(Danny Chong)

The New Jersey Tech Meetup (formerly the Hoboken Tech Meetup) had been a sleeper success; a smaller venue where new startups could demo before their big Skirball debut at the much larger New York Tech Meetup. But the meetup, run by DFJ Gotham entrepreneur in residence Aaron Price, has been growing steadily and recently hit 1,500 members, adding about 100 members a month for the last six months. It's now the largest tech organization in New Jersey, Mr. Price said.

The NJTM has little in common with that mothership of tech meetups, the 21,000-some member New York Tech Meetup. In Hoboken, the meetup starts with speed dating style networking. Then from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. (Mr. Price is very precise when it comes to time, and publicly shames those who RSVP but don't show up), three startups demo for around 100 or so people who then vote on their favorites. The meetup rounds out with a featured speaker and question and answer session, after which attendees decamp to a nearby bar for beer and wings.

It's not changed much since Betabeat braved the PATH out to Hoboken almost a year ago; it's just bigger. Although Mr. Price might want to be cautious about growth; intimacy is one of the advantages of the Jersey meetup over NYTM, members said.

Now the meetup is pulling in some attendees, including venture capitalists, who want to meet some new startups outside the Silicon Alley-General Assembly-NYTM bubble, Mr. Price said in a phone call yesterday.

The last meetup featured two fairly well-known startups: Mark Davis's Kohort and the Y Combinator graduate Tutorspree, as well as something called DinnerDateDeal. Joy Marcus, a venture partner at DFJ Gotham, was the speaker. "Amazing time at last night's @njtechme! 150+, standing room only," Mr. Price tweeted after the event.

The next goal is to get Senator Robert Menendez, who was made aware of the group after NJTM organized its own emergency SOPA/PIPA rally, to speak at the event.

MissionFifty

Aaron Price, organizer of the 1,000-plus member Hoboken Tech Meetup and entrepreneur-at-large for DFJ Gotham, has been working on a Jersey coworking space for months. MissionFifty, at 50 Harrison St. in Hoboken, is finally open.

Last week was open house for entrepreneurs who wanted to check it out. They found amenities in the 3,000 sq. ft. space include sitting and standing desks, lockers, and a bathroom with a shower. Pricing is not yet set, but leases are month-to-month.

UNYStartups posted a video tour of the new space:

“I can’t tell you the whole idea.” The Internet entrepreneur on the other end of the phone sounded panicky. “It’s going to sound ludicrous and ambitious, more ludicrous and ambitious than most.”

The voice belonged to a 27-year-old Stanford law student—“just about the oldest you can be where I cannot remember not having a computer”—who was in New York last week to talk to people about his new concept for a website.

He gave a few vague descriptors that could apply to half the start-ups in New York.

“I definitely don’t want it in the newspaper,” he said. “I’m worried that even little sign posts toward what I want to build are dangerous.”

When he had the idea in April, he talked about it to anyone who would listen. “I definitely went manic--which has never happened before--when it came into my head, for about 10 days, which were incredibly productive and I wound up talking to a senior engineer at Google and some very well respected people at Stanford,” he said. “I would not sleep. I’d get to bed at like 3:30 and wake up at 6:30 and the entire time I’m just thinking about how to build this thing that was in my head that I think would make the world a better place... I was pacing and talking to everyone I could about it.”

The mania lasted about ten days, followed by four days of crippling depression. His girlfriend seemed to be the only one who noticed. “The fact that I seemed to be taking along some very, very smart people with me was both exciting and in retrospect, a little bit disconcerting,” he said.

“But it is a big idea, and that’s the language of start-ups," he continued. "The language of start-ups is a sort of manic language, it’s, ‘I’m going to change the world,’ which for normal people is like, ‘Whoa, that sounds grandiose,’ and you sound a little bit crazy. In start-up world, it’s like, ‘Can I give you some money for that?’”

We hung up. He emailed immediately to scrub the record. “I know this is going to sound a little paranoid, but I'd appreciate it if you would not include the quote about ----------- being ----------- and wanting to develop a platform for ----------. Paranoia is also a symptom of start-up fever.”

Bankers Pull a Pivot - Read the Diaries of a Fledgling Founder

Start-up fever! Whether it’s due to The Social Network or the new wave of billion-dollar tech I.P.O.’s, lately it seems like everyone has a start-up. Betabeat first noticed it in our own neighborhood, the tech-tending East Village, home of Foursquare. On a recent weekend, we overheard an entrepreneur talking about pitching investors over brunch on St. Marks and glimpsed another demonstrating his website’s Twitter integration to a friend at Ninth Street Espresso. We tried to eavesdrop on a bearded, 40-ish fellow ranting about his start-up to a friend in Tompkins Square Park around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday and caught the words “convertible note.” The trend has invaded our building as well. The Goldman Sachs engineer on the second floor wants to join a start-up. He asked us about tech events.

