Prior to starting G2 Crowd, Abel founded Big Machines, a sales configuration vendor that grew to $50 million in revenues before being sold to private-equity partners.
One woman who was emphatically in favor of the event and its reverberation across the world was Maz Kessler, whose Catapult company, an online crowd-funding platform founded in 2012 with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, allowed each member of the audience to become a donor.
Headquartered in Long Island City, NY, Songza was built by the team that founded crowd-priced MP3 download store AmieStreet.com in 2006 while at university.
"We then founded G2 Crowd based on our frustration in selling business software," he said.
A small shop near Tokyo Station that specializes in products from Fukushima Prefecture, the site of the stricken nuclear plant, suddenly founded itself crowded by people who came because it carries newspapers from that region, which are hard to find elsewhere in Tokyo.
Duolingo, the language learning and crowd-sourced translation service founded by reCAPTCHA founder and Carnegie Mellon professor Luis von Ahn, just announced that it has raised a $15 million Series B round led by NEA, with participation from Union Square Ventures.
The founding crowd hasn't dispersed.
"We definitely are geared to the attention-deficit crowd," said Evelyn Brady, founding director of the Golden Trailer Awards, presented on Thursday at the Orpheum Theater here.
Some 40,000 visited, and the spots that catered to them were chosen by the organisers on the basis of their popularity with what can loosely be termed the "art crowd".The Frieze fairs were founded by two art publishers, Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover.
