Mr. Hsieh/Mr. Wiggles

Earlier this month, Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman announced the newest member of the Meetup cap table: Zappos front man Tony Hsieh. "indeed, tony (zappos ceo) bought out one of our shareholders," Mr. Heiferman wrote in a company-wide email.

"i'm thrilled--because tony is a true hero of great companies, cultures, customer experience, community and it can't hurt to have another hsieh around," he added, referring presumably to Richard Hsieh, Meetup's lead software engineer here in New York.

Mr. Heiferman didn't specify which shareholder was bought out. Previous investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Omidyar Network, eBay, and Union Square Ventures. In February, cofounder Matt Meeker left to launch BarkBox, a Birchbox for dogs. Mr. Heiferman said that Mr. Hsieh's motivation was two-fold:

tony bought a piece of meetup because he believes in our potential --both meme & money: he wants us to revolutionize community for people-- and i think he wants a cut of the profit as we keep growing over the long-haul (or whatever way that all of our stock/options pay out)

Based on the growth in new members, things are definitely looking up-and-to-the-right, as they say.

As for Mr. Hsieh, this isn't his first run-in with the company.  Back in 2009, he introduced staffers to a scooter-racing alter-ego known as Mr. Wiggles (at about 1.50):

We! Are! New York Tech! (And so are you!)

On a recent Wednesday evening, all the red plush seats in the large, two-tiered auditorium at NYU’s Skirball Center were filled, as they usually are for the monthly assembly of the New York Tech Meetup, the largest organization of Internet professionals in the city. But the twittering audience members were about to hear some bad news they probably already knew: New York is No. 2.

Scott Heiferman, the sandy-haired founder known to smash iPads on stage for dramatic effect, flipped through slides ranking cities around the world by their tech meetup ecosystems. Chicago was No. 5; Washington, D.C. was No. 4, and London was No. 3. He reached a screen labeled TOP TWO TECH TOWNS, and he stopped. “So the Bay Area and New York,” he said mischievously, as the techies giggled and agitated in their seats. “Let’s get into this right now. Leeeeet’s take a look at this.”

The next slide showed two lines, red and blue, zig-zagging in tandem—but Silicon Valley was consistently a cut above. “Isn’t it crazy that we have been neck and neck with the Bay Area for month after month after month?” Mr. Heiferman asked the audience. “I think that has to change. And I think we need to let a little aggression out. Does anyone have an iPad?”
Nobody did—or rather, nobody offered to hand one over. But it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Mr. Heiferman sledgehammering a tablet from the Cupertino-based company to make his point.

The rivalry between the coastal tech hubs is not entirely friendly. “The NYC tech scene is exploding,” investor and entrepreneur Chris Dixon wrote in February 2010, an early instance of the now-common trope of pairing the words “New York City tech” with the word “exploding” (alternatively, “blowing up”; also “killing it,” “crushing it”). “Am I the only person in NYC rolling their eyes at this continual barrage of ‘IN NYC IT RAINS MANNA FROM THE SKY!’?” one commenter wrote. Fans of the East or West Coast volleyed in the comments. New York was accused of being frivolous, blustery, and “startup suicide.” California was called out for being a monoculture.

Over the last few years, the rhetoric in Silicon Alley has started to sound like a Bring It On sequel. The rhetoric is dominated by two themes: boostery New York exceptionalism—in September 2009, the high-profile investor Fred Wilson gave a talk called “NYC’s Startup Scene: What makes it special?”—and the David and Goliath narrative, with Silicon Valley as the reigning champion versus New York as the cool, scrappy young challenger.

Even City Hall is on the squad. “My ultimate goal is reclaiming our title as the world capital of technological innovation,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said back in July. When a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News called to say he was “planning a column on the budding rivalry between our two regions,” the receptionist answered: “What rivalry? We’re winning!”

Rachel Sterne, whose appointment as the city’s first “chief digital officer” last year immediately started trending on Twitter within New York, is probably New York’s head tech cheerleader, trumpeting startup minutiae to her 29,490 followers.

Given that the three-year-old debate really hasn’t changed much, some feel it’s time to stop the pep rally and get to the game.

“The West Coast can claim it won round one of whatever ridiculous battle this is all about, but it really depends on when you start the ‘fight,’” said Aaron Price, an entrepreneur in residence at DFJ Gotham Ventures and founder of the New Jersey Tech Meetup. “Do they want talk pharmaceutical or telephony? I didn’t think so. It’s all pointless and self-serving. Let’s just all get back to work and build awesome companies that can have offices employing people all throughout the country and the globe.”

