This week’s Startup Engine dinner was at the Giant Robot in Farringdon. A quirky mixed menu and many mustached staff!

We had 10 diners this week, including a few regulars. Venus was back, 3rd week in a row, with more ideas for her business; she’s ready to map out the site! It was also good to see Doug Haines of London School of Attraction back again. His company offers coaching courses to men and women looking to improve their love lives. They also provide a wealth of online resources on the very same topic. Great news that we’ve managed to pin him down and he’ll be hosting a guys’ dinner and a girls’ dinner soon, where he’ll be sharing pearls of wisdom about the dating game to diners. Dates in February to follow.

In terms of unusual startups / businesses, I thought Kevin Quincey would be in the lead for some time with City Beach London, the UK’s largest indoor beach complex he’s building in Harrow. However then along came Richard Peacock to equal him. Richard was responsible for Cirque Olympique, a spectacular circus by the TEA Buildings in Shoreditch during those glorious Olympic weeks. A hypnotist and performer himself, Richard organizes all kinds of shows and events. I’ll be front row at his next creation when it takes over London town.

After chatting on TableCrowd it was good to finally meet spreadsheet enthusiast Ben Blomerley, whose startup is AskHerFriends, a site to help guys find that perfect gift for the women in their lives.

I recently introduced Ben to Emma Watkinson of SilkFred, the online destination for emerging fashion designers which has 1,000s of potentially perfect gifts. Emma hosted a TableCrowd dinner last year on the topic of emerging fashion.

Everyone else was at the ideas stage, so I’m watching this space to see how their projects develop!

If you want to meet other startups over dinner, click here to view what’s coming up. Next week we have a special guest speaker, Sylvia Cohen, who is giving a 45 minute taster session on public speaking before we eat.

So if you break out into a cold sweat at the thought of speaking in front of others or if you need to finely tune your skills for an upcoming pitch or demo, why not grab one of the last few seats.

Cheerio

– Kate Jackson
– @katejacksonk