and David Sacks of Geni/Yammer , who were saying “maybe/no”. The issue, highlighted by Sacks’ announcement that he was moving Yammer to Silicon Valley, was the perception that Southern California firms don’t get the attention and lavish praises, particularly from the press/Silicon Valley blogs/etc., Jamie Montgomery–whose business relies on IPOs and M/A–and who already moved his operations mostly out of Santa Monica to San Francisco several years ago, and arguably Last week, one of those never-ending topics of discussion came up at Twiistup on a panel about whether or not Southern California was a good place to put your startup.

After this was my panel (co-hosted by Christian Gammill who had to leave mid-way to race off to Hawaii to get engaged and by Tony Adam), with Mike Jones (COO of MySpace), David Sacks (founder of Geni and Yammer) and Jamie Montgomery (CEO of tech investment bank Montgomery & Co).  The tone of the panel was set by David’s announcement that he was relocating to Silicon Valley (and dragging Geni & Yammer with him).  ExpenseBay Wins Showoff Twiistup 6 has come to an end. 

Twiistup 5 –the brainchild of Mike Macadaan–lets startups show off their products to the crowd in a very non-conference setting (this time, a private hangar at the Santa Monica airport). Cogi , a service which helps you capture meetings and phone calls in text transcripts, scored the judge’s award (I was one of the judges);  the other firms were Causecast , eHow , FixYa , GoGreenSolar , Meebo , RoboDynamics , TheScene , Totspot , Viewdle , and Yammer . ...Tags: In what was a remarkable turnout–given the horrible economy we’re in–there were more than a thousand people at last night’s Twiistup 5 event.