My PR Friend Owns a Golden Goose!
First, a little background on my office situation.
(my office)
As you can tell from the pics, I have a pretty swanky setup. It’s part of the deal I worked out for my company and magically (and by “magically” I mean after hours upon hours of bargaining, fighting, and pouting), it’s basically free. Those of you familiar with the world of Venture Capitalism might recognize my office as “incubator space.”
Translated for the lay person: a company gives you free office space and resources, and sticks you in a building with a bunch of caffeine-addicted, over worked, underfunded entrepreneurs. In exchange for your suffering, they take a tiny little piece of what they hope, one day, will be a large tasty pie. The real upside, if you can stomach the Larry Paige wannabes, is the variety of connections you make in this environment (factored into the “incubator” design).
Today’s post is about one of these connections, namely: ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com. What does this company do? Well, it brings together programmers and, you guessed it, designers (as well as entrepreneurs and writers).
The head of PR and marketing at PMD is a wirey, 40 something year old man named David Bernstein who, unbeknownst to himself, is a regular contributor at this blog. By “contributor,” I mean that his bitching about venture capitalists, marketers, and every other person with two eyes and an asshole… well, it kinda rubs off on me - not that I need any rubbing.
Anyway, he’s a constant source of entertainment, so I finally managed to get around to looking at PMD’s site the other day, and believe it or not, I was very impressed.
However, I was even more impressed when I learned - through talking to him - about the early successes at PMD. Apparently, several prominent TechCrunch, TechStars and DEMO companies have come together through his site. One company, IntenseDebate (see: TechCrunch, TechStars, ReadWriteWeb, VC Funded), even details their worldwide meeting/collaboration through their site’s ” about us” section.
I’ve also seen their Facebook application, which announces one’s status (i.e. Entrepreneur seeking Programmer) on several friends’ profiles. When I first heard these guys talk about Facebook, I assumed they were merely looking to score dates with co-eds. But I guess I was proved wrong once again.
Not too shabby, David. Particularly for a guy who keeps a set of his girlfriend’s bra and panties in his desk drawer.
Anyway, long story short: I’m not too angry about sharing an office space with PMD. They might be guilty of obsessively watching “The Hills” and eating lunch at Urth cafe solely to catch a glimpse Tyra Banks gouring herself and any potential cleavage that may or may not result, but they are also responsible for the genesis of various prominent websites and for that, I tip my cap. That’s right. Consider my hat officially tipped.
Stay tuned. One of these days I’ll be sure to sit PMD down for an interview. After all, they’re only down the hall.
backlink: http://www.brianzafron.com/blog/?p=20
February 6th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
I’d like to confirm everything he wrote about Bernstien’s GF… its all true. Nice post. Thanks for the press!
February 6th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
What he meant to say was, untrue. Everything is true minus the part about my GF. She’s a fine lady. But definitely a nice post. Thanks for the mention.
March 4th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
[…] website (one of the start-ups in my shared incubator space; mentioned in this article), I found myself ready to click. And herein lies the unpleasant surprise: before even […]