Rolling start to the meeting… didn’t really develop a quorum until around 9 am.
Some new folks (or people who haven’t been to an OpenCoffee in a very long timed ) …
Shawn Broderick of TrustPlus which provides reputation management services so individuals can “manage” their online reputations across a range of services they use such as Ebay, Craigslist, etc.
Tom Summit of Genotrope. The premise behind Tom’s new service is that sucessful venture teams tend to replicate themselves across the business ecosystem over space and time. New ventures will be most successful recruiting candidates that have some similar DNA. Most of the serial entrepreneurs at the table agreed with Tom’s argument. Mass High Tech has a nice concise article about Genotrope.
David Thompson runs a Cambridge based software company specializing in information systems for hedge funds and private equity firms. Most of his work has been custom software projects but he is considering productizing some of it.
Albert Park graduates from MIT this week and already is a fairly well known serial entrepreneur around the MIT campus. He recently ran a conference, Underground 2008, for student entrepreneurs. Albert has taken a position as “entrepreneur in residence” at IncTank, a Cambridge seed stage venture capital firm specializing in biotech.
There were a couple of new guys who were somewhat in stealth mode.
Some regulars gave updates on the status of their previously announced projects.
Mark Soper is working on an NLP based service for the job/career market. He hopes to launch by the end of the summer.
Jay Neely, aka socialstrategist.com, is working on a new community based news service that goes beyond the somewhat simplistic approaches of the Slashdots, Diggs, Reddits, etc.s of the world. He described his approach and a couple of people at the table grokked it immediately. If Jay can implement the concept, he just might be onto something.
Some other regulars at the meeting included Brandon of LoudCity, Erin of Promotions.com, Victor Hong (he is still evolving his startup idea), Bill of Virosity/Betahouse and David of Traackr.
The meeting started to wind down around 11:15 am. There were still some stragglers around 11:30am when I left.
Mike- Thanks for doing the minutes. Wish I could have stayed longer, it seems it was a good group. I met Tom Summit at POPSignal a couple of weeks ago and his Genotrope is very interesting.
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Ya i love how i was searching for info on the berkman talk today and found your post which made me decide it’s not worth it to go to the talk or go pick up my tennis racquet because of the graduation traffic. Which reminded me to get directions to the graduation dinner i have to go to tonight for a friend. And then your post led me to your blog and these meeting notes from yesterday and i even learned a new word! (grok). So ya mike you rule hehe