And some requisite super disco breakin' at the Miracle of Science Bar and Grill in Cambridge. These were my events last night, and the highlight of my weekend, besides seeing my girlfriend greet me at the door with a pink spotted apron holding a beer and cooking chicken. Those fifties guys never knew how good they had it!
Anyway, this post is less to brag about my awesome girlfriend, and more to talk about how cool people interested in startups are. As a regular reader of Hacker News and (future) startup co-founder myself, I was loathe to pass up the opportunity to meet up with some other people interested in (and founding) startups, especially at a cool science themed bar. The bar in question also had Brooklyn Lager on tap, which is enough reason for me to show up right there. I'd show up to a Klan rally if they had that shit to drink.
So I showed up and started sipping mellifluously on brew and waiting for my co-founder, one John Watson, to show up. I scouted the bar trying to guess which other people might be from YC. This was tough; pretty much everyone in the damn bar looked like a YC geek, just like me. I later found out that half the bar was indeed from YC, but no one knew it yet.
Watson showed up dead on time, and immediately commenced drinking as well. Having showed up early to check out the bar, we spent a pleasant half hour or so talking shit about employers past and present. We got antsy when 8:30 rolled around and no one had made any announcements ("IS ANYONE HERE FROM THE INTERNET?"), but then John had a fine idea.
Being a tremendous dork, I had brought my PowerBook to the bar. John suggested I fire it up, load up Paul Graham's homepage (with that bitchin' Y combinator tattoo) and a text editor with "Y COMBINATOR??" in the biggest readable font, and point it at the door.
Man, did that ever work. People started showing up in droves, cheering and waving, ordering beer, ordering food, and chatting about whether they had been chosen for funding or not. Seeing as Watson and I didn't even merit an interview, people seemed quite free to not feel too bad about being interviewed but not getting funding, which was the dominant theme of the evening. However, we did meet some people who DID get in, which was tremendously exciting. One of which refused to say anything whatsoever about his idea (which tantalized the rest of us, much to his obvious amusement), but the other seemed to have a pretty well established product in RescueTime, which looks like a fairly interesting application, and is already in beta.
And so a good time was had by all, and some interesting discussions were had with a guy from an interesting Comet-based startup, which will probably merit another post later, when I am less lazy.
RSS Feed