aaron's blog

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.

A

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.

A

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.

A