Dinner At Arianna's

Headed to a dinner party at Arianna's place on 17th St this evening. bit.ly/yLGKTZ

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) February 23, 2012

What should I wear? I think I am going to wear my boots.

My Favorite Black Dress: Love Story or Cautionary Tale?
Black Friday
Wearing Black
Black Buddhas: The Madhesis Of Nepal: Documentary

Meeting Arianna Huffington

Manick Bhan: The BhanMan Of TicketMonkey

Image via CrunchBaseI met Manick at a Spotify event, my second Spotify event. I looked at his name tag and said, "That's an Indian name!" (Spotify Now Advertising On Netizen, Spotify Vision Specialist: A No Go, The Spotify CTO Talk, The Spotify Event Was Great, Sean Parker's 2009 Email To Spotify)

The guy impressed me immediately. Not all fast talkers are smart, but this one was out of the ballpark. I could tell. Immediately. He was a high energy packet. If you can deal with people, if you can make decisions on the fly, if you are a quick study, you are CEO material. This guy is.

Duke to Goldman to startup. They work out of an apartment not far from the Port Authority bus terminal, or Penn Station, for that matter. The view out the window is beautiful.

I have offered to shift the office to some garage, and put them on noodle diets. They order in lunch, good stuff.

I am always looking for projects for my tech consulting operation. And so I thought I might insert one of my techies into his operation. Other than that it was just going to be nice knowing him. He was to go on my to watch list.

TicketMonkey "Monk-A-Thon": I showed up for this. It was a nice opportunity to get to know Matt.

But Manick got me on board before he would even look at my techie. By now it looks like my tech team that I am keeping warmed up to launch my own microfinance startup later this year might play a pretty prominent role in TicketMonkey itself. We have been exploring options.

TicketMonkey hopes to take selling tickets to a whole new level. You make your name on platforms like Spotify and you make money through live performances. I think that is going to be a dominant business model for music bands. And TicketMonkey could end up to selling tickets what Yipit is to daily deals: an aggregator.

Many of the leading ticket selling sites are like malls. They show you those two things you maybe maybe might be interested in, and then they show you 100 other things as if to distract you. TicketMonkey will be a more personalized experience.

Manick, a self taught programmer, has this beautiful, beautiful landing page. The site is pre launch. He has also been doing a lot of back end work. My lead techie is about to step in and help with launch.

Vintage Nepal

How cars first arrived in Kathmandu valley.

Source: Vintage Nepal

Beautiful Nepal
Nepal
US Ambassador To Nepal On Facebook
Kiva Is In Nepal
Mafia Politics In Nepal
Black Buddhas: The Madhesis Of Nepal: Documentary
Namaste Nepal
Shakira Or Hydroelectricity?

Meeting Arianna Huffington

I still don't know how I got invited to this event, but there I was. I was the first person to show. The second two people to show asked me, "How do you know Reid?" Reid, as in Reid Hoffman.

"I don't know Reid," I said.

And then Reid Hoffman was the fourth person to show and he stood next to me and waxed eloquent for a full 10 minutes or so. To the person who asked how I knew Reid. Apparently they knew each other.

Mayor Bloomberg showed up not long after. He walked a step towards me and shook my hand. I was about to say, Mr. Mayor, I was Barack Obama's first full time volunteer in all of New York City. But with Bloomberg you don't know if you are talking to an entrepreneur or a politician or a soon to be full time philanthropist.

Arianna must have showed up fashionably late. Because I only spotted her when I thought I might leave soon, and the room was by then two thirds empty. She has the cutest accent.

This woman has enough money to bail out Greece.

I had teamed with Mike who I met at the event for the first time. Let's go say hello to as many people as possible, I said. One person we said hello to was president of MTV, or so he said.

When I spotted Arianna across the room, I dragged Mike along.

"Hi. We just wanted to say hello," I said. The guy who had been talking to her for the prior 15 minutes or so disappeared within a second. And Arianna engaged me, Mike and three, four other people who quickly gathered around her for a comfortable 15 minutes or so.

I am going to say Arianna was the most interesting person I met at the party.

I want to write for The Huffington Post. And I don't want to get paid. I think I could make more money through the publicity and exposure writing for The Huffington Post could give me than the Post could pay me.

