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Over the weekend, 300 people showed up in Union Square for a "Pandamonium".  With some dressed as Pandas, there wasn't much point to the gathering "other than to wreak havoc," according to one of the participants.

After moving to Williamsburg, the group started getting rowdy.

"The participants were chanting, “Whose street? Our street!” and some began overturning newspaper boxes." - AMNY

Not surprisingly, my buddy "No Neck" Noel was in the middle of the action...

“Hundreds of people were out on the sidewalk, dancing, yelling, having a good time,” said Noel Hidalgo, a community activist who goes by the name No Neck and who witnessed the event. “Police were trying to control people and clear the streets and that’s when it got out of control.”

Noel, I hate to break it to you, but when 300 people go roaming the streets yelling and overturning newspaper boxes, that's about when I want the police to step in and "control people". 

What a lot of the people involved in these mass gatherings fail to realize is that they do infringe upon the rights of others.  You can't have hundreds of people randomly gathering in a single group like that without police presence...  because the chances of a riot are too great--unless you simply think all that mob mentality research is bunk.  This group didn't get out of control because of the cops--turning over newspaper boxes or anything that isn't yours, is out of control.  Chances are a wayward newsbox dented someone's car, or a sideview mirror or two got knocked off, too.  Stuff like that happens when 300 people roam the streets. 

Police presences cost money.  As a NYC taxpayer, I paid for this Panda caper.  Clogged streets cost money and they're dangerous, too.  What happens when ambulances get held up because of mass gatherings like this that clog streets with traffic?  I'd hate to have a heart attack on the Friday of the mass bike ride here in the city.

Do these folks think that EVERYONE in the surrounding neighborhoods thought the yelling Panda's were a good idea?  I'm sure a bunch of people didn't think it was so hot.  What about their rights?

How about a mass feeding of the homeless?  Or a mass graffiti cleanup?  For once, I'd like to see people do something more constructive with their energy than just prove they can "stand up" to authority.  Authority serves a purpose... it keeps your panda asses off my street and away from my car.  

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Equity Private is the most amazing woman that I don't know...      She's incredibly savvy, and a total finance junkie.  She's also got a helluva sense of humor. 

She's been dubbing that "Der Untergang" Hitler mini-series (you know the one... it's been done on the Super Bowl, the Cowboys, Twitter failing, etc) with a financial crisis epic. 

Three of the episodes are up, and she tells me she's got seven more in the complete set.

Here's the first one:

If you're into finance, Equity Private is a must-read....  and now, a must-watch!

Last night, I stopped to see my friend Amy on my way home, because she broke her ankle.  She's been pretty shut in over the last few months.

This is the x-ray of her ankle.  You can actually see the faint lines of where she broke it, in two places.  One break is right where the leftmost screw starts the grooves, just to the left of it... and the other is midway between the bottom two screws on the right.

Anyway, I locked my bike up in front of her apartment, but not right in front of the doorman, because there's construction and no place to put it in plain sight.  I was maybe there for about an hour and when I came back, the bike was gone and all that was left was my broken lock and chain. 

I wasn't that bothered by it actually.  I never spend more than $250 on a bike, because I assume it will get stolen every two years or so.  This one I got three years out of.  Tack on the $200 of various accessories and maintenance I did and I averaged about a $12.50 a month cost.  That's pretty good, considering all the train fare I saved--definitely came out ahead.

So now I'm in the market for a new bike.  I definitely want something lighter and taller than I had, and mildly considering a single speed bike, but the ones I've seen are a bit hard on the suspension or seem not to have any at all.  

So, if you know anyone selling a used bike that would fit a 34" inseam for $250 or less, please let me know.

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Default avatar on faceyourmanga.com I didn't even get to click anything, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Creepy... how did they know??

Back when I was at GM, working on investing in private equity funds, there were two funds I really liked that the team eventually turned down:

Union Square Ventures, which saw exits in Tacoda, Feedburner, and del.icio.us, and is nearly guaranteed (because of significant revenue traction) $200mil+ exits in Etsy and Indeed.  That's not counting the potential value of Twitter, either. 

The other one was a consumer focused buyout fund called Catterton Partners, which PEHub just announced had a 7x return on Wellness Pet Food.

"Wellness represents the second big exit for Catterton in four months. In April it earned more than 4x its money when it sold luxury hair product company Frederick Fekkai & Co. for more than $400 million..."

I'm not going to say I told you so, but...

Back in February of 2006, when nextNY started, there weren't a lot of social events going on in the NY Tech scene.  Now, it seems like there's a party going on every other day--and not parties for specific user groups or industries, where the chances of you making a connection to someone relevant are pretty good--just these big generalized "tech community" parties with sponsors no one really cares about. 

It's fun if most of your friends are tech and digital media folks, but mine aren't.  I grew up here in NYC and was a finance guy long before I was a tech guy--not that all my friends are finance people either.  My best friends work in publishing, law, and television production.

That's not to say I haven't made really good friends in the tech community.  I have, but I don't only see them at "industry" events.  I try to see the people in the tech community that I'm actually friends with in smaller settings like at the Shake Shack or for 1:1 lunches.  I play on sports teams with them and invite them to go out with me and my non-tech friends. 

