Saturday, January 09, 2010

Craig Newmark, Dennis Crowley, Jennifer 8 Lee: Koreatown

Around noon I came across a Facebook update from Jennifer (@jenny8lee). It was a Twitter update, but since she has her Twitter integrated with Facebook. The update was from yesterday. Does anyone want to have Korean fried chicken with Craig Newmark? (@craignewmark) And I am like, shoot, I missed that one. That must have been a Friday evening thing. But another update said Saturday. So I promptly shot her an email. Any spots left? She said yes, come on over.

Jennifer is one of the very top journalists on Twitter (her account of the evening). Her guy Craig Silverstein (@csilvers) was Google's employee number one. It is like the founders of Google got together, and then when they looked around, Craig was the first person they spotted, something like that.

New York Times: Craig (of the list) Looks Beyond The Web

I was the first person to show. (@badenchicken) So I went upstairs. I saw one spot taken. I am thinking, that has got be 8's spot. So Craig will probably be sitting near there. I took a nice spot a few seats from them. But when Craig finally showed he walked right past my table on to some back table.

But guess who else showed up? Dennis Crowley, (@dens) the FourSquare guy, and he decided to sit right next to me. He was with his girlfriend (@chelsa, @pnizzle) who moved to New York City from Indiana a few years ago. "Me too!" I exclaimed.

Dennis Crowley: I Underestimated Him

Once we were squarely sitted, I told Dennis that I was at his demo at the New York Tech MeetUp last spring, "Sorry, but I did not see the FourSquare potential at that time. Now people are saying FourSquare is the next Twitter and I can see why."

Image representing Dennis Crowley as depicted ...Image via CrunchBase
"I did not either," he said rather disarmingly.

I asked him a bunch of questions. One of my final questions was, "Let me ask you a stupid question. Why are you in New York? Why are you not in California?"

He said New York is a better location, it is more diverse. When a white guy like Dennis says diverse, he means people from different sectors like tech, media, finance, advertising, design. When I say diverse, I mean the rainbow coalition.

Towards the end Craig went from table to table. He and Dennis talked at some length.

"You helped me find my place when I moved to NYC a few years ago," I said to Craig.

"I appreciate that," he said. (@yunapark)

About 40 people showed up for the dinner.

http://twitter.com/craignewmark/status/7594771078
http://twitter.com/Jason/status/7597851825


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