Tag Archives: new york city

My Manhattan office

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I went to the New York OpenCoffee meeting this morning. I’ve been to a few OpenCoffee’s around the world and I like the events. They normally give me a quick flavour of the tech scene in a place. The meetings in Cape Town are really buzzing for example.

This morning’s meeting opened with a series of introductions, each person introduced themselves in that usual “My name is blah and my company is called blah and I blah blah blah”. I was looking for a place to work for the day so I literally jumped from my seat when my turn came. I sprang into life, delivered an energetic good morning, explained my name was Callum, I’m from Scotland, and I was looking for a desk for the day.

The charming, generous and downright handsome Ashley J. Heather was a couple of intros before me. English accent, runs a tech incubator. Perfect I thought. He agreed. Bingo, I had scored an office for the day. So this post comes to you from the office space of dotbox. Thanks Ashley. :-)

Here’s a completely unrelated, creative commons licenced picture of a totally different type of dotbox for your viewing pleasure!

A non MBA with Seth Godin

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Wow. I just woke up and read this. Awesome. I’m physically excited. My first thought is, apply, do it right now, immediately, without hesitation. Ok, reality check:

  • I have 6 months of expenses saved, I can afford it.
  • I could still spend 3 hours / day working on my own stuff.
  • How would I get a visa to remain in the US for 6 months?
  • I’d need to apply and be accepted!

It would be a huge commitment. I dreamed up a new project last night. One new customer per day. If I can find one customer per day for StraightPress, in 6 months, I’ll have a sustainable business. I was thinking to launch on 1 January, try to get a few other people on board.

There’s something about Seth’s focus that really connects with me. I’ve always been hesitant to fully engage with purely commercial projects. I’ve never felt quite … comfortable about it. Somehow like just making money was a little corrupt. I think I’ve managed to solve that within StraightPress by making our service available, for free, to non profits, charities, NGOs, and others.

Application deadline is 14 December. That’s 2 weeks. I have some time to consider. Anyone care to comment? Should I go for it? Either way I’m about to email the top 10 people I think would benefit from it. Now who are they? :)