Cory Booker’s Big Opportunity

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Nate Westheimer

These are exciting times in NY Tech, and one of the most exciting projects / debates is the City’s “Applied Sciences NYC” project.

If you want to brush up on the subject, Anil Dash has a fantastic summary of arguments about the project here, and I wrote a little about my opinions here.

Nothing has excited me more in recent months than hearing about the extraordinary interest the City’s initiative has generated in the academic community. From what I hear, Standford, Cornell, Stevens, and about every other top-tier engineering school has submitted a proposal to the City. As one City official said to me, “It’s like we sent out an invite to a party hoping for a least one person would come, and now we find out everyone wants to come.”

This is exciting, but it also makes me worried: I’m worried that despite all this interest in building bigger engineering departments in NYC, this proposal will go to one school and everyone else’s passion and interest will be wasted… left on the cutting room floor.

And this, I believe, is Cory Booker and other leaders in neighboring areas’ big opportunity. If NYC can’t accomodate more than one of these great institutions opening up shop in NYC, than New Jersey should find matching resources to welcome the runners up.

While we are “NYC tech” and the “NY Tech Meetup” and all of our energies end up focused on promoting and investing in the “New York tech ecosystem,” the truth is that ecosystem goes beyond the municipal walls of New York City and extends to Long Island, Upstate New York, and Northern New Jersey.

NY Tech is bigger than New York City. Aviary was founded and spent its critical early years in Long Island. Multiple HackNY Hackathon winners have come from Rutgers’ computer science labs. Dozens of our best VCs commute from upstate NY. The Hoboken Tech Meetup (now the NJ Tech Meetup, and a closer train ride than much of Brooklyn) has over 1,000 members.

While our City government understandably has to worry about jurisdiction, we do not.

My hope is that, stemming from our City’s forward-thinking and important project, our entire region steps up to the plate and works with these fine engineering schools to find them a home in the area, even if that home isn’t in the City of New York. While I can’t speak for the rest of the community, I know I would do whatever I can, as an entrepreneur and as the leader of the NY Tech Meetup, to welcome new great schools to the area, wherever that is.

Posted in New York City, NY Tech Meetup | Leave a comment

Where NY Tech’s Culture Comes From (and why we owe Amit Gupta our bone marrow)

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Nate Westheimer

As the NY Tech scene has gained momentum over the past few years, I find myself talking to a lot of journalists who are trying to understand what’s going on here and how we arrived at this point.

In these interviews, I always highlight NY Tech’s unique culture, and in so doing I point out that this culture is both native to New York itself, but also cultivated and defined by folks in the tech community 5 to 10 years ago, before this Great Boom showed up in Gap ads and magazine covers.

In my opinion, the culture we have here has been defined by three people:

Scott Heiferman, the NY Tech Meetup, and the culture of building “interesting things.”

Let me be clear, I’m talking about the NY Tech Meetup I became a member of, not the one I run now. Scott created a culture, from the very beginning (2004) of “show the demo, not a PowerPoint.” Scott set the tone in this City that building amazing software that did amazing things was more important and intellectually interesting than who your investors or partners are. When Scott picked people to demo at the NY Tech Meetup there was never a question of “is this a business” — it was always, “Is this interesting?”

Charlie O’Donnell, nextNY, and the culture of coordinated, decentralized community.

When I was elected to run the NY Tech Meetup, it was on the platform of supporting a decentralized community, not creating a traditional, monolithic trade association. Saying “no” to doing more, and instead using the NYTM platform to nurture and support other groups (hackNY, TechiesGiveBack, NYHacker.org, etc) is the thing I think we’ve done best at NYTM. That idea and those values came from the community in nextNY, the non-incorporated, non-hierarchical Google Group-based “organization” Charlie founded in early 2006 and which served as the back-channel conversation and organizational tool for many of the leading entrepreneurs in NYC from 2006 to 2009.

Amit Gupta, Jelly, and the culture of working together.

And this brings me to Amit Gupta. When Amit started Jelly, there were no co-working spaces or hacker spaces or Barcamps or people hosting office hours in NYC. If you wanted to jam out with people about what you were working on you had to show up to a meetup and talk about it, but you’d never just open your laptop, show a stranger some code, and ask for help. Jelly created the idea in NYC that literally opening our homes (or offices) and having other people come work along side us could make us better at what we do and that in turn we could help others do what they do better. We owe the culture of working together to Amit…

AND SO, this brings me to another matter. Recently, Amit was diagnosed with Leukemia.

This Friday, there’s a big event in NYC to get people swabbed to see if there’s a potential genetic match to donate bone marrow to him. I can’t make the event, but I’ve already followed this link from Seth Godin’s blog post on the matter and requested a free home-swab kit.

You see, while chances are slim that I’ll be a genetic match for Amit (chances are higher that a South Asian person would be a match) there’s absolutely no reason not to get swabbed yourself in honor of Amit, especially given his incredible role in shaping the NY tech community — a community which supports my career and likely supports yours as well.

So, please, if you’re appreciative of what Amit has done for us, do something for him: either attend the swabbing party on Friday or order a kit for yourself today.

