I disagree. If you're going to mixers for startups, which for us is how we're hoping to stir up customers, it's good to be able to give them something to hang onto. It's a lot less clumsy than having to reach for a pen and paper. Why do I say this? Because I tried pen and paper at the last one that I went to. Yesterday I ordered business cards.
That said, I don't think it's important that they're impressive early on. If we're going to impress people it's going to be with what we say, not with our cards. The card has one function: so that they still have our contact info when they get back to their office. I got the cheapest ones I could find (50 for €12) and spent all of about half an hour sorting that out.
The business cards that I ordered are all just text, black on white, in Times. On the left in bigger print is our name and slogan, on the right is my name, title, email address, phone number and our website. I'd love to have something well designed, but if you stay minimal, you can usually avoid being overtly ugly.
Clean design is important, but impressing people with our design skills is less core for us than most news.YC readers since we're providing tools to integrate to other sites (at the data-level) rather than user-accessible components. We just need to look professional, not so much exciting.
Plus I think that having a design that makes a notable impression is possible, but to get above the run-of-the-mill nice looking cards, you're going to pay. That's fine if you're Guy Kawasaki. For us, I'm just hoping that the people that would remember me anyway remember me plus have my email address.
I couldn't tell you what any of the cards that I collected at my last outing looked like. I copied them into my address book at home, synched to my phone, connected to the folks on LinkedIn / Xing, and threw them in the recycling bin. :-)
Maybe I figure we're in a slightly different forum here. I'm under the impression most folks here are the creators, not the salespeople. Some cheap business cards simply printed might be useful for the latter, and I guess in some circumstances for the former too - but what your describe seems a little like leaving a flyer under somebody's windshield wipers in the parking lot.
But if hacker or engineer or physician or writer or anyone else who actually does the hard work pulls out some fancy-dancy-designed cards and seems to be all about "mixing" rather than building, I start to wonder.
I'm development, marketing, sales, investor relations, quality assurance, public relations, human resources, customer service and janitor. I suspect most people are in the same boat. ;-)
That said, I don't think it's important that they're impressive early on. If we're going to impress people it's going to be with what we say, not with our cards. The card has one function: so that they still have our contact info when they get back to their office. I got the cheapest ones I could find (50 for €12) and spent all of about half an hour sorting that out.