Long time no blog, but when you’re deep in development, not much to blog about other than ‘built more features and fixed more bugs.’ With that as our backdrop, I wanted to pass along a fun experience we were fortutnate enough to participate in.
Last year, Nam and I were the charter members for Startup Weekend in Boulder, CO. This project was featured on TechCrunch and we got a kick out of reading comments about what we were up to. We met a lot of great people there and even the man who ended up being our lawyer, Ryan Howell. Ryan is top notch and very tech savvy. He sent us a this link to another TechCrunch article since it may help us with Walkspots. Not only did the article interste me, but as I read the comments, one jumped out.
It was from someone in the Denver area explaining she ran a youth program, Arts Street, to help get young people interested in media, GIS, Web 2.0 and technology in general. I wrote back indicating we’re a startup company in Denver and are working on a few things that may be of interested and we’re looking for opportunities to give back to the community. That began my correspondence with Stella Yu. Stella is a wonderful person and let me know all about Arts Street and how she is working in the community to create opportunities for Denver’s young adults. So, after a lot of emails, working on a grant with Stella, we were finally able to meet up with her last Monday.
Nam and I have done a few presentations, mostly for graduate students, and have gathered data to show that the audience will have a much more favorable response when provided with pizza. Not to question our theory, we offer to provide as much pizza as they could eat (partially hoping they’d think we were cool and not ask us any hard questions to make us look dumb!). Pizza was a big hit, we did a live demo of Walkspots (still in development, so no working links yet) and answered a lot of questions. Most of all, everyone seemed really interested and saw there was a opportunity for young entrepreneurs in Colorado 
The presentation was a big success and we’re brainstorming with Stella about how we can grow our relationship and find other opportunities to work Arts Street!
What is the takeaway from this post?
- Even startup companies can do good work in the community
- You never know how you’re network will be built
- Take advantage of opportunities like this, you never know who you might inspire!