I showed up on time and there was a long line. Amy Cao and Jeremy Frank had not RSVPd. Soraya Darabi RSVPing does not count, she does the Scott Heiferman thing, I have noted a few times. Scott will RSVP for events to be there in spirit. Besides, I was aware of the ongoing 99 Percent Conference. And I am thinking, there is this ridiculously long line, and Nick Rovisa is the only name and face I seem to remember from the RSVP list. If he does not show up, I will not even know who to look for. 10 minutes later I just went in.
Image via WikipediaSo I showed up for this event called The Future Of Women. It was in Tribeca, which is right there by Chinatown. That helps. After the event was over, I walked over to Chinatown, and had some dumplings. But before that I took some cash out from the bank right by my favorite Buddhist temple in the city, the one by Manhattan Bridge.
I am glad I showed up.
Bumped into Scott Heiferman in the lobby. I had not seen him in a long time. I had seen he had RSVPd. But then I have seen him RSVP for an event and not show up several times before, so I was not counting on him showing up. But he showed up.
A lot of people do that. They see an event. They like it. They want to go. And when it is show up time, something else shows up, or they think of something else to do, or they just get plain lazy. It is not like they penalize you for not showing up.
It was a good event. There was some fun, lively talk. There were very few men in the room.
New York Observer: Screw Meetup: Organizers Up In Arms Over Redesign: In the new redesign, ordinary users can arrange for events, leading some to declare that organizers have been downgraded to moderators..... less than 1 percent of organizers active on Meetup have complained or commented on the redesign .... a simple solution. “If they don’t like users organizing events, they can just turn it off. It's a feature organizers have full control over.” .... "As we see how people are using the new tools we will keep iterating to simplify and improve the experience."
People love the Facebook newsfeed today. It is central to the Facebook experience. But when Facebook first introduced it, there was major ruckus. It is inertia. People dislike change. They are used to doing things one way. They would like to keep doing things the same way.
During the wee hours of Friday morning when the rest of the world was asleep I sent out an email to Fred Wilson. I felt ready. I was proud to have a deck that had only three slides. Not only that, the email had no attachment. Instead it was a Google Docweb address, one simple line. T-h-i-s will impress AVC, I thought.
Instead I got put into place. We don't invest in companies pre-incorporation, but I'd be glad to have a Skype conversation with you, he said.
Scott blew it last night at the NY Tech MeetUp. There were some great demos for sure including one with a HTML 5 inkling: Thumbplay. And it was great to see Tikva Morawati's KnowMore.com up there. I told her last night I will be at Ignite NYC tonight, but I can't be: something came up that will have me tied to 10 PM. Nate showed up in formal attire last night: that was a letdown for me personally. His trademark jeans and shirt with the cut on the sides, the curve cuts look better, I think. But I am all for trying out new looks. Iterate.
So Scott Heiferman smashed Dawn Barber's iPad with a sledgehammer. I ran into Dawn later.
"Are you guys still friends?" I asked her.
Scott was offering the 2010 version of that famous 1984 ad, of course.
Scott presented MeetUp Everywhere.
And then he introduced ThePoint.com guy. Ends up that site did not take off. So they launched a side project that did take off: GroupOn.
"I started out wanting to change the world," he lamented." And I have been reduced to dealing with coupons."
Most startups fail, but the trick is to rise from the ashes.
At one point Scott called AVC.com "a stupid blog." Then he whispered, "I should not say that. He is one of my investors."
So I got to meet Fred Wilson in person for the first time. I showed up for the AVC MeetUp at 29 Union Square West around 3 PM. It took me a while to find the location. A Broadway or Park Avenue address would have been easier for me to find, and the MeetUp site had listed the address as 29 Union Square East. It was West.
I did 1,000 crunches before I showed up, and here was Fred Wilson trying to impress me and a few Indians with yoga talk. There is a Bruce Lee school of thought. Your tummy muscles are the most important. If you want to feel the strength, do your crunches.
I did my 1,000 crunches, had my lunch. I was sweating like Mark Zuckerberg by the time I headed towards the train station. Zuck has proven beyond doubt genius is 99% perspiration. (The Hoodie)
I thought I was running a little late. The place was downstairs, in the basement. It was dark. When Fred showed up half an hour later, he was like, "Ugh, this place is so dark, I needed to be here at 2 AM instead."