The start-up mythology—build fast, get cash, save the world—and the low barrier to entry make it tough to resist. “An all-consuming start-up can be very difficult for a mom of young kids,” New York-based mommy blog mogul Philippa Smith said in an email, but “the lure of creating something that was potentially such a benefit to both local moms and the local business community was too great.” Her start-up, Juice in the City or “the Groupon for moms,” recently announced a $6 million round of funding.

“It’s Foursquare, it’s Etsy, it’s Tumblr,” said Zeb Dropkin, a digital media consultant-turned-start-up entrepreneur currently working on RentHackr.com, a website where New Yorkers admit how much rent they’re really paying. “New York City has real investment now, real cycles. This is the real leagues.”

Roger Wu, who organizes the Stamford Tech Meetup, recently raised money for one of his start-ups. The investors remembered him because of his red New Balances, he told Betabeat. “It’s like Hollywood, where everyone’s an actor,” he said. “Everyone with a little idea they had when they were drinking is going to start a company and be the next Facebook.”

(Betabeat got an email recently from a friend seeking cycling routes: “Is there a HopStop for bicycles? Because if there isn’t let’s start one and get riiiiichhh!”)

Cheryl Yeoh was working as a management consultant for KPMG, an 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. gig that kept her in Scotch tastings and Michelin stars, when she realized sometime in the middle of April that she needed to do an Internet start-up for something. Anything. The idea was secondary. What mattered was making something amazing that could reach not just hundreds of people or thousands, but millions. “I knew I could do something greater,” she told Betabeat. “Every time I met someone who told me, ‘Oh, I’m a founder of so-and-so,’ or whatever, I don’t care what company it was, every time they said that I thought, oh my gosh, why am I not doing this, I know I can start something, I know I can do something.

“I was obsessed. You can use the word ‘obsession.’”

Ms. Yeoh had a programmer friend. She took him out to lunch and pitched him a few ideas. He picked CityPockets, a website that imports a user’s coupons from daily deal sites like Groupon and sends friendly reminders when they’re about to expire. “We’d come home at 8:30 at night and right away from 9 p.m. I was writing, researching until like 2 a.m.,” she said. “Or I would spend time going to tech events. Some days I would go until 3 or 4 a.m. because I was talking to my mentor in San Francisco. Even though I was physically tired, I was mentally awake. Every morning I would jump out of bed because I was like, I wonder what new features I can think of next... Even my friends were like, ‘Wow, you’re sleeping so little but you look so much more alive!’” She left her job in August, two months after her 27th birthday. “I told my manager, I have to leave,” she said. “I have to do this thing because it’s consuming me.”

She went on. “I had a one-bedroom in Gramercy, lived the high life, had designer coats and bags, traveled multiple times a year. I quit all that. Moved into an apartment in the East Village—Alphabet City, actually—and slept in a living room on a futon kind of separated by curtains Velcroed up to the ceiling. For five months I did that... I wanted to prove that I can live just bare bones, live the life of a scrappy entrepreneur so that I can just fully focus on the product without any distractions whatever.

“I have enough savings in my bank, actually, to continue living in my Gramercy apartment,” she added. “It was more like I made an active choice to go with that lifestyle.” The day she put the curtains up, she recalled, she giggled until her eyes teared.

“In the Bay Area you have more superstars and guys who have done a bunch of start-ups,” said Shai Goldman, a director at Silicon Valley Bank who moved to New York from the Bay Area in January. “The majority of entrepreneurs here, a lot of them are first-time entrepreneurs. It’s almost like a cohort. They’re kind of all learning at the same time, they’re going through the same missteps. It makes it a little more interesting here.

“Every entrepreneur has the opportunity to make a big mark in New York right now.”

The anonymous entrepreneur we spoke to by phone wants to drop out of Stanford and raise money in New York. “I think New York is kind of the Wild West frontier of investing right now. It’s a little bit unstable and it’s a little bit dirty,” he said. Silicon Valley is “this weird system that’s dominated by these monsters” like Facebook and Google, which are buying "crap companies to get the people."

“The mythology is a little tarnished out there,” he said. “The people I know in New York are really excited about the things that happen here in a way that people at Stanford and the Valley certainly aren’t. You know, it’s big business.”