So when I bounce from these bigger, generalized, noisy parties early, it's often because there's someone I know for years, maybe since junior high, waiting somewhere for coffee--or I just have a ton of work to do and can't go out every night if I ever expect to see my parents and other family. 

I think because I don't necessarily take part in the "scene" as much as others, I get a little bit of a reputation of being standoffish, or not sociable.  In actuality, I'm very social--just not necessarily with 300 random strangers who also have websites. 

Sometimes, I think that people think this is what is meant by "participation" when entrepreneurs out looking for money or deals for their startups attend these parties.  I don't know about you, but I never quite feel like these big things are my community and I always wind up hanging out with the same people anyway.

I think entrepreneurs are better off spending as much 1:1 time with people who's opinions they respect and admire, who actually know their space a bit, and also creating communities around them.  No matter what the industry or interest, there's a smaller community of people that you should be gathering together to leverage and exchange ideas.

Hey, if you wanna drink on someone else's tab, these big parties are great... but don't mistake them for or let them replace the more authentic, true relationship (and dare I say friendship) building that needs to be part of your networking.

Last Thursday, I attended Jeff Veen and Bryan Mason's Start Conference.  First off, I want to thank them for all their hard work--it was a refreshing event with a sincere approach.  Right off the bat, priced at $200, you knew that these guys were more out to actually lend entrepreneurs a hand than make a quick buck off them, so I appreciated that.

As I sat through the morning interviews they had set up, I realized that successful people have trouble attributing success to specific actions taken.  There were a few spots in the conversations where key points were glossed over with things like, "And soon after we launched, the product took off..."

Whoa!  Back up the truck!

How?  Why?  What caused success and did you plan for it?

I mean, you know, besides the fact that you created a great product and all, because I definitely took that note down.  "Create great product... check."

Failures are often easier to figure out.  Usually, when shit hits the fan, you know exactly what you did wrong, whether or not you're willing to admit it, but success--crossing that chasm is often something that people can debate for years.

I think someone ought to create a conference just about failure--that all the speakers can do is talk about stuff that went wrong.  We'll call it FailureCon or something.  That's one of my favorite things about having so many entrepreneurs as angels--if I could just manage to avoid half the mistakes they tell me they made, Path 101 will turn out ok. 

Still, attempting to get a list of likely success causes and best practices would be a good start.  I would have liked to see more structured conversations.  George Oates did a fantastic job up on the stage monitoring the audience feedback--perhaps another person could have an expanded role in recording specific takeaways and lessons.

That's another cool thing about the conference--George's presence was an indication of their willingness to experiment to create the best outcome possible for all those involved. 

How about a "what worked/what didn't work" ledger, with each speaker needing to add at least one or two things to both?

Or some kind of lesson voting system for the crowd... where the conference recorder person could add lessons learned to a publicly displayed voting site, the audience could add their own, and at the end of the conference, you'd have 10 solid takeaways. 

One other thing I'd like to hear more discussion of is product.  Making a great product always seems to be what being successful is all about, and everyone usually feels like they have one, but obviously that's not the case.  I'd love to see more product folks go in detail on what makes a great product, how to reposition things when they're not going well, and now to go back to the drawing board.  I'm happy to toss my "7 Product features you should add right now" talk from BarCampNYC.

One other idea...   It seemed like Jeff and Bryan, not surprisingly, attracted a great crowd.  The only problem was, I had no idea who was there and what they were up to, so I really didn't know who to meet.  Perhaps a Ning or Crowdvine site setup beforehand would have done the trick?

All in all, though, I'm glad I went.  Getting to pitch in front of the conference was awesome and I got great feedback (more focused deck coming soon!).  One thing I was a bit surprised at was that other than David Hornik and Rob Hayes, who were both involved with the conference, I didn't spot very many VCs.  You'd think this is the kind of thing investors would show up to.  I guess there's not enough mindless hype about Start yet.  Perhaps that's why I'm inclined to show up again.  :)

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Picture 839, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Hilarious sign on their front door.

I can't agree more with Andrew Kortina:

"I find my self asking many of my friends these days to start blogging or at least posting commentary on interesting web content. My motivations are partly selfish and partly altruistic.  The thought process:

I like to befriend smart people.  They have good ideas. Conversations about good ideas lead to better ideas. Geographic constraints should not prevent good ideation."

I do the same thing, with varying amounts of success.  Not every smart person in my life is going to agree to start and maintain a constant blog.  What I'd really like is a post by post blog invitation service.  If I could just ping people with questions by e-mail, and their responses could automatically wind up on a blog, that would be awesome. 

Sure I could do a lot of cutting and pasting, but it would be a lot more seemless just to have a page to send questions out to people, and have the responses automatically show up on the blog, like Disqus does with comment notifications.  Plus, you could even e-mail back the creator with a link for editing, ping them with comment notifications when people respond, etc.

The quality of such a blog would depend on the owner's ability to ask great questions to smart and interesting people.

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