien, Ruby guru)

"There seems to be a real buzz around these type of events now. A lot of us now know each other and everyone's moving forward and getting real traction." (Peter, entrepreneur & developer)

"Great atmosphere and some great people. I got way more out of it than I thought I would - and that isn’t meant to sound like I went in with low expectations. I didn’t. I’m looking forward to the next one." (Nic, VC)

Mike and Michael also have some pictures.

I'm really interested to hear more feedback from people who came along and also how OpenCoffee went in Ireland today -- please let us know guys.

Looking forward to seeing folks next week - and seeing more OpenCoffee clubs popping up very soon.