New York Video Meetup
I attended the New York Video Meetup last night at Columbia. It was the first meetup I had attended from the video group. I loved the Tech Meetups until the New York Times covered then, ruining the intimate setting and networking opportunities by subsequently skewing the crowd away from hackers and toward ‘business development executives at large media companies’ (who aren’t working on any deals that eventually get implemented).
I loved last night but had the lingering feeling that I had missed the boat on this meetup by one or two meetings as well. There were probably 120 or so people at the event. The ideal number I think is around 50, although heavily dependent on the quality of the audience.
That said, the presenters were of top quality and Yaron, the moderator, did a great job of keeping things ticking along.
Initially I went along to see Jeff Pulver, who I had read a lot about, but he didn’t really have that much to say and the mission of his new startup, Network2, is a little ambiguous (getting the word out about online video? isn’t YouTube spreading the word about online video by virtue of its popularity?).
By far the best speaker was Aaron Cohen, who founded Bolt.com. Aaron had the charming nonchalance of someone who had lost a lot of fuckload of money and ridden the roller coaster ride of the late nineties. He founded Bolt.com a decade ago, raised $60m, nearly went public, left and then came back and bought the company through a management buyout in 2003. The company did about $10m in revenue last year, which is not insignificant, and is a top ten video destination.
The strength of the decade old community meant that video adoption recently was fairly easy to achieve. Without the fabric of community, he doubted the site would have been able to thrive. In the end, video is a new medium for the blur between communications and content, rather than something into itself.
Cohen also said that he had founded another startup to swing for the fences and announced that he had raised money from First Round Capital. But he declined to say the name of the startup, what it was doing (other than trying to supplant MySpace) or how it would do it. Stay tuned.
