StartUp Week: Job Fair: Fish Market

Meeting Brad Feld
Getting To Meet Mark Suster In Person
2,000 Squats
StartUp Week At NYU April 6-15

It said 2:30 to 5:00 PM. 770 Broadway, AOL Headquarters. So I am going up and down the street. This is 752 Broadway. Wait a minute, this is now 780 Broadway. What did I miss? Finally I gave up and walked into Bank Of America. It looked like they were at the address where AOL should have been. Ends up 770 Broadway is not on Broadway proper. Take a left at the street corner, the clerk said.

One of the first people I met was Amanda Moritz of Brainscape. I first met her at a party during Social Media Week. Facebook said we had two mutual friends.

Meeting Brad Feld

I got to meet Mark Suster yesterday, and Brad Feld today, and I get to meet Vin Vacanti next week. In Vacanti's case it will not be my first time, but still. What do you think is going on? StartUp Week, that's what.

TechStars' Geographical Advantage Over Y Combinator
Brad Feld
StartUp Week At NYU April 6-15
To: Brad Feld, Subject: Iran And Me (Digital Ninja/Commando)
Happy July 4 Fred Wilson, Brad Feld
An Immigrant Story For Brad Feld
Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC
To Iran, With Love (3)
To Iran, With Love (1)
To Iran, With Love (2)

Both Mark and Brad recognized me right away. We have interacted online. I have interacted more with Brad than with Mark. At one point I was trying to get Brad to fund my work into Iran democracy.

"Oh, hey," Brad said when it was my turn to greet him.

Coachella (3)

Coachella (2)

Coachella (1)

Facebook Location

Image via Wikipedia

New York Times: A Corporate Campus Made to Mirror Facebook: Facebook, which started out in a dormitory at Harvard, transferred to a rented house in Silicon Valley and now occupies a cluster of office buildings in Palo Alto, Calif., is about to make its biggest move yet: to a 57-acre campus in this small city about 30 miles south of San Francisco. ...... a series of stucco-covered low-rise buildings occupied by Sun Microsystems until Sun was bought ...... s. The campus will resemble an urban streetscape, with cafeterias .... if the campus will be a microcosm of a city, it’s not clear that the real city around the campus — including the largely Mexican-American neighborhood of Belle Haven ....... the Facebook site is surrounded on three sides by water, and separated from the rest of Menlo Park by railroad tracks and a divided highway. ..... The site is so insular that in the two decades it was occupied by Sun Microsystems it was nicknamed Sun Quentin (a reference to San Quentin prison, about 40 miles north). And because Facebook provides its employees with three meals a day in its own cafeterias, there may be little reason for them to venture off the property. ..... the city, which has a population of about 30,000 ..... Sun had 3,600 employees on site; Facebook, with a work force that is growing by 50 percent a year, could exceed that number ...... because Sun’s engineers had private offices, while most Facebook employees work in unpartitioned spaces ...... they can’t have more than 3,600 employees until they get City Council approval. ..... leasing with an option to buy .... walking and biking paths and greater access to public transportation and the wetlands alongside the Facebook site. ..... One team, charged with connecting the Facebook site to the rest of Menlo Park, devised an elevated ringlike walkway that links the campus to the Belle Haven neighborhood, a proposed transit station and the San Francisco Bay waterfront. The architects named it Friends Circle. (Though Belle Haven is a tidy neighborhood, many of the homes are small and flimsy-looking.) ...... Contractors have already replaced rows of small offices in one of the Sun buildings with a loftlike space where desks will be pushed together in groups of four. “We like that you can sit at one end and see all the way to the other,” said Mr. Tenanes, showing off a section of building that had been stripped to concrete and ductwork .... “protecting Facebook’s extraordinary company culture.” ...... he liked the “casual eclectic” look of the firm’s Ace Hotel ..... (The Ace crowd, which tends toward 20somethings with laptops, mirrors the Facebook employees’ demographic.) Unlike the Sun campus, with color-coordinated buildings reminiscent of an upscale resort, Facebook is looking for “an urban streetscape where no one architect or designer” dominates, Mr. Tenanes said. “Random is good” ....... Facebook wanted there to be "life and soul and some idiosyncrasy to the campus.” ...... “They don’t want to buy into that corporate structure,” she said. “They want to continue to feel hungry." ..... Currently, about 40 percent of Facebook employees commute to work on foot or bicycle or by bus (including some provided by the company), Mr. Tenanes said. For those employees, the remote location of the new site will pose a challenge. But he is already planning bus routes and considering opening a pedestrian tunnel that was dug but never used under the Bayfront Expressway, the highway that separates the campus from the rest of Menlo Park. (In case it outgrows the Sun property, Facebook bought a 22-acre site across the road.)

The key phrase here is urban streetscape. Facebook wants its campus to look and feel like New York City. My bias for the city just got stronger. New York City is the place to be.

The other key phrase is unpartitioned spaces.

Getting To Meet Mark Suster In Person

So I got to meet Mark. Suster. In person. It was a great feeling. I had read enough of his blog posts that I really wanted to meet in person and make it real.

Mark is the most visible VC in Los Angeles. One time years ago I happened to be in downtown Los Angeles. I made a point to go see the bank where the bank robbery scene in the movie Heat was shot. Heat is one of my favorite movies.

Having Mango Lassi

Nihal Mehta: Being Mysterious About Local Response

Image via CrunchBase
Buzzd
Buzzd Party Thursday
Mark Suster: The Social Network: Facebook To Fragmentation: December 2010: Social Chaos Will Create New Business Opportunities: Klout, Sprout Social, CoTweet, awe.sm, (next gen) Buzzd ..... one of the cooler new products that will emerge in 2011 is being created by Nihal Mehta, who has pivoted from his previous company Buzzd ..... will address the world of what happens when businesses and consumers are increasingly mobile and social.
Blip.TV: How Do They Ever Get Anything Done?
Reshma Saujani

48 Hours

It was two days before Demo Day at Y Combinator and Daniel Gross had moved from product to product like I had changed majors at college. The guy had nothing for Demo Day. The textbook thing to do for Paul Graham was to say, you know what, you had your 12 weeks, tough, you are out. But Paul Graham took the road not taken, and that made all the difference.

Greplin: The First Y Combinator Company To Get Me Excited

Greplin happened during the final 48 hours.

2Pac