Smooth.

Last night at Mixergy's Drinks 2.0 DocStoc founder Jason Nazar offered the first 25 people who linked to DocStoc a free copy of my book. Note this suave attempt! (Also, note I'm not linking. I have enough copies!)
 

Vijay has an interesting business-- and one that is jaw droppingly ambitious. Essentially he wants to make healthcare an ala carte retail system that disintermediates insurance agencies. (I met a ton of startups last night so hopefully I'm doing that justice.)

In some ways, this was a lot like many of the startups I met in LA. They weren't "me too" ideas at all really. They were very creative and even audacious. But almost every one seemed to have a huge practical business obstacle. I don't actually mean that as a knock. Marc Andreessen is fond of saying every great company started out as an insane idea, and that if an idea made perfect sense he'd never fund it. (Again, I'm probably badly paraphrasing him...)

I'm guessing this is partially due to the flashier LA culture, but I think the lack of a institutionalized startup scene means less people are telling you how much you can't do something. There's a fine line between naiveté and insanity, sure, but I'm not going to be the one to try and draw it. Selfishly, I say, thanks for making a night of listening to pitches interesting! Life is too short to hear about the next great social network or Twitter clone...