February 19, 2008

Day #2 of Visit to the NYC office

Met with a young entrepreneur, Noah Glass, 26 yrs old, who founded a super innovative startup called GoMobo, where mobile phone users (basically 1/2 of the world) can purchase food at a restaurant from their car, cab, train, or on foot and then go pick it up without waiting in line. It's the perfect solution for Manhattan where waits can be long and everyone is on a mobile device. In the past couple years, Noah and GoMobo have been covered on ABC News, Good Morning America, Business Week, Wall Street Journal, and Inc. magazine. They've got 5,000 active users/consumers in their network and the company is really taking off.

On the Inc. magazine topic, I met an Inc. reporter, Athena, at the Inc. 500 Conference in 2007 in Chicago, and reconnected with her at the new Inc. office at 7 World Trade Center. Wow - the views from their office were unbelievable - and very cool to watch Ground Zero start to come back to life with some major developments happening quickly. I'm a huge fan of Inc. magazine and their annual Inc. 500 conference is really helpful for connecting entrepreneurs and giving some new perspective on growing your business the right way. Athena asked a lot of great questions about some of the innovative Oregon companies that I mentioned to her - Plas2Fuel and a network of entrepreneurs in a group we started called Starve Ups.

A friend sent me this awesome video on the "best prank ever done" at Grand Central Station:

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 7:08 AM | Permalink

February 18, 2008

Day #1 of Visit to the NYC office

I took the train in from Princeton, New Jersey this morning (spent the night at my childhood friend's house in Princeton, after recovering from a huge night out at TGI Fridays - with him, his wife, and adorable 2-year-old son, followed by an intense game of Scrabble where his British wife crushed us with words like "cheque" and other non-American, English words). I digress. It's a balmy 55 degree, overcast day in Manhattan and I'm loving the freedom of walking everywhere in this town.

I connected w/ Chris Masagatani, our NYC Director, at my hotel near Madison Square Garden and we walked to his interim office at ReturnPath - an awesome partner of ours. It's amazing what you can get done in just a few hours when you have uninterrupted time in person with someone. Chris and I went over updates on all of our NY region clients - roughly 40 of them. We made travel arrangements for him to come back to see us in April in P'town. We also went over a NYC-specific grassroots marketing campaign of reaching out to other bloggers in NYC in the marketing, interactive, and advertising industries.

Chris's blog is www.CrossPixelNation.com. It's barebones from a design perspective, but it will soon be a key asset to our NYC office.

We treated ReturnPath Exec Stephanie Miller out to a tasty lunch of Southern cooking nearby and caught up on the happenings within the email and interactive industry. Huge thanks again to Matt, Stephanie, and the ReturnPath team to making our entry into the NYC market so much more enjoyable than scrapping away and learning the hard way.

Another update. We hired an awesome NYC-dedicated account coordinator, Donald Law, in our Portland office and he's hitting the ground floor running this week.

If you still haven't clicked through to Chris's blog, here is Episode II of his video talents and impressions of the Big Apple after living here for the past 6 weeks:

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 1:45 PM | Permalink

January 10, 2008

eROI's new NYC Director - Chris Masagatani

Chris spent all weekend and week (wait - is he working at all?) on this very cool video of his journey from Portland to New York City. Watch it and see the amazing amount of positive energy Chris has - nicely done!

Big things will happen in '08, Chris - let the journey begin!

Comments (0) | Posted by ryan at 8:29 AM | Permalink