Digital Dumbo: Here I Come

Dumbo. Directly under the Manhattan Brooklyn overpass. At first I did not know the full form name. But it was a great sound, like Yahoo, or Google, supposedly meaningless, but a great sounding name. I thought some of the techies in town came over to this semi vacated part of the city, drove away the rest of the inhabitants, mostly homeless people, and took over. That is what Dumbo feels like.

Dumbo is special in the NY tech ecosystem. I am not aware of another geographical locale quite like it. There are some very cool office spaces around town, some of which look like abandoned artist spaces. But Dumbo is the only place that is not one office, or even one street, but an entire neighborhood, although it is not that big of a neighborhood.

Ignite, Set It On Fire

Come to think of it I lived in Brooklyn for my first few years in the city. I lived south of Prospect Park. That is quite a distance from Dumbo. But a few times I walked from Times Square to where I lived. I'd start out around midnight, and be home by dawn. That is a great way to experience summer in town. It is much better than throwing up on a subway platform or inside the train: I have done both. And no, I was not drunk during those walks. The truth is I am not much of a drinker. One beer for one evening is as far as I prefer to go. Like last night, the MeetUp people had an entire refrigerator bulging with free beer - free for us, a bunch of money for them, but hey, they are a profit making dot com, who cares; yes they exist, profit making dot coms - but I took just one. (FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology)

A few days back I had an email from the First Round Capital guy Charlie; I am on his mailing list for cool tech events in town. Two events for the week looked at me. Sam Lessin was speaking at the MeetUp headquarters on Tuesday, and it was a MeetUp that sounded really, really cool, but I had never heard of. And there was this Digital Dumbo thing for Thursday that looked so great and fun, but there were no spots left. I shot a quick email to Sam. Can you get me in? Since it was taking place at the Dropio office.

Thursday, April 29th
7:30PM Digital DUMBO #15 Drop.io On In

While our application lives in the 'clouds', we set up people-world headquarters in DUMBO in ye-olden-days of 2008. Now in the spring of 2010 we are prepping to roll out the next generation of rich media file-sharing... Join us to celebrate

RSVP: http://digitaldumbo.eventbrite.com/

Drip.io HQ
68 Jay St #413
btw Water & Front
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Date: April 29th, 2010
Time: 7:30 - 10pm

When I brought that up with Jacob, the other Dropio speaker at the MeetUp, he taught me the secret way to get into the Dropio office. He casually mentioned it was like a cocktail for people who worked in Dumbo. I tried to unlearn the secret way and said, "In that case I will not come. I don't work in Dumbo." Hacking a site is one thing. But hacking a site's office, um, wait, I don't even hack sites. But thanks, Jake.

Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever

Charlie has blocked me from leaving comments at his blog. I retaliated by hyperlinking his name Charlie to the most famous Charlie video on YouTube: 2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments. Charlie bit my finger, Charlie blocked me on his blog.

And today I have a Facebook email from none other than the guy who runs the show, the organizer of Digital Dumbo. How cool is that? And the guy read about my interest in Digital Dumbo at my blog. That is even cooler. People who read my blog are, by definition, cool. Andrew Zarick is now officially cool.

Not having read up on it, not having been to one event yet, this is what I have to say about Digital Dumbo. Everyone who works at any tech company in Dumbo should be able to attend. Heck, everyone who works for any tech company anywhere in the city should be able to attend. I guess what I am saying is turn Digital Dumbo into a block party in Dumbo. May would be a great month to start in that direction.

Digital Dumbo Block Party. Get the city involved. You want jobs? Buy me beer.

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The Jack Dorsey Story

I came across this post on TechCrunch linked to from Fred Wilson's blog. It is really something. Jack (@jack) is the guy who invented Twitter. The first tweet is like the first phone call. The post is worth the read.

• The guy is from the Midwest. He grew up in St. Louis. A guy who went to the same high school as me in Kathmandu and the same college in Kentucky lives there now.
• He started out at Missouri State.
• He taught himself programming early.
• He has a thing for New York. 