In May, the Brooklyn-based tech blogger Courtney Boyd Myers wrote a blog post for The Next Web called “Why New York City’s Tech Scene is Thriving.” It was very well-received. “Should Rachel Sterne stop talking about how New York City is ready to be the social media and technology center of the world? Absolutely not,” she wrote in an email. “That would be like forcing a father to stop telling his daughter she’s brilliant, beautiful and capable of saving the world.”

But, she acknowledged, “We need to stop comparing ourselves to Silicon Valley. We should be celebrating our differences and figuring out innovative ways to collaborate, not fighting for VC money or attention in the press. It is the World Wide Web after all.”

Rachel Sklar, a Canadian lawyer-turned-tech and media consultant and founder of Change the Ratio, got into the tech scene around the time the cheerleading started really ramping up. Since then, she’s become adept at baton twirling for New York tech. She’s done publicity for several New York startups, formally and informally. Last year, when many New Yorkers traveled to the South by Southwest Interactive tradeshow for the first time, Ms. Sklar managed a Twitter account called @NYxSW. (Sample tweet: “Congrats on an awesome SXSW, folks! Tweet at us and tell us how you crushed it, so we can RT and give you your due. #NYCrushingIt.”) Recently, Ms. Sklar roped in dozens of local founders, engineers and investors to lipsync lyrics about New York tech—New York underdogs / We can make it here, make it here—in a music video played at a benefit for HackNY, a nonprofit initiative that pits New York tech against another behemoth, Wall Street. “Every NY Tech Person And Their Dog Made A Cameo In This Music Video,” wrote Business Insider blogger Allyson Shontell, who also appeared in the video.

Most of the cheerleading and nyah-nyahs plays out in blog fights, however.

“I feel like the Valley started it,” said Ms. Sklar, who said she doesn’t “have a dog in this fight” despite her efforts to market New York tech. “I remember reading some long ranty article.”

Was it “Face It: NYC Is Not The Best Place For A Startup,” authored by former New Yorker Matt Mireles in February 2010?

“It wasn’t Matt Mireles,” she said. She’s had other blog fights with Mr. Mireles. “It was this guy, Antonio something. It was obnoxious.”

That blog post was titled, “New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what Chris Dixon or Ron Conway or Paul Graham say.” It was written in August 2010 by Antonio Garcia-Martinez, the founder of a startup that was later acquired by Twitter, and it ended with a challenge: “I promise to wear one of those ridiculous ‘I NY’ shirts you buy for $3 from the Nigerians in Times Square for an entire month if the total amount of New York–based startup funding, as reported in Crunchbase, exceeds that of Bay Area-based startups in any financial quarter during the next five years.”

He concluded, “So…bring it, New York. ‘Cause I say the hippies from California will continue to eat your lox.”

Perhaps that jeering bet is what’s kept the bicoastal battle alive even after the city surpassed Boston in venture capital invested in Internet companies in 2011. New York now has a stable of plausibly successful companies, including Foursquare, Etsy and Tumblr; and with both a Facebook engineering headquarters and the Cornell-Technion tech campus on the way, one would be hard-pressed to deny the city its tech cred. California dreamer Paul Graham, who finds New York intolerable, especially when the humidity causes sweat to bead above his upper lip, encourages the startups at his incubator, Y Combinator, to stay in the Bay Area. But even Mr. Graham acknowledged on a recent visit that “New York is definitely now solidly in the No. 2 spot.” By this and many metrics, the city seems to have arrived. So why the persistent Valley-baiting?

Kirill Sheynkman, a former Silicon Valley resident who heads up the New York branch of RTP Ventures, a $750 $700 million fund based in Russia, likes to compare the New York tech scene to a football player stammering through a history report and then blurting out, “San Dimas High School football rules!” in a panic, a scene from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

“There’s a lot of talk about Silicon Valley in New York City, a lot of comparison. I think it’s the underdog syndrome,” Mr. Sheynkmann said, though he added that the “star quality” of New York startups, which tend to be highly visible and impeccably-branded, might have something to do with the messaging.

“I don’t see a need to compete,” he said. “The two cities are different! They focus on different areas of tech. Tech is vast. It’s like science. Science is a broad concept.”