Evidence of the city’s start-up fever can be seen on Meetup.com—the New York-based, dot-com-era start-up that became a hub for local techsters—where the number of recurring tech events has wildly accelerated: Startup Lunch, 104 members; Dumbo Tech Breakfast, 641 members; UWS Startup Meetup, 164 members; the NYC Startup Garage, 208 members; NYC Startup Weekend, 337 members; the NYC Lean Startup Machine, 1,553 members; the New York Technology Bathhouse Meetup, 25 members.

On a recent muggy evening, about 70 mostly 20-something, mostly male guests gathered in clusters on a rooftop in Chelsea for the summer’s first “Find a Cofounder” party, squinting at one another’s name tags as the sun set. Red name tags were for programmers; blue meant you were more of a business guy. The blue name tags ran out by the time Betabeat got a drink.

“So three years ago, there was the New York Tech Meetup, right?” Gary Sharma said, referring to the 18,545-member organization that draws about 800 attendees to its monthly demo nights. Mr. Sharma was a mild-mannered Wall Street marketing consultant before he became “The Guy with the Red Tie,” per his business card and neckwear. He has been attending tech start-up events and cataloguing them in his weekly newsletter, GarysGuide, for the better part of four years. “That was the start-up meetup, pretty much. I like to call it the mothership. As that gets bigger, I started seeing satellite meetups coming out of it. Video 2.0, Web 2.0. Then you started seeing even smaller ones. Travel 2.0, Fashion 2.0. Then more niche ones. Some people started the Hoboken Tech Meetup. You know where Hoboken is?” We did; we’ve been. The Hoboken Tech Meetup has 901 members. Its monthly Monday night meetings always have a wait list.

“I want to start a social-local-mobile meetup called SoLoMo!” Mr. Sharma said. “No, I’m just kidding,” he added quickly.

“I knew nothing about Internet start-ups,” Ben Wolff, a smiley personal stylist who lives in Corona, Queens, admitted to Betabeat as we sat cross-legged on a futon in a corner of the patio. “I knew I needed to make an electronic version of myself. That’s why I started.”

Last year, Mr. Wolff, whose business consists of going through client’s closets and refreshing their wardrobes, wrote out a set of “if this, then that” instructions in a spreadsheet to formalize his process. A few encouraging conversations with friends inspired him to turn it into a start-up. His dream is to make the “Faster Pants algorithm” part of every man’s shopping experience, he said, as soon as he can find someone to code for equity. “I equate this with a high school dance where there’s more girls than boys,” he said, mock-twiddling his thumbs. “I feel like I’m sitting on the wall going, ‘Oh, please dance with me!’”

“You’re a reporter? Reporters did a lot for me!” said Ray Schmitz. A former real-estate broker who made a small name for himself by passing out business cards at the revolving door of Bear Stearns the day the investment bank announced its sale to JPMorgan, he was also seeking dance partners. He had the idea for a website that lets brokers refer business to each other in 2009. “I remember reading a book by Clay Shirky,” he said. “He makes a wonderful point that the Internet may be the biggest change in society since the printing press. It may be even bigger. The start-ups in New York are forging the life of the future for everyone right now. The way we’ll live, work and play tomorrow is being created here today.”

On our way out, Betabeat ran into Aaron Price, the fastidious organizer of the Hoboken Tech Meetup, who was standing in the bathroom line. Things were going well, he said. He was recently named to the nebulous position of “entrepreneur at large” for the early-stage venture capital fund DFJ Gotham, opened a co-working space, and was working on his start-up, makeMania, a website where crafty people show off their D.I.Y. projects.

He exhorted us, as always, to come to the next Hoboken meetup. We promised to try.

Bankers Pull a Pivot - Read the Diaries of a Fledgling Founder

In the start-up community, failure is a badge of honor. The Purple Heart highlights glorious stories of failure, lessons learned, and redemption.

"Probably my most interesting failure was my first start-up," Aaron Price, the fastidious director of the Hoboken Tech Meetup, told Betabeat over the phone. We were expecting him to tell us the story of how he used to sell Harley Davidson motorcycle parts on eBay, relying on a warehouse of high school students who cataloged each overstock part--a tale he had partially related over Blue Moons after the Meetup Monday night. But Mr. Price has founded several start-ups--his blog is called "Failway to Success"--and the story he wanted to tell was of DeliverU.com, born in 1999, when he was a 20-year old junior at the University of Maryland.

DeliverU.com started like all food delivery start-ups. "In college, my roommate and I wanted to order food online and couldn’t." They bought DeliverU.com and started hosting a fax server so they could transmit orders to local restaurants. It was a smash hit on campus.

"We had a lot of success on a completely viral marketing effort," he said. "But we were just very naive to the kinds of capital that it took to grow a business like that. We really didn’t think through what the business model would look like."