It took you about five minutes to get your eyes adjusted to the light. I caught both Fred Wilson and Scott Heiferman during their first minutes. I had the advantage of well adjusted to the dark eyes.
"The Scotts in the Bay Area are behind her," I said: Jack Dorsey, Randi Zuckerberg. "We need to get behind her here too."
Scott is one of the earliest people I got to know after I moved to New York City. Every time we meet, we meet like old friends, but I have never been able to get him to reply to my emails, most of which have been FYI emails anyways. I have long made peace with that as a productivity issue for him. The circle he maintains email communication with must be tied to his work. And I am glad. Look at the distance MeetUp.com has covered in five years. Scott in many ways is the original tech entrepreneur in town. The NY Tech MeetUp he launched has been a major platform. If no longer saying hello to me will mean MeetUp.com goes to ever newer heights, I will happily swallow that pill too. Scott is one of those people who can make it sound like "change the world" is not a cliche phrase.
This was a few years back. A friend told me Scott was number five on the list of the top people in tech in New York City, as put together by the Silicon Alley Insider. I was like, no way. But I know the guy!
Today I told Scott I had applied for a MeetUp.com job, but Greg told me it was an entry level position.
"It does not have to be," Scott said. "Good luck."
That is Scottspeak for MeetUp.com has a department that handles the hiring decisions, I hope they like your application. I liked the spirit in which it was said.
"Honored to be meeting you for the first time," I said to Fred. "I watched your debate online. You won easy. But you did have a hometown advantage."
He was as gracious as possible before, during and after the debate. He has been the exact opposite of Mike Tyson after a victorious championship fight. He maintained that mode in his response.
"It was not much of a debate," he said. Talking to a group of Republicans about tax cuts is not hard, he has insisted.
He got hold of his name card as if anyone there needed to know what his name was or what he looked like, then he went to the bar to grab a soda, walked back to me and said, "Who put this together? Who organized this?"
He sounded puzzled as much as curious. I could have burst out laughing right there. I did not know. I took a guess and pointed at two important looking guys. Maybe them? Then I spotted Shana. I motioned her and asked her. She took him to the guy who had organized the MeetUp.
People got together in small groups. People moved around. Fred moved from group to group. I mostly wanted to listen to what he had to say. He was relaxed, and he was making insightful comments about some of his portfolio companies, and some of their founders.
The Gotham Gal did not show up because she was busy cooking for a party they are throwing Tuesday evening, Fred said. I have not visited her blog nearly as often as I have visited Fred's whose blog I visit almost daily, but when I have visited her blog I have learned a lot, perhaps more than from Fred's blog because she touches upon topics I know very little about, stuff like the local non profit scene, for example.
At one point I found myself with these three other Indians, two business partners, the leader of the team was married to this young woman who had made it to the interview phase of the two job openings at Fred's VC firm.
I got to meet the Columbus, Ohio, woman who is now in the Analyst position. Fred said one of the new hires is going to be bi-coastal, maintaining apartments in both the Bay Area and in New York.
So Fred walks over. He says he just wanted some water. I pass on the message. I get a glass of water in my hand, I pass it on to him. He sits down. A small crowd forms around him, about 10 people.
There is this discussion about the entrepreneurship scene in India. There is some frank talk. Some of the Indians volunteer to say things can get rough. The bureaucracy can be a nightmare sometimes. Society is more hierarchical. The culture is more sexist. The venture capital industry is not there yet. It can prove hard to pay your electric bill. They don't want your money. And if you don't pay, they cut off your electricity. But there are rewards to being able to navigate the culture. Labor is cheap and top quality. I said a high school friend of mine tried it in the US, that did not work, now he works his dot com based out of Kathmandu, and it has been working wonders, making him a lot of money. The guy gets on national television there, I said. That would be Kathmandu.
He talked at length about Twitter and David Karp of Tumblr. Twitter is set to do $100 million in revenue, but could they do a billion, he asked. He said Karp had that personality type that is the entrepreneur personality type. Every conversation he has with you he is trying to sell you something, either he wants you to invest in him, or he wants you to partner with him, or he wants to sell some idea.
He also pointed out New York is not there yet when it comes to the tech startup culture that the Bay Area has. Culture is really the word.