It’s a super easy way to send a big thanks to Amit for all that he’s done and I know you’ll feel good doing it.

Posted in nextNY, NY Tech Meetup | 2 Comments

Meeting Bill Clinton, Remembering Steve Jobs.

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Nate Westheimer

I met Bill Clinton last night. Oddly, I get a similar feeling thinking about him as I do Steve Jobs. Maybe it’s my association with the roaring 90s, or perhaps the monstrous charisma they both exude. Was balancing the budget the political equivalent to getting all of my music I ever owned on one little, beautiful device? It’s all magic to me.

Back to the event: I walked over to the President as he and Scott Heiferman were talking about the power of self-organized groups. They got kicked off on their conversation, of course, by talking about what Scott does, but when I fully poked my head into the conversation they were on to crowd funding and all the old regulation getting in the way of more crowd lending programs and domestic micro-finance programs. Super fun fact: President Bill Clinton is a big fan of Kickstarter. Also cool, but not surprising: the President still knows more about policy than 99.999% of people who talk about policy. The extensiveness of his knowledge on these issues was astounding. Details matter and are what good policy is made from.

Anyway, when the President introduced himself to me (he has this whole pivot, look you the in the eye, extend his hand and say ‘hello’ thing down pretty well), I wasn’t quite sure what to say. I told him about the NY Tech Meetup for a moment (was cool to have Scott there next to me), but had actually come to the event knowing exactly what I wanted to say to him, if given the chance. So this is what I told him:

“I just wanted to let you know that when I was 9, in 1992, I had just started playing the saxophone, and to see a presidential candidate play the saxophone on national television was about the coolest thing ever. Thanks.”

This is the video of the “Arsenio moment“, if you’ve never seen it:

I’ve met “famous” people before, but I’ve never really known what to say, and when I do say something I usually think “I can’t believe I said that!” Not this time. Telling him a memory from when I was nine and he wasn’t elected president yet felt awesome and I think it was a fun story for him too. Of course, in Cliton’s famous style, he followed up my story with an incredibly detailed story about jazz and the Elvis song played (Heartbreak Hotel).

Anyway, now that I have you in the mood, here’s another video of the President playing saxophone. This time at the Newport Jazz Festival’s 40th Anniversary:

And this brings me to Steve Jobs. If I had ever gotten the chance to meet him I would have told him about the fun my brother and I had playing the Voyage of the Mimi game on our Apple IIe. The game had all these cool peripherals, like a barometer and light meter. It turned our computer into a science kit. While Microsoft embraced business Apple aimed at education. And that’s why I’ve always loved Apple: Spreadsheets? Any computer can run a spreadsheet. Not every computer, at least not ever computer in the mid-80s, made you want to learn something.

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment

Getting Good.

Posted on October 1, 2011 by Nate Westheimer

It was 12 months ago last week that my friend Sam Lessin sat me down and gave me the kick in the rear that got me going down this road of learning to code.

A year later, and I’m super excited about how good of an engineer I’ve become.

I got good.

Some day in the future I’ll write Chapter Two of the HoPE Manifesto, and go into great detail about phase two of my education as an engineer, but today I want to write about the single biggest factor for “getting good” at something.

Just work.

Just say “no” to coffees, lunches, drinks, events, speaking opportunities, advisory board positions, calls, Skype chats, etc.

Let emails go un-replied.

Wake up at 7am every day — at the latest — and get back to working on getting good.

Test your relationships with friends (don’t test them with your partner or family).

Be selfish, if selfish means spending more time mastering your craft.

Be generous — always — but especially if that means helping other people master your craft with you. You’d be surprised how much you learn teaching others.

The single biggest factor in getting good at something is true devotion.

For the past year, I’ve devoted myself to getting good as an engineer. It’s the first skill I’ve ever truly devoted myself to, and thus the first skill I can actually say I have.

Lord knows I have a ways, ways ways to go, but today, I feel pretty awesome about how far I’ve come. And, I can’t wait to see where I am one year of devotion from now. I think I’m hooked on this concept of “just work.”

Sorry, Emails…

Posted in Code, Entrepreneurship | Leave a comment

I’m Teaching a SkillShare Class: “Teaching Yourself to Code for N00bs and Product People”

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Nate Westheimer

Ever since writing my “learn to code” manifesto, learning to code has been the number one thing people want to talk to me about at my Ohours or whenever I see people out and about.

As it turns out, there are a ton of people out there who are just like I was 10 months ago: a n00b, a “product person,” someone hopelessly looking for their “technical co-founder.”

So, I’m joining the SkillShare revolution and teaching a class called “Teaching Yourself to Code for N00bs and Product People.”

The idea of the class is not that you’ll come away knowing how to code but that you’ll come away from the class knowing how to learn.

Anyway, I’m totally excited about this class, and if all goes well I’ll be making it a regular thing.

So, if you’re interested, go sign up for my class, and if you’re only kinda interested or the date doesn’t work for you, follow me on SkillShare or “Watch” the class for when I do it again in the future.

Posted in Code | Tagged | 2 Comments