The top blog in the world. Arianna turned it into a powerhouse right before my eyes, it feels like. I remember watching her debate The Terminator. I mean, the guy is an action hero, and Arianna couldn't have cared less. Next thing you know she had launched the Post. Next thing you know she had sold it to AOL for hundreds of millions. That is an entrepreneur.

Wikipedia: Arianna Huffington
Huffington Post: Arianna Huffington
Twitter: Arianna Huffington
Facebook: Arianna Huffington

HuffPost + AOL: The First Year in Numbers
My Favorite Black Dress: Love Story or Cautionary Tale?

London Paris New York

Blogger Khosla

Image via WikipediaVinod Khosla: TechCrunch: The “Unhyped” New Areas in Internet and Mobile

a whole new world of platforms, a post-PC era, which I’d more aptly describe as the always/everywhere era, finally, and that means a whole new set of opportunities ..... the cost of experimentation has gone down dramatically ..... raw computing power is taken for granted. ..... What else new has the potential (nothing is certain!) to be truly disruptive or establish a new category in the domain of consumer Internet/mobile/services (which to me are fast becoming interchangeable)? ...... AirBnB and Instagram would be examples of companies whose categories existed prior to their entry, but they are meaningfully different. ...... I call them the “unhyped dozen” (to go with my energy investing activities, which I call the “clean dozen”) ...... (1) Data Reduction or Filters (Siri) (2) Big data or Analytics ... There will be countless new types of data streams .... Much has been written about big data and it and may be getting past the unhyped label! (3) Emotion (Foodspotting, Ness, Instagram) (4) Education 2.0 (Khan Academy) ... “Education models that dramatically reduce the cost and increase the availability of quality learning.” The puzzling question is why education has not already changed. (5) TV 2.0 (6) Social Next (7) Interest-based networks (Twitter) (8) Health 2.0 (9) Internet of Things/Universal ID/NFC/Smart sensors.... The network of things is supposedly growing faster than any other network, social or otherwise. (10) Personal Collaborative Publishing (Pinterest, Tumblr) ... Self-publishing on Amazon is becoming real, removing the gateway of traditional editors and the tax of traditional business models. Where will this lead? Books, especially non-fiction, can become more interactive, crowdsourced (ck12.org), social and collaborative. (11) Utility Apps (Siri) (12) Marketplaces & Disintermediation (Etsy) .... Why does Tom Freidman need The New York Times to get readers ................. We as investors have seen Square take off at an unprecedented rate (so far) for a payments startup, but in terms of relative scale, even Square is dwarfed by Mpesa — it is 20% of Kenya’s GDP already (using a totally different model than Square). Meanwhile in India, their UID system could remake the concept of “cash”....... Tools and services that used to be inaccessible to all but large manufacturers are now available to everyone. Foreign factories that were impenetrable before are now an email away. Design software costing thousands of dollars per seat is freely available (or very cheap). Hackers are mixing all of these elements together and re-imagining entire industries from the ground up. ..... the next industrial revolution ...... “The under 25” who don’t know what they don’t know, mostly have not worked at what traditionalists would call a “real job” and are not afraid to try new things ..... the rate of change is accelerating and the possibilities are endless!

The Clean Dozen
Artificial Intelligence
Teachers Or Algorithms

Why the Interest Graph Will Reshape Social Networks (and the Next Generation of Internet Business)

Vinod Khosla At MIT
When Vinod Khosla Took A Break From Tweeting
Vinod Khosla's Entry Into New York City
Vinod Khosla: For Profit Poverty Alleviation
Vinod Khosla's Green Tech Sweep
The Microfinance Fishing Net

A Tweet From Aileen Lee

wrote a @techcrunch guest post today on Women on Boards & companies that get it... hope you'll read & sharetechcrunch.com/2012/02/19/why…

— aileenlee (@aileenlee) February 19, 2012

@paramendra thank you!

— aileenlee (@aileenlee) February 20, 2012

I Am On Pinterest Now

And this is my first Board. And I am loving the embed feature.

Source: classy-in-the-city.tumblr.com via Paramendra on Pinterest

Source: yayeveryday.com via Paramendra on Pinterest

Source: flickr.com via Paramendra on Pinterest

Long Walk

I went for a long walk today: 6 hours. A great way to go offline, get disconnected. I did not eat or drink the entire time.

Pictures

Thug Le

Top 10 Social Media Week Global Influencer

Social Media Week Top Outreacher