My NYTM Blog

The NYC startup experience isn't abstract to me: it's what I'm doing right now.

The only skin I've got in the game is my own— I'm running for the NY Tech Meetup Board not as a representative of a huge startup or incubator program, but as your representative. I've given the community two years of sweat equity and dedication; now I'm asking for your vote so I can take things even further.

I stand for three things: community involvement, getting things done, and recruiting more hackers. It's my intention to identify and empower community leaders as a means of fulfilling our potential as an organization. Meanwhile, we'll collaborate more closely with our engineers, creatives, and builders to ensure that there's a steady stream of talent to fuel our industry well into the future.

Community

Every month, 850 technologists get together at the NYU Skirball Center for two hours of tech thrills and spills. By my count, that leaves roughly 18,000 technologists high and dry along with the hundreds of folks who can't snag a ticket. That's no good.

We need to do a better job of uniting the community. We need to take a serious look at what it means to be a Meetupster. We need to rekindle our student group, start a women's group, involve more engineers, creatives, and builders, and improve our remote experience.

Addressing the challenges of ticketing, programming, and community is well within reach. It won't just happen, however. We'll need to work together and we'll need to take action.

Action

During my tenure producing the meetup, I ran into the same problem over and over: between alumni programs, mentorships, satellite meetups, smarter mailing lists, networking, special interest groups and so forth, there was so much we could be doing… but weren't. Why?

Bandwidth. At the end of the day, there's anywhere from one to three people actually running the organization. And that needs to change.

After my first NY Tech Meetup, I knew that I wanted to give something back. With a measure of tenacity and stubbornness (along with Nate's unrelenting support), I was able to slowly unravel the tangles of our grassroots group and get to work; diving in was all but easy. We need to make community participation much, much simpler— otherwise, we'll never have the bandwidth to advance.

For this reason, I believe that it is extremely important that we empower anyone and everyone who wants to get involved. We need more community leaders and more programs and more transparency. More contributors means more bandwidth, and more bandwidth means more progress.

Technology

Toward the end of last year, I started noticing a trend. Everyone seemed to be looking for developers; even the developers themselves. While there was a rich smattering of tech meetups and user groups, there really wasn't a cohesive center and there certainly wasn't a sense of unity.

I've always believed that the first step to effecting change is standing together. With that in mind, myself along with a small group of dedicated hackers sought to unify the builder community. We called our initiative nyhacker.org and put hours upon hours into addressing the hacker shortage.

After more than a year of work, nyhacker (now Hacker Union) has grown to include more than a thousand hackers. We've hosted dozens of events including a monthly Hacker Townhall, weekly Hacker Hours, the Hack of the Month segment at the NY Tech Meetup, as well as a series of independent hackathons including Music Hack Day, Game Hack Day, and soon Education Hack Day.

It's my hope that by serving on the Board, I'll be able to better represent this important piece of the NY tech ecosystem. Together, we can ensure a successful future for technologists, founders, and hackers living and working in NYC.