I think it's proportional to the perceived fame/importance of your brand. My startup launched something locally this summer, associated with a particularly cool

I think it's proportional to the perceived fame/importance of your brand. My startup launched something locally this summer, associated with a particularly cool event. I get anything from the 'wow you run your own company' to 'wow you made that? I used it' and 'eh'. I don't think it's necessarily a matter of competence/achievement but simply being able to relate. If they've heard of our product then they don't need to spend fifteen minutes having technical buzzwords thrown at them, nor do I need to spend hours unravelling the misconceptions they form. It's just 'oh yeah, you did that? great' and onwards we go away from the fantastically boring topic of 'where do you work'. In circles where people don't find that topic boring (i.e. startup guys) the 'being impressed by working on $foo' doesn't hold anyway.