Fred said he was making an effort to get more software engineer graduates from the top schools to end up in New York City. That is another thing I really like about Fred. He loves this city. Look at the names of his current and former venture capital firms.
Then he walked over to the next group of people before he walked away. With that final group, there was a spirited discussion about "gold." I was feeling a little lost. Da what? Ends up Fred's blog post for the day that I had not yet read was about gold.
These were people who were fond of Fred Wilson. Fond is the word. It was a nice gathering. The gathering was proof a blog is a very real, social entity. It can bring together people. But if Fred had showed up at the San Francisco AVC MeetUp instead, the 100 plus RSVPs would not have been in New York, they would have been in San Francisco.
Fred has his standing in the tech community for work he has done, companies he has invested in. A few years back Geocities had been the best deal he ever did. By now it is between Twitter and Zynga, although the Twitter story is more compelling, and FourSquare could be doing really well in a few years. A Twitter IPO will get the Twitter story into the mainstream. Jack Dorsey talks about Fred Wilson every chance he gets.
I have a feeling after a Twitter IPO he and his firm might reach new heights.
Meeting Fred in person was not dramatic, as in, now I know what he looks like, what he sounds like. After months of reading his blog, I have a fairly good idea of his thought processes. I have watched hours of Fred Wilson videos on YouTube. So I had a fairly good idea of what he looks like, what he sounds like. But there is something about meeting in person. It feels real. Not that he ever felt unreal to me. He is down to earth, normal, pleasant, curious about things, passionate about his work. It is just that his accomplishments are outsize.
During the event I felt a certain tension. I can't be a full fledged tech startup guy right now. That is a year or two away for me. But I advise one startup - PayCheckr - and am in talks to become a full timer with another: TeaSpiller. I am itching to get into the scene.
After the event, around 5:30, I walked over to the Apple store on 14th and 9th. The iPad felt a little heavy in my hand. The virtual keyboard sucks. The thing had to heat up if held long enough. I think the world of Steve Jobs but I don't seem to relate to his products. It is as if he is a great president of a country on a planet I don't live on, or at least a country on a continent very, very far away. I found myself gravitating to a large screen Apple computer with a regular keyboard. I just wanted a browser, a big screen, and a physical keyboard. My fear is they might make the Chrome OS netbooks too small. Got to keep the screen big enough.
From there I walked over to the Chelsea Piers to take in the Hudson. There is something about that smell of water that can collapse time. That water can smell like some of the water from a long time ago.
I walked back to Union Square and went into the McDonald's there. I eat healthy for the most part. But I think it is important to eat one bad meal once in a while.
Recently I applied for a job with MeetUp.com that I thought would be something that would lead to a Chief People Person position, on par with the Chief Technology Officer position. But then I was at the MeetUp CTO Greg Whalin run MeetUp Tuesday evening at the MeetUp offices in their third floor space, and Greg tells me it might be an "entry level position." What a bummer. (Community Specialist)
And I was having thoughts of the butterfly effect, part two. There is all the coding, and all the tech. And the site gets people to show up at events in person. But once they show up, that is Chief People Person territory. How do you turn those events into the best possible experiences for those who show up? You, of course, work through the Organizers. Create a five star system. People start out as one star Organizers. And the best Organizers - those who have earned the most points in a publicly displayed system - are five star. And every year you declare an Organizer Of The Year. Bring that person on an all expenses paid trip to NYC.
And the entire time you are trying to put in place a simple manual that tells people how to become the best Organizer they can possibly be. And you get to know as many of them as possible, one on one. Social media can come in handy here. Skype can come in handy.
And you treat NYC as the microcosm of the world, and you go attend as many MeetUps as humanly possible. That would apply to the entire People Person team. Go out there where the action is. The action is not in the office. Keep your smartphones handy. But otherwise be out there. Work unconventional hours. Create templates in NYC to take to the rest of the world. Iterate.
India Employment Agency
19 W 34th St, Ste 1221
New York, NY 10001
In my cover letters to Google, I tried to impress upon them that I was a smart person. I made sure I mentioned the butterfly effect, the biggest thing going on for me right now. Paul Orlando got into the picture. He has a friend - Anant Singh - at Google. But so far it has been all quiet on the western front. It has been over a week. (Chatfe: Audio, Interest Based Random Connections On Skype?)
