Last night was our big MeetUp in Austin, and it was a blast. The guys from DadLabs made the video above, which somehow manages to both mock and honor the event at the same time. (They also helped us livestream our Web Grassroots panel, which at one point drew an online audience of 2,600 people). As you can see in the video above, the place was packed with folks from startups and stranger places. People came all the way from Dallas and LA to mingle in the startup crowd. I hitched a ride from the roundtable to the party from the Ice Cream Man in his truck, despite the fact that security asked him to leave the conference center we had been at for passing out free ice cream . In the end, everything was cool, though. Austin startups are a hardy breed. Since there are only a few venture capital firms in town, including Austin Ventures , which helped us put on the events, many startups tend to go without VC money longer than they would in Silicon Valley. Those who don't starve tend to figure out their business models faster. That said, some investors are already thinking about creative ways to infuse more capital into Texas startups. One angel investor I spoke with, Joshua Shipley of the Central Texas Angel Network, told me that he is exploring starting an angel seed fund along the lines of Y Combinator and TechStars. Both the Roundtable and the MeetUp made me realize that TechCrunch, in its own way, is a grassroots phenomenon. We try to bring together people who are building startups or want to build them, and connect those startup communities across the country and around the world. These are our people.