I first ran into Marshall Kirkpatrick in the blogger’s room at the Web 2.0 Expo in 2007. At the time he was writing for ReadWriteWeb and one of technology’s top 10 bloggers; in the rarified air with Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Malik Om, Erick Schonfeld and Jeremiah Owyang.
Sitting in on start-up product pitches for a living must have been hard. Then under deadline, having to write about it, explain it and prognosticate — even harder. One would imagine that people like this would have at some point aspired to be involved in a start-up. But not so much. Mr. Kirkpatrick is an exception. His company is called Little Bird. If I got the Is-Does right (I sat through a webinar yesterday) Little Bird is a Social Monitoring 2.0 tool designed to help find category Posters rather than Pasters. The tool feels really smart at first pass.
Seeing hundreds of start-up presentations over the years has prepared Mr. Kirkpatrick for the “life.” The funding period(s), naming, first hires, code-fests, Beta testing and pitching. And more pitching. His tech blogging background does not insure a successful tech startup, though it certainly should give him a leg up. I applaud his derring do and look forward following Little Bird’s progress. (Nice name by the way.) Peace.
