a360 Blog
Startup Book Club - The Linchpin
Just for fun, I headed out to the San Francisco Startup Book Club meeting on Saturday. I found the club, which recently merged with the San Francisco Business Book Club, on meetup.com. It’s just an eclectic group of people from around the Bay Area that meet once a month outside the Book Passage in the ferry building to informally discuss a different book.
This month’s book was The Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? by Scott Godin.
My two cents? The book is far from earth shattering, but a quick and easy read nonetheless. It is very much a behavioral book rather than practical guide for a certain business problem. Godin has a very interesting framework based on using (what he describes as) “art” in your work to make you indispensible.
Unfortunately this will be my only opportunity to check out the club while I’m in town. Thanks to Scott for putting it together and everyone that dropped by.
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StartupWeekend Party
Last night I got out to then StartupWeekend Preparty hosted at Younoodle HQ.
It wasn’t an earth-shattering party by any means, but the combination of the StartupWeekend Crowd and the Younoodle office/employees made it exciting none the less.
StartupWeekend, if you’re not familiar, is an event that is held around the country where participants have one weekend to pitch business concepts, divide themselves into teams to work on the best ideas, and try to hammer out as much as they can in a few short days. Many companies have gotten a solid start (i.e. a working proof-of-concept) coming out of a StartupWeekend and proceeded to grow into legitimate startups.
Younoodle, who hosted the party, is a networking site for entrepreneurs and people involved with startups—it has a pretty cool “Startup Predictor” which uses an algorithm to value businesses based on information entered by site members. On the back end, Younoodle aggregates and analyzes this data for sale to investors and other entities. (If you decide to join, hit me up!)
The Younoodle HQ is in South Park (in the SOMA neighborhood). It was a cool little converted-warehouse space that has the requisite ping-pong table, couches, huge flat-screen TV and other startup amenities. Perfect for a party. (NOTE: Didn’t get any pictures myself but I found a good pic here from another event).
I’ve got a few more exciting things on the horizon including a funding party at Heyzap and the TechCrunch Social Currency CrunchUp.
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San Francisco Apartment
Just arrived in San Francisco last night to start my internship on Monday morning. Check out my apartment and view of the city from the financial district.
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Rendering
So I’m stuck in the Digital Union rendering out the “final” cut of the What If? video and I thought I’d pass the time by blogging about it. Two weeks ago I had never heard about this place—and over that time I’ve spent a few days here working on the video.
The Digital Union is a center in the OSU Science and Engineering Library that has a bunch of MAC/PCs loaded with audio, video and photo editing software. I’ve been using Final Cut Pro to edit the video from the What If? Innovation Summit because the video was captured with an HD codec not compatible with my Adobe Premiere setup. Fun, right?
The “proctors” here are pretty knowledgeable and there are some other cool services (like loaner Flips and decks) that I don’t need now, but sure are good to know about.
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What If? 2010 Video:
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2010 Emerald City Music Games
Wednesday night I got out to the Emerald City Music Games at Dublin Coffman High School—this will probably be the only DCI (Drum Corps International) show that I get to this summer).
For the uninitiated: Drum Corps—short for Drum & Bugle Corps—is a youth marching music activity, that is like an amped up marching band. Participants, who must be 21 years or younger, make a full time (24/7) commitment to the corps, perfecting a show that they perform 30+ times in 3 months on a national tour.
The corps in attendance on Wednesday were:
- Cincinnati Tradition
- Legends
- Teal Sound
- Madison Scouts
- Blue Stars
- The Cavaliers
- Bluecoats
- Carolina Crown
For videos and pics, check out the links below.
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/apfriedman/sets/72157624454161556/show/
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