I love the entrepreneur life.
Getting pig-level-commitment for this business has been amazing for progress. I’m learning how to manage my time and focus on the right things, but I have a ways to go before I feel like I’m firing on all cylinders.
Being a New York based startup is an interesting challenge. Out in Silicon Valley, they’ve got a whole ecosystem for dealing with tech entrepreneurial startups. NYC has elements of this, but the community is definitely smaller, but bigger than I had feared.
In my first two weeks of this, I’ve already attended four networking type events. In reverse chronological order:
A) NY-Tech Meetup. Loved the format – setup like the 1970’s computer meets, where people have a few minutes each to demo and share, then drinks and snacks. Might have found some cool collaborative office space for our team through a guy I met afterwards. And if your company is going to speak, and you bring a CTO and a head of sales, let the CTO talk.
B) Jason Calacanis’s drinky drink party. Congrats Jason on the new dream-job and thanks for the pizza.
C) Staying Ahead in a Flat World with “Tom Friedman, author of ‘The World is Flat’, Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and Internet luminary who coined the term Web 2.0m, Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of Apache, Devin Wenig, COO, Reuters Group” at the Marriott in Times Square. The event itself was mediocre — dumbed down to fit the large room full of suites I suppose, but interesting to hear the panelist speak. The afterparty was tops though and I met two great folks who happened to be the only other under-40 yr olds at the place.
D) Listening to Fred Wilson speak at a Columbia Business School sponsored event. Fred works for Union Square ventures, writes a popular VC blog (A VC), and is one of the few New Yorkers with money+power that “gets it”. And by “gets it”, I mean understands where the web and technology are moving, what web 2.0 is all about and that beyond the hype there is real value being created with these tools. Virtually everything Fred said (and posts about) reaffirms what we are building, is completely in the sweet spot for his VC firm and inspires confidence like you can’t imagine.