New York talks about itself for two reasons, he said. First: it’s in the city’s nature. Second: there is pressure to tell a compelling story in order to attract talent and capital.

Still, as much as New York tech loves itself, some are wary of talking too much talk.

“I just think it’s a little bit of a wasted effort,” said Kyle Bragger, who recently returned from a session at Mountain View's 500 Startups for his startup Forrst. “Is it really productive to have yet another blog post debate about the latest ‘New York is better or worse than other city,’ or ‘City A is better or worse than City B’?”

Maybe the persistent marketing served a purpose when New York was getting on its feet. But at this point the local tech scene is at least toddling, if not walking. “We call it the flywheel effect,” said Lucas Nelson, an associate at DFJ Gotham Ventures. “Is the flywheel going? Can it sustain itself, or do you still need to put energy in it?”

New York needs big exits and role models more than it needs savvy marketing, he said. “I think the underdog thing is getting pretty old pretty quickly,” he said. “I don’t want to dissuade anyone who is cheerleading in New York. But in the end, no amount of cheerleading will take the place of smart, experienced angels, or smart experienced anything.”

Others pointed out that the marketing for New York tech tends to get competitive mostly because talent and capital are scarce. “We need to keep investing in the ecosystem and evangelizing what is going on here,” Mr. Wilson wrote in an email. “Students still leave the CS programs at Columbia, Princeton, and NYU and go to Silicon Valley. That means we still need to market NYC.”

A survey of local tech professionals suggested that the boosterism is likely to continue. “NY tech talking NY tech is fine,” Alex Taub, head of business development at Aviary, said in an email. “I don’t think it’s an insecurity thing—I think it’s just topical because NY tech is really thriving. Real businesses are being built and scaling here.”

New York may not be insecure, but there seems to be plenty of demand for self-validation. Two entrepreneurs have organized New York Tech Day, a “science fair for startups” to “celebrate New York’s awesome startup ecosystem” in April. More concretely, it’s going to be a gigantic one-day expo at the block-sized Lexington Ave. Armory, with 200 startup booths, more sponsor and vendor booths, and a few thousand attendees rotating through.

It will followed by an awards show.

A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of February 20, 2012.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said Rachel Sklar moved to New York two years ago; that is incorrect. She has been in the city for 13 years. Betabeat regrets the error.

You started Meetup right after 9/11, and part of the inspiration was conversations with strangers. Can you talk about what some of those conversations were like?

On 9/11 and the days after, [I was] having random interactions with neighbors and people in the neighborhood and people in my apartment building and strangers on the street. People were more friendly and friendly to conversation. I actually discovered the book “Bowling Alone” in a blog post a week or two after 9/11.

I actually was looking back on my old Amazon—you know Amazon keeps the history of everything you ever bought so, it’s funny... I bought the book “Bowling Alone” a few weeks after 9/11 and I think the idea there was, the essence of what that meant to us, and what stood out, was this idea that there are these linkages between people interacting with strangers and trust.

Basically, the less you interact with strangers the less you trust strangers and the less yo trust strangers, the less you interact and by that trusting of strangers—really is a proxy for being happy or feeling that the world isn’t totally screwed up. Because if you walk around thinking like that everyone’s an asshole and you can’t trust anybody, one would think ‘oh, well as long as you could just go into your cocoon of friends and family...’ but the reality is if you don’t trust the world around you, you're going to—it’s a vicious cycle that becomes coarser and nastier and less friendly world.

Someone told me you like to give copies of this book away.

Yeah. When someone’s hired at Meetup they get a copy of “Bowling Alone.”

I don’t have time to read the whole thing. Are there specific parts I should check out?

It’s okay, I didn’t read the whole thing either. I think what’s interesting is to look at all the pretty charts and graphs about the declining membership that a lot of these 20th century organizations have had. And you can ask yourself, okay, do we need to recreate your grandfather's Kiwanis Club in order to have a neighborhood-y vibe in the 21st century? The answer is no.

The thing to scan in that book—and I don’t mean to paint it like it’s some bible for Meetup, but the question is not, who cares about the fraternal organizations and the VFW and all that kind of stuff—the question is more, what role did the fact that people were working together with other people and had this sort of opportunity to have an outlet outside of just work and family and friends, what role did that play in people’s lives? How did it relate to optimism and how did it relate to people feeling like they could be a whole person?

