TWSS

I'm back! Well, at least I'm going to try to be back. I'll call my laziness in updating this blog a "hiatus."  Um, sure. To be fair, for a while, I was busy updating my other blog, Apartmentalizing, but coincidentally, my hiatus from that blog occurred at exactly the same time as from TWSS.  Hm, sorry.

Anyway, I'm back.  Back in NY.  Back out of school.  Back to the blog.  And soon, back to work (gasp!).  And I promise that TWSS will be stomach-crunches-don't-work-your-abs-as-hard-as-this-laughter funny, sarcastic, insightful, witty, yadda yadda.

But in the meantime, I thought y'all (I just got back from vacay in fly-over country) would be interested in what Quora (or more specifically, Quora users) considers the "hottest start-ups in NY."  (NOTE:  The map above is from Business Insider... and no, I did not cross-reference.)  Perhaps not surprisingly, this question got a whole lot more replies (112) than my other one about how to get angel funding (0). A lot of repeats, a lot of founders' posting their own companies, a lot of not-really-startups-but-you-can-pretend-you-still-work-at-a-start-up-postings, a lot of bickering, but a pretty comprehensive list.

Here it is (I didn't edit it, so don't get on me about the ones that are clearly NOT start-ups) - discuss, debate, fight it out.

• 10gen
• 20x200
• Animoto
• AppNexus
• Aviary
• Behance
• Blip.tv
• Boxee
• Carbonmade
• charity: water
• College Humor
• drop.io
• Etsy
• FanBridge
• Flavors.me
• FluidInfo
• Foursquare
• Gawker
• gdgt
• Gilt Groupe
• Hotpotato
• Huffington Post
• Hunch
• Ideeli
• Intent Media
• Invite Media (confirmed acquired by Google)
• iVdopia
• Kickstarter
• Livestream
• Makerbot
• Measy INC
• MediaMath
• Meetup
• Ogmento
• OKCupid
• OMGPOP
• PaperlessPost
• Quirky
• Rent the Runway
• SecondMarket
• Square
• Squarespace
• StackOverflow
• Thrillist
• TED
• Tinychat
• Tremor Media
• Tumblr
• TheLadders
• Vimeo

This is the last week of classes for 2nd year students at HBS, and we're all feeling a bit traumatized by the whole thing (by school ending, by not school itself).  Emotions range from anxiety to denial to drunkenness to panic to heartbreak to...well, you get the point.  Anyway, my section was asked to read a short article by John Gardner for our final meeting tomorrow.  And since I'm constantly answering the question "what did you actually learn in business school?" (apparently, "how to spend debt with abandon" is not, in fact, a legitimate answer...), I figured I'd share the last paragraph of the article:

"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt.  Meaning is something you build into your life.  You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something.  The ingredients are there.  You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life.  Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you.  If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account." - John Gardner

Definitely not ready to leave the HBS bubble.

So Kickstarter is my recent obsession.  It allows you to "back" creative projects by giving anything between $1 and $10,000 (you know, for all you high rollers out there just dying to throw 10G's on your credit card).

Creative types - artists, filmmakers, photographers, designers, etc. - post projects and request funding to achieve their next milestone.  You only get charged if they reach their full funding needs, and in exchange for contributing, the producer will give you something - anything from a hug if you run into them on the street (though I don't think that homeless guy offering me some lovin' the other night was one of my producers...) to an archival photo to a 300-pg graphic novel and more.  Needless to say, I've thrown down some cashola on this site.  Because while I love my Gilt purchases (and believe me, I still make them), at least here I'm helping to make the world a more creative place!

Anyway, I'm a backer of one project in particular that I'm totally loving.  The artist behind it was a young volunteer on the Obama campaign, and has/is creating 300 pen-and-ink drawings of her experiences on the trail.  The drawings are pretty amazing!!  She's super behind her funding goal, though, so fingers crossed that she goes gang-busters on the fundraising in the next 55 days!

Check out the proj:

There's really only one word for this: AH-mazing.

PS. Thanks AB!

A view from the bridge...