I'd love to join Google on the business side of its advertising business out of its NYC offices.
I was the number one student in my class at the top school in Nepal for the seven out of 10 years I was there. I was selected to the University of Chicago but the money part did not work out so I went to the school that has the best financial aid program in all of America, Berea College in Kentucky, the number one liberal arts college in the South. I got myself elected student body president at Berea within six months of landing as an international student. In 1999 I was one of the founding members of Chaitime.com that raised 25 million dollars round two before it succumbed to the nuclear winter. We were trying to be the premier South Asian online community.
There is a concrete mathematical theory called the butterfly effect. A butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon forest could be the reason a cyclone hit Bangladesh. In April 2006, over a period of 19 days, about eight million people out of the country's 27 million came out into the streets to shut the country down completely to force a dictator out. I was the butterfly flapping my wings in New York City.
A few days back I got an email from Alex Cybriwsky. I got just the job for you, he said, Scott is hiring. There was an opening for a Community Specialist at MeetUp.com. I promptly applied. It felt like a great fit. I am a people person in the tech sector. Years ago I described MeetUp as a 5.0 company; 5.0 is face time. I wrote a great cover letter.
I like it that this job will bring MeetUp and me together. MeetUp has
huge global potential. And I am so glad it is profitable already.
MeetUp is what I call a 5.0 company. 5.0 is face time. I blogged about
that concept years ago.
MeetUp has an imbalance. It pours too much of its resources into tech,
and not enough into all the MeetUp action that takes place during face
time. I'd like to help MeetUp strike a better balance.
I am a people person. I got myself elected student body president at
my college - the number one liberal arts school in the South - within
six months of landing as an international student: about eight SGA
veterans had run against me. That was a lot of talking to a lot of
people. Only five months before I had lost the race for Freshman Class
President. Everyone else got more votes than me.
It is also about NYC, this capital city of the world. I absolutely
love this city, and I love the outer boroughs as much as Manhattan.
MeetUp has had a tendency to do well in the big cities of the world,
and so NYC is a great place to build templates and experiment with
them to take across the world.
Group dynamics is just like coding. Group dynamics is beyond common
sense. It is sophistication, it is skill, it is knowledge, it is
talent, it is a specialty.
The job of Community Specialist seems to be custom made for me. I like
the idea of being able to work any five days of the week, and do some
of the work from home. I like that flexibility. I look forward to
attending even more MeetUps than I already do, have done for years.
A friend of mine once said several months back, Scott has organized
more people than lesser people running for president. I thought that
was a remarkable thing to say.
I would like to work at least one day every weekend, some times both days
of the weekend, but I'd like it to be flex each week, some weeks I'd
like to work Monday to Friday, some weeks Tuesday to Saturday. Some
weeks I'd like to take Tuesday and Thursday off. I don't do well with
structure. Some randomness helps me stay creative.
I'd want to organize my work week around attending as many MeetUps as
possible. We have to be out there among the star Organizers. We have
to be where the action is.
Please check my blogs for my writing samples. Besides being naturally
a people person, I am a great, great writer. And I am addicted to
communication. I thrive on emails and message boards. I love to meet
people. I love to call them up. I like to party. I dance to sweat.
As for salary requirements, I am aware there is a bias that says
coders make more than people with soft skills. But I encourage you to
value both equally. This has to be extra true for MeetUp. This company
was born valuing face time.
I am hoping the salary approaches six figures, or maybe even is six
figures. But I am open to negotiation. I don't just want a job, I want
to build a team around me inside the company that will help MeetUp be
not just a great tech company but also a great group dynamics company.
Human interaction is just like coding. There is art and science
involved.
I look forward to formally joining the team that I have felt I have
been part of for years now.
I have had visions of ending up the Chief People Person at MeetUp.com, on par with the CTO: Hello Greg. I am a people person in the tech sector.
My immigration nightmare might finally be over. I should get my work papers any time now. They said "four to six weeks, maybe eight weeks" on March 30. So. And hopefully the paper turns into a green card in a year. They decide on it in June 2011. Even if they do, it might take them another three months to get the paperwork through. The immigration bureaucracy runs at a fashionably sluggish pace.
I am not someone who lost his job to the Great Recession. I am not someone whose startup did not take off. I am not someone whose startup fizzled out. I am someone who has been out of status. That is about to end.