The foundation of that is embedded in some of what people do on Facebook and Twitter and how it has something to do with Foursqaure and all sorts of things. In our case we’re just hitting it dead on and saying that a city is a better city if there’s all these opportunities to do what you did over seven days [go to seven random meetups]. But those communities are now there and they’re in place and they’re welcoming and they’re friendly and how does it make a city better when those opportunities are available to people? And that’s some of what you should go fishin’ for in the book.

At the Meetups I asked people why they came. A lot of people said it’s really hard to meet people in New York. It’s a city with eight million people but it’s really hard to meet one. Have you ever experienced that personally? Are you from New York?

No, I’m from the Midwest. Grew up in Illinois, went to school in Iowa.

Yeah certainly. There’s a lot of different influences that inform why I started Meetup, but one of them is just the —there’s a band that’s no longer together that—I was really into this band for years and years and years and I saw the band—I probably saw 20 of their shows over the course of seven or eight years snd the joke was, it came to a point where a friend of mine, they were sick of this band and I had no one to go with. I went to probably half of these shows just by myself at Bowery Ballroom and other places and what’s funny is that I would see some of the similar faces time after time at this band’s shows and my entire experience of going out to see this band was, I would grab a bite to eat by myself and I would go to the show and I’d stand there and I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I’d stand waiting for the show to start, I’d be there for the show and then I’d filter out staring at my shoes leaving and—maybe it’s just being shy—or I don’t know what but there was no context for being allowed to talk to anyone that would have been awkward.

And so the concept of Meetup was, it’s not just find the people that have a similar interest because the other people that like that band were in the same place multiple times a year, but it’s more about giving them permission to talk to people, giving them license to talk to each other. I’ve sort of felt that, not only is this a city of eight million people, but this is a hardcore fanbase of a few hundred people and yet no one said I could talk to them.

What was the name of the band?

Luna.

What kind of music was it?

Sort of post-Velvet Undergroundy New York vibe. I dunno. You can Google them.

When was that?

One reason why I moved to New York was because I liked this band and I said, you know, wherever they’re from is probably a good place to be and that was New York. This was like ‘95 to 2005. And I started Meetup in 2002

When you started Meetup, did you start a Meetup for this band?

Oh shit. I knew you were going to ask that. I did not and... I don’t know why. I used it for other stuff but—I really had that in mind. In fact one of the original mockups—wireframes and stuff that I designed for Meetup were using Luna as the example. You know what it was, I think they were largely broken up by like 2004. I don’t know why I never started that Meetup.

Nowadays they’d have a forum.

They all did. That’s the other thing. Any kind of active online forum always had people saying ‘who on this list is in Chicago?’ or ‘who here is in New York?’ They did have online stuff going on but no one had the guts to propose something Meetup-like.

You asked me if I ran into a lot of people scouting for someone to date. That bugs you?

No, it bugs me when it’s sort of dominant in Meetups that aren’t. [Many] Meetups are singles-focused and it’s great—those can be great. It’s when people have an experience where they are not looking for that and that’s what some people bring. We hear it occasionally and I hear it occasionally and I always ask the question, whenever someone goes to Meetups, was that what it was? And most of the time it’s no.

When people hear about Meetup for the first time, and it’s outside the context of a tech Meetup and it’s outside the context of a mom’s Meetup or anything like that, [to] kind of make sense of what the hell it is, they think that it must be some dating thing, because why the hell would you want to meet people if not to hookup or get money? 'Why on Earth would you want to talk to anybody that you don’t already if not for sex or money, I don’t get it,' is the feeling.

Does Meetup look different in NYC versus the rest of the country?

New York is the biggest Meetup city so you get a really good things happening by [virtue of the fact that it] hits a tipping point of the density of everything going on. We have these anomaly cities like Raleigh-Durham, NC. You have per capita almost three [times] the number of meetups and peole in meetups than even in New York. So there Meetup is this very, very popular and common. You just see things working better because more Meetups get a critical mass and all that.

The other thing that’s—we used to have a joke—I’ve met with Meetup organizers in about 35 cities around the world. If I’m going to a city we’ll do an organizer meetup where we invite the organizers and I’ll meet 20, 50, 100 Meetup organizers, and we’ve done that in New York and the interesting thing was always that New York organizers always sort of brought out this—and this is early in the days of Meetup—really extreme characters; whereas in other cities they were not so extreme.

