tech meetup in nyc
Although we’ve been in business since 2005, we’re still something of a start-up and certainly an entrepreneurial entity, so when a VC friend of mine suggested checking-out meetup.com’s technology and business groups I was open to the idea. This past week I attended my second meeting of the “ny tech” group and was as impressed the second time around as the first. It’s quite a production – from the venue, to the organization, to the ideas, people and products being presented – all for $5! (Though they sadly announced a price increase to $10 starting next meeting.) If you have even a small inclination towards entrepreneurial ventures or emerging technologies, it’s well worth a look-see.
The venue is the enormous lobby of the IAC building which is right on manhattan’s west side highway. So, as you sit watching the presentations, to your back you have giant windows overlooking the murderously speeding commuters hurtling to bedroom communities for 100 miles in every direction. In front of you is the single largest and coolest high definition monitor you have ever seen. Seriously. It’s about 30-odd feet high and maybe 120 feet long. It’s absurd.
Five or so presenters are each given 5-10 minutes to show their technology and tout their business model or idea. Almost all of them are good or interesting in some fashion but fear not! good, bad or otherwise, no presenter will consume more than 10 min.s of your life. The format is extremely crisp; presenters are briefly introduced after which they have 5 min.s to speak their piece. Afterwards, they get no more than 3 minutes to field questions. If you’re particularly interested in a particular speaker, each speaker is made available at one of the building’s structural columns at the end of all presentations. After too many years of interminable corporate meetings, the experience of such a crisp and efficient and knowledge-yielding format is really a revelation. Mayhaps there is something to this whole startup thing after all…(!)
The technologies are all pretty much of the web2.0 / social-networking varieties, so they’re not intrinsically of particular interest to me but they are interesting. The format is also prohibitive for showcasing sophisticated “vertical” technologies like our own, but the cleverness and innovation of people is evidently unbounded and it’s in that spirit that I find the presentations compelling.
The businesses ranged from a pretty well established (and excellent!) charity to an enthusiastic web hacker who’d put together a simple site “just because” and it had taken off, leaving him blinking in the light and delighted to learn that he’d hit on something people liked (and might even pay for!) This guy’s site, muxtape.com was actually my favorite of the bunch despite being by far the simplest. It evokes the time when friends would give each other mixed tapes of carefully selected, personally targeted tracks of music. Very fun – I’ve been listening to it ever since. His elegant use of amazon’s ludicrously cool ec2 infrastructure as his back-end is the only hint that nothing is as simple as it first appears..
Anyways, this is a pretty off-topic post and I don’t want to belabor the point, but you might want to check it out or find another interesting meetup near you…