A few days back the thought of going to work full time for the Reshma Saujani For Congress campaign for three and a half months did cross my mind. That might be a step down from my "Superstar Volunteer" status - what Reshma calls me - and it would be a major pay cut from a possible tech sector job. So, Scott. (@heif)
When I presented at the Dot Com Hatchery in January, good thing they drove me out of the building. If an investor had become excited enough to want to put in the money into the venture, I would not have known what to do with the money. I prompted the Hatchery people to invent the Gong Rule. Ask them what that is.
“Those are Botanicalls. When they need to be watered, they send you a message on Twitter that says, ‘Water me, please.’ I have it hooked up with one of my plants at home.”
“There was a girl who had a project that was just three robots following each other around. I said, ‘I need to be here playing with this stuff. This is where I belong.’ ”
“See that foosball table? That was my first project at ITP. I put sensors in the goals. When you started playing, you swiped your NYU I.D. on the table and your stats got shown on the screens behind it. If you scored a goal, it would show.”
“I wanted to make the foosball table smarter. My professor”—Internet-culture guru Clay Shirky—“said to go analyze a source of social data. I had all the data from the foosball table, and I started thinking, What do friendship circles look like? Who are the outliers? Who doesn’t connect to other folks? I was trying to wrap my head around it. To make a foosball table smarter isn’t that different from ‘Let’s make a city smarter.’ ”
“It was just after their IPO. The New York office had just opened. A couple weeks into it, we were like, ‘Where are those engineers?’ We were hoping to have more of a team, but it was hard to get engineers.”
“The stuff is, first and foremost, meant for our friends. The same thing happened with Dodgeball. We were just building tools that were making New York more efficient for twenty of our closest friends. A lot of the ideas we shoot within Foursquare are also themes that I think already existed in Dodgeball. We’re just bringing them back to life in new ways, with smarter phones. At the time, Dodgeball was a New York application. It was meant for people to start off with 25 friends who could easily jump to five places in one night, which is definitely an urban type of experience. Foursquare has been changed so that it rewards a one-player experience—it gets more interesting as you add friends to it, but it’s definitely a better one-player experience. And it’s designed to work in New York, and then we kind of tweak it so it works everywhere else. I think it works best in really dense urban areas. New York’s been critiqued for a long time,” he continues. “The critique is that you can’t do stuff like this here, but I think part of the reason that our product is interesting and special is because it came out of New York. It was designed to solve problems in that context, and those solutions tend to work in other parts of the world pretty well. I think the product is better because we’re based here.”
“Usually what will happen is a user becomes the mayor somewhere and asks the manager, ‘What do I get for free?’ ” says Crowley. “The manager at first is usually like, ‘What are you talking about?’ They’ve never heard of Foursquare. Eventually, the manager will break down. It’s an opportunity for us to start turning users not just into evangelists but also salespeople. So the venues win—anytime someone checks in, it’s like a mini-ad. With the stats tools, you can find out who the most valuable users are to local businesses, like who’s sending their check-ins to Twitter. Maybe the owner wants to reach out to that person.”
“We have all these companies calling us, and it’s a little bit problematic—we have so much inbound business development that we can’t capture it all. Foursquare could eventually turn into not just an app that tells you how many bars your friends went to the night before but a more ambitious project about social relations. You build a game of it. The first person to do ten crazy things wins. It expands it beyond consumption. Maybe you get badges for meeting people or bringing people together.” So on Foursquare, based on the bands you saw in one week, maybe you met more people, and so maybe your happiness and your productivity is higher. So check-in is just the first part of this story.”
“There’s enough of a unique user experience within Foursquare that I don’t think someone can come along and replace it. It’s a different type of sharing. When Facebook changed its status updates, it didn’t kill Twitter. It might make us a little more focused.”
“We’re trying to figure out what the best thing is for us going forward. We’re raising financing and meeting with tons of different companies. Don’t read into it too much. It’s a business that can be a real business.”
“We could make it work as a stand-alone business, or it might turn out that there are other companies that would find us valuable. The future is rosy.”
Fred Wilson
“They’ve taken the Silicon Valley culture and infected hundreds of engineers with it, and those engineers are not likely to want to go work for Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. It’s not in their DNA. That’s not what they’re going to do. They’re more likely to go into one of our start-ups.”