".....One night, I couldn’t sleep, I just had to write a prototype script. It would sit on a server, take incoming emails, broadcast them out to a list, and also record them in a database that I could view on the Web.” That was the first glimmer of Twitter......But for a variety of reasons, dNET did not get traction in the market, and so Jack embarked on a period of freelance programming before joining a podcasting start-up called Odeo, primarily to work with Evan (a.k.a. @ev) Williams, formerly of Google....... The very first tweet was an internal one that Jack sent out at 12:50 p.m. on March 21, 2006: “just setting up my twttr.” A few minutes later, he tweeted innocuously: “inviting coworkers.” This was the beginning of the Twitter revolution....... Jack and his colleagues lugged big plasma screens across the country and set them up in the hallways of the conference to display the live Twitter chatter about the conference sessions in action, one at the registration desk and one at the exit from the main conference room.......“We were really good at getting the right friends in. We had a lot of high-powered, vocal bloggers using Twitter at South by Southwest. They were talking about it non-stop at the conference. And the press happened to be watching, too. And it just blew up.”....... I was really surprised by the velocity.....“We weren’t really ready to take money right away, but we got a note from someone. We went to meet them for breakfast at the top of this hotel in San Francisco and had a pretty good conversation. We were still kind of forming the company and whatnot. When we got back to the office thirty minutes later, we found a scanned image of a check for half a million dollars in our inbox.”.......It was not where he comes from, but ‘Is this guy fun to work with? Is he going to challenge us? Is he smart?’ This person was going to take a seat on the board.”.......Fred Wilson says he likes to think of himself as the entrepreneur’s consigliere..... The beauty of being a venture capitalist is we’ve seen all these issues a lot of times......... “Fred had our phone on priority dial, so he could reach us at any time.......He is very engaged and whenever we need something, we call him up. He is excited to do anything for us.” Jack points out that Fred isn’t just focused on big-picture strategy, but also on the nitty-gritty features of Twitter as an avid user. “We listen to what he thinks and what he needs from the product,” says Jack. “And that has been a great way to get into the relationship and for both of us to trust each other more. As we worked on the product together, we began to learn, ‘Oh, this is how Fred is, and this is how Jack is.’ We began to learn each other’s faults. And that couldn’t really happen any other way.”........ I want a VC who is always thinking a few steps ahead of me....... “We had a lot of conversations with people down in the Valley,” Jack said. “At the end of the pitch, the person across the table would say, ‘Well, we’ll let you know fairly soon, like in an hour or so. We just want to talk internally, but we’re really excited.’ We didn’t react well to that. We wanted to be questioned, we wanted to be challenged, and we wanted to see some of their thinking around actually developing this product.”....... Jack found more of those challenging VCs on the East Coast than on the West Coast. “I think it was just an attitude thing,” he said. “I found the East Coast to be a little bit more aggressive. They say what they mean in the hopes of just moving on right away. On the West Coast, people were a little bit more laid back. If they thought we were going down the wrong path, they wouldn’t necessarily say it, but they might make it known in an indirect way. I just didn’t appreciate that at all.”........“We turned down a bunch of VCs,” Jack said. “We saw a name, but there wasn’t enough behind the name immediately. A VC has to show me right away that I can trust them. It’s hard to do. But when it’s right, it’s right. And we were very fortunate in it being right with Fred. He was very aggressive, in a good way, in a thinking way. He had no subtlety at all. But more importantly, he was a day-to-day user of our service and he obviously loved it. He came to the pitch with a bunch of requests for features and lots of questions about why we had done what we had done........ During their courting period, Fred showed Jack he could provide more than just money; he could contribute to the product’s vision and direction to help lead the company to success. If your VC doesn’t show you that passion for your product and your own personal success, as well as an ability to add value during the due diligence process through their strategic or product insight, then he and his firm may not be the right business partner for you. As Dorsey put it to me, “When selecting our VC partner, I knew I was hiring a boss I couldn’t fire.”....... The entrepreneur is your client. It’s a very weird relationship because the entrepreneur is not exactly paying you, even though they really are paying you. But they absolutely can’t fire you. In fact, you can fire them. So it’s among the weirdest kinds of service relationships that one could come up with.”.......the best entrepreneurs don’t focus on the money, they focus on their dream for the business......Are you done? If you are, then exit. If you’re not, keep going for it.”...."