Extreme how?

Just really eccentric—and eccentric can be beautiful. I like eccentric—but just eccentric in anyway you can imagine. Very passionate—I don’t know how to describe... Here in New York we have five or six thousand Meetup organizers. I'm talking about back when there were maybe one thousand so many it’s shifted.

That said, the similarities [of] New York and other cities is kind of remarkable also. You’ll see how the community cell-divides and spawns new communities so the way in which New York has hundreds and hundreds of mom's meetups—the stay at homes moms of this neghborhood and the working moms of that neighborhood and the Jewish, black lesbian moms Meetup of this neghborhood—I’m making that one up but the way in which they divide, city by city, you see it mimic the similar divisions. The different kinds of hiking Meetups and the different kinds of parenting Meetups and all these different things and you say ‘wow, what a distinctive way in which they’ve cell-divided and formed this whole network in New York.' You look at L.A. or London, you say ‘oh my God.' A lot of the same frustrations that different people have had have created the same sort of varied and interesting mix of Meetup groups.

I would imagine that one thing unique to Meetup in New York is how specific some of the Meetups are to the point where they’re hard to describe. Do niche meetups like that happen in other cities?

Absolutely. I don’t know if this is a dirty secret or not but a lot of that often comes out of the frustrating expereinces that people will have going to this one and they say ‘you know, this is fine but what we really need is something where it’s for these people and not those people’ and so they create that. It’s a really interesting, almost Darwinian ecosystem. And yeah the get really specific. I started a Meetup group just a week or two ago. Even though in my neighborhood there are over 50—I’ve got a one year old and even though there are over 50 parenting meetups in my neighborhood, the perfect one that I wanted didn’t exist and so therefore I wasn’t able to get what I wanted. I want just nine-16 month olds who just live in this part of the neighborhood and so I had to create. And Saturday I had eight babies on my living room floor.

I know you’re a part of the New York City Dads Meetup. What other Meetups are you a part of?

That’s on the public site... There’s a bunch that I’m active in.

How many Meetups are there in New York, on average, each day?

I knew that, let’s see. I think about 3,000 a week so four or five hundred and probably about half of those are at a critical mass point... so there’s probably 200-plus that have at least four or more people signed up.

What do you mean by critical mass?

Internally we refer to something as a “SMUG” ... which means successful Meetup group or successful Meetup. We know that if a Meetup has four people singed up it’s probably ging to be a good experience. If less than four people signed up it will probably suck.

We also know that if a group has had a Meetup with four or more RSVPs, if they’ve had an event in the past month with four or more RSVPs we know that it’s likely to continue going and growing well and if they don’t then the group will probably fail.

On an average day we have about 10,000 meetups worldwide and about five to six thousand of them have four or more people. Some meetups are four people. some are 400. There are about 100,000 people going to a Meetup on a heavier day.

We crossed 500,000 New Yorkers a few months ago. Just the City. [and New York is the biggest city]

Are you familiar with the people who are sort of “Meetup addicts?”

Yep.

Do you have an in-house slang for that?

Not that I can say...

There’s one guy... For all I know he could be a member of a thousand Meetup groups and he goes to all of them. No he doesn’t. He’s a really great guy, given us great feedback through the years.

Do you think there are people that Meetup doesn’t work for? For whom Meetup is just not relevant?

The reason why I’m gonna be working onthis for many years to come is because we haven’t yet proven that this kind of community can be good for everyone. And when I say everyone, I don’t mean most people, I mean literally everyone. The people who say that, ‘well I don’t have enough time’ or ‘I have enough friends’—I’ve had enough situations where people who initially looked at Meetup and they said ‘oh that’s really nice, oh that’s great.’ This common thing—almost like an NPR perspective.

Anyone can look at Meetup and say ‘oh that’s really wonderful, that’s really good. and you say ‘what about you?’ and they say, ‘well that’s not for me. I’m not that kind of person. I don’t have those kinds of needs. It’s not right for me.’ A photographer I talked to said it looks really great but not for him and then I said ‘well you know there’s Meetups for professional photographers’ and he said ‘yeah, I don’t know’ He said he ended up joining this photographers Meetup and it was really good for his business—oh and by the way he said ‘I don’t really like people’—and the thing is is that I’m of the belief that most people have no interest in meeting people. In fact, the last thing they would want to do ever is have to talk to anyone. A Meetup is the last thing in the world that they’d want to do.