“I think it’s partially the Wall Street mentality. This is a very merchant town, a very commercial town. My partners and I make a decent living, but we manage $275 million. I have friends who are my same age who are partners at Goldman Sachs, or who are running their own hedge funds, who make ten to a hundred times more money than I make. I’m not upset about it, because I love what I do. But in New York, it’s about making money.”
“We have a two-year program here, and we try like hell to hire women into that program. We tell the world we’ve got this opening, and anybody who’s interested can apply, and it’s 90 percent men who even bother to apply. I mean, I don’t know what the problem is.”
Scott Heiferman
“Start-up culture is about really changing the world. I know that’s a cliché. But Si Newhouse never wanted to change the world.”
“Here we were schlepping around, protecting the power of gatekeepers and publishers and Barry Diller. Fuck that. We really have to look at ourselves—the Internet is reinventing and rejiggering everything. We need to see ourselves as making a new New York.”
“In Silicon Valley, when an Apple or a Google happens, it inspires tons of people to not just be entrepreneurs or founders of start-ups. It encourages people to just work in the industry because they know if you’re an engineer for a company that does really well, then you do well. New York does not have its great success stories that become the stuff of legend and lore and myth.”
“Madison Avenue ain’t gonna be the heart of New York anymore. Wall Street’s not going to be the heart of New York anymore. Media’s not going to be the heart of New York anymore. New York is actually really hot. We’re inventing the shit that the world is using! This is a first. The fact is that New York didn’t create any great companies in the first tech boom. The closest thing was DoubleClick—but that was about making what old advertisers need.”
And now I read this gushing mention of him by Tim O'Reilly in TechCrunch: Gov 2.0: It’s All About The Platform. Makes me feel good. Scott started what I call a 5.0 company, one about face time. (Netizen: Web 5.0: Face Time) And he has executed well. And he has a sound business model. He charges organizers, organizers charge those who show up: everyone is happy. Wishing the guy all the best.
It’s important for the idea of “government as platform” to reach well beyond the world of IT. It was Scott Heiferman, the founder of meetup.com who hammered this point home to me. Meetup is a platform for people to do whatever they want with. A lot of them are using it for citizen engagement: cleaning up parks, beaches, and roads; identifying and fixing local problems.
In this regard, there’s a CNN story from last April that I like to tell: a
road into a state park in Kauai was washed out, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of businesses chipped in, organized a group of volunteers, and fixed the road themselves. I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’”
Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?
I got excited about Geocities when it came along back in the days. You mean I can have my own homepage? To this day my Geocities homepage is the first page I go to when I go online ea
ch day. When I jump to Twitter, Facebook, Gmail or Google Search, it is from my Geocities homepage. I was saddened to learn a few weeks back that Yahoo plans to shut down Geocities by the end of the year. I think that is a bad decision on the part of Yahoo.
I have been excited about Twitter most of this year.
I got taken by Disqus and Zemanta a few months back. They have taken my blogging to a whole different level. There is no blogging without Disqus and Zemanta as far as I am concerned.
Before Disqus came along, blog comments sections were a wasteland. Now it has becom
e valuable real estate. The blog comments sections are microblogging territory just like Twitter. They are a better way to meet new people who might share your interests than even Twitter. And Disqus is the reigning monarch there. And it is one of those things where having the first mover advantage makes all the difference. Twitter has had that in its turf.
A few months back I came across a blog called AVC.com. A venture capitalist with a blog, and not a ghostwritten blog, or a blog because it was cool to have a blog. This was a guy who was really into blogging. This was no vanity blogger. This was a genuine blogger who also happened to be a venture capitalist. At that point I did not know of what stature.
Recently I started reading that blog regularly and commenting in the comments sectio
ns. The blogger/VC replied to some of my comments, and even left a comment at my own blog.
I am a Deaniac from 2004. I moved to NYC summer of 2005. Howard Dean got to know me through DFNYC. I have been fast friends with the MeetUp CEO Scott for a few years now. And I am eFriends with Joe Trippi. Today I learned Fred Wilson is also associated with MeetUp.
I have been honored to have exchanged a few emails with Fred Wilson this past week.
MeetUp is a Web 5.0 company. I could argue Geocities was a 2.0 company before that term got coined. Twitter needs no introduction, soon Disqus and Zemanta will not either.
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