Mr. Price and his partner were  approached by angel investors, but they had been advised by "a bitter old entrepreneur" to never take outside investment. That was their first mistake.

"We could really have used the guidance as well as the capital," Mr. Price said. The business was popular and the salesmen had honed their pitch--DeliverU expanded to Washington, D.C., partnered with Takeout Taxi and got dangerously close to closing national deals with Chipotle and Cosi. So what went wrong?

For one, the business was profitable, but margins were thin. "We made five percent of every order that went through. On a college campus, the average order is $12. That gives us a whopping $.60 cents for every order that goes through," he said. "To make any money, you need a huge amount of volume. Customer acquisition costs could quickly eat away at those margins."

And customer acquisition was mostly on DeliverU. The merchants had the wrong incentives, Mr. Price explained, because the cost of a DeliverU order was slightly higher than one they could take over the phone. That put the burden of marketing the service mostly on Mr. Price and his partner. "We were a B2B service. But then the restaurants were asking us to be a B2C marketing company and bring them this business. That was a major flaw in our model; there was not enough money to also market those restaurants," he said.

The technology was also a challenge. Fax servers would go down and DeliverU had to maintain a backup system that was inefficient and tough to scale. When the Cosi and Chipotle deals fell through around the same time, the entrepreneurs got discouraged and decided it was time to move on. One of the partners took over the business and eventually shut it down.

"It was a failure in that I didn’t retire on DeliverU, but it was a success in that it's definitely changed the way I approach any business ever since," he said.

So what's at DeliverU.com now? we asked.

"That’s a good question. Let’s find out," he said. "It’s been a while." Silence on the other end of the line, as Mr. Price navigates to his old domain. It's a list of Google Ads; we assumed a squatter. "I think that I actually own the domain," Mr. Price said. "But I just haven’t done anything with it in so long. I guess I could change it... I guess it doesn't really matter, though."

Source: http://coolhunting.com

The Hoboken Tech Meetup features printed name tags, sandwiches and soft drinks, public humiliation for anyone who RSVPs but doesn't show, and a more-or-less prompt start time of 6:30 (there's only so much discipline that can be imposed on people, and we have to get to Hoboken). On Monday, the featured speaker was Craig Kanarick.

Mr. Kanarick was once one of the Silicon Alley dot-com kings; he co-founded Razorfish, one of the first large agencies to make websites for major brands. Razorfish grew from two employees to more than 2,000 and its share price doubled on the day it IPO'ed. Two years later, the company's value had dropped from $4 billion to $8 million and Mr. Kanarick started working as a prep cook.

"When the business was failing, and all we were talking about was who we were going to fire tomorrow, I would look across the street and see the chefs in their toques taking a cigarette break," he said. "I thought, I should be over there learning how to make soup instead of decided who I was going to make cry today." He interned at the Institute Babbo across from his former office for nine months.

It would have been interesting to go to the 1999 equivalent of the Hoboken Tech Meetup. The members are dedicated--no wantrepreneurs here--and leader Aaron Price, a spectacled and fastidious self-starter punctuated by a pair of plaid TOMS, curates a careful lineup of speakers and demos to talk in the lecture room at Stevens Institute of Technology. This was the tenth such Meetup. The internet is slow and the start-ups represented by the audience are a little 2008. Most businesses Betabeat encountered were web-based, not mobile, and there was no location-based anything!

But that may not be a bad thing, because it means the Jersey entrepreneurs are well outside the Union Square groupthink. All the presenting companies chosen by Mr. Price had precise business models, none of which relied on advertising. The New York City start-ups Honestly Now relies on referrals to small business professionals. City-based Dealery is a daily deal curator that also does its own daily deals and Jersey-based Takeoff, a collaborative video editing service, will be a paid service.

The outpost gathering is also more intimate than its city counterpart. "New York Tech Meetup is just too huge," one attendee said.

Mr. Kanarick's Powerpoint was not actually about his own dot-com hell. He talked about the history of marketing and the state of tech today (it's Global, Social, Mobile, Digital, Live, Immersive and Integrated) with some inspirational aphorisms for entrepreneurs thrown in. "Who picked out their outfit this morning?" he asked the audience of 70 or so. We all raised our hands. "You're all designers. You all designed an interface." He indicated his dark grey blazer and jeans. He recommended we read Delivering Happiness by Zappo's CEO Tony Hsieh.

Afterward, the Jersey entrepreneurs repaired to a nearby pub where we discussed Foursquare and whether it would be possible or enjoyable to live without a cell phone for a year. Mr. Price told Betabeat about an encounter with New York City entrepreneurs. "I capitalize on the fact that you guys ignore New Jersey," he said.