But even for those people, for their careers, for their lives, for whatever these things that are important to them. In the case of the photographer, he could use his photography business to be better. He said, ‘no it was great. In this Meetup they trade leads, they trade vendors, they trade help and they work with each other on projects and gigs’ and he said that it’s just been really, really great for his business. And then he goes, ‘oh and the people are really great too.’ It’s like, speaking of the Midwest, there was an old restaurant chain that said, ‘Come for the food. Stay for the pie.’

What we’re saying is, people are going to come for the benefits and maybe stay for the people. So we’re Meetup, but I don’t think people want to meet up. I think that they want all this other stuff. To learn what they want to learn, improve their careers, start businesses, grow their business. They want to stand up for something important, they want to run a marathon and all that kind of stuff. No one goes to Weight Watchers or AA because they really want to hang out with people, no it’s because they want to lose wieght or they want to deal with their alcoholism. If you think of Meetup as the thing where you want to meet people, that’s great and there are millions of people who will do that but a lot of where we are and a lot of where we’re going is around trying to make easier and better this thing that would actually help everyone, in different ways, at some point in their lives.

What do you mean, it's like an "NPR thing?"

“I think people start these Meetups where it’s like, ‘we’re going to have trans-partisan discussion where Republicans are going to talk to Democrats and we’re going to talk it out and we’re going to have this great experience of finding commonality amongst our differences.’ This do-gooder concept—anyone can look at that and say, ‘oh, that’s really great, oh, that’s really nice’ but you know, those Meetups fail. You know why? Someone... is going to look at that and be like ‘Okay, do you want to go on Thursday night to a trans-partisan Democrat-democracy discussion town hall where we Democrats are going to talk to Republicans?’ No, they don’t want to do that.

What’s more interesting, and Esther Dyson, one of our investors, she put it really well she said she’s more interested in the mom’s Meetup where Democrats and Republican women are there then the Democrat Meetup or the Republican Meetup because the natural way people will find these bridges—my point is, it’s not a just a flyover concept, what I’m saying is it’s the difference between people saying they should go to a Meetup and they actually will in their real life.

What we’re basically saying is no, actually, community is a cure for a lot of things in a lot of people’s lives—or it can be. We are on a long-haul mission to spark that and what I think we’ll find, and this is over the course of a generation, in the years ahead it’ll become pretty obvious and normal that people in the world are collaborating and cooperating and actually just finding benefits to themselves by not being hermetically sealed in their Facebook filter bubble.”

You said you don’t think you’ve succeeded yet. What has to happen?

We need to make it so much easier and so much better and then it just has to hit more and more natural tipping points where Meetup is more of a household world and the idea of solving a problem in your life—When you think, ‘damnit, this year I’m going to run that half-marathon,’ that you don’t just watch a video about how to train, you don’t just read a webpage about how to train for that half-marathon, but that it just feels natural to say, 'oh I wonder if there’s a Meetup in my neighborhood on Saturday of people who are running the half-marathon... because we’ll be more likely to succeed.'

The Start Living in 2012 inaugural meetup.

Around 8 p.m. on a recent Monday, about 35 people of disparate ages were sitting on the marble steps of the public atrium inside Two World Financial Center, listening to a 25-year-old in baggy jeans named Jordan Phoenix talk about Living. “This is the class where we figure out who we are and what we want to do with our lives,” he told his audience, a range of artists and professionals, employed and unemployed, 20-somethings and middle-aged divorcees who, like me, were drawn in by Mr. Phoenix’s aggressive pitch on the website Meetup.com.

As the post had put it: “This group is for you if you know you are capable of greatness, but are unclear and frustrated about how to get there.” The group, “Start Living in 2012,” had picked up more than 100 members in three days, which made it a very fast-growing meetup group indeed.

“I love that everyone here showed up,” Mr. Phoenix said. “Sixty-eight people RSVP’ed. Thirty people didn’t show up. Guess what? They’re not invited to the next meetup, because they’re bullshit artists.”

I had no intention of going to the next meetup. As much as I want to start living in 2012, I was merely a tourist.

Meetup is a website where strangers with common interests can organize get-togethers. In New York, where it started, it has become a compendium of microsubcultures. I have a small habit of peeking at Meetup every once in a while, just reading the descriptions and marveling at how nudists, Dungeons & Dragons players and “male cat lovers” talk when they’re speaking just to one another. (“We celebrate and cherish our cats. We are male. Sometimes we feel like no one understands us when you show them pictures of your cat or share stories about its adventures in your apartment.") There are meetups for Satanists and ukulele players, swingers and “deep thinkers,” as well as a wealth of groups for people “just doing their daily shit,” as one Meetup employee put it. Voyeuristically, it’s richer than Craigslist’s missed connections and more authentic than New York’s sex diaries.

Meetup is a strange world for the average ironical urbanite. For me, socializing revolves around drinking, primarily with people I already know. And as much as I grouse about both of those facts, I had the same feelings about Meetup that I did about online dating: it’s something other people do.

My attitude was common, Scott Heiferman, the co-founder and CEO of Meetup, told me in a recent phone interview. “Anyone can look at Meetup and say ‘Oh, that’s really wonderful,’” he said. “And you say ‘what about you?’ And they say, ‘Well, that’s not for me. I’m not that kind of person. I don’t have those kinds of needs.’” Mr. Heiferman, of course, believes Meetup is for everyone. Recently, a misanthropic photographer dismissed Meetup as being “not for him.” “I don’t really like people,” he told Mr. Heiferman. But after joining a professional meetup group to trade leads, share vendors and collaborate on projects, the photographer admitted he’d been wrong. It was great for business, he said, and the people were great too.

“When people hear about Meetup for the first time and it's outside the context of a tech meetup or moms meetup, they think it must be some dating thing,” Mr. Heiferman said. “Because why the hell would you want to meet people, if not to hook up or get money? Like, why on earth would you want to talk to anybody that you don't already know, if not for sex or money?”

But about six months ago, my curiosity spilled over into the real world. I was scouring the site for a book club for my overworked mom; instead I came across the NYC Freegan Meetup, which was hosting a dumpster diving tour in my neighborhood that evening. My motivation was mostly anthropological. I didn’t mind taking home a few scavenged bagels, but really I wanted to meet these freegans and study their ways. But as my fellow dumpster divers and I delighted over an intact box of Godiva chocolate bars and passed around sleeves of perfectly good saltines, I found myself wondering, could Meetup work for me?

On Tuesday around 8 p.m., a companion and I walked into West 3rd Common, a low-lit bar with red banquettes where about eight people were playing cards on low cherrywood tables. This was the East Village Euchre Club.
The card players, all in their 20s and 30s, included students, a pair of engineers, a Rochester native who was also a member of the Brooklyn Euchre Club, and a long-haired martinet named James, who had brought the cards and made sure conversations didn’t distract players from the hand.

Meetups need at least four attendees to be a good experience, according to Meetup, the company. The norm is for a meetup to start really, really small, with one or two people, and either grow slowly or die out. Occasionally meetups will catch fire, like Start Living in 2012, and attract a bunch of members all at once.

The East Village Euchre Club had 15 people at its first game in September, and has hosted more than a game a week since then, enough to qualify it as a a SMUG, or Successful Meetup Group, in Meetup parlance.
Most of the talk was of euchre, a trump game popular in the Midwest, interspersed with rote introductions. What do you do? When did you move to New York? Three hours later, and we still knew very little about each other, but it was after midnight and the four players at my table were the last patrons in the bar.

Mr. Heiferman started Meetup as a lonely midwestern transplant himself. Quiet, political, and smart, he moved to New York in part to be near his favorite band, Luna, a punk collective with a cult following. “My entire experience of going out to see this band was, I would grab a bite to eat by myself and I would go to the show, and I’d stand there, and I wouldn’t talk to anybody,” he said. “Then I’d filter out, staring at my shoes. Maybe it’s just being shy, or I don’t know what, but there was no context for being allowed to talk to anyone.”

Then in September of 2001, everyone in New York suddenly had permission to talk to each other. The introverted Mr. Heiferman found himself having conversations with his neighbors, and he liked it. A few weeks later, he bought a copy of "Bowling Alone," a chronicle of the disappearance of bowling leagues, church groups and other social clubs, and the accompanying effect on our health and democracy. Every new employee at Meetup is given a copy of "Bowling Alone." In the book, the author cites the Internet as one of the causes of rifts between Americans. Mr. Heiferman and a friend, Matt Meeker, thought the Internet could be a solution.

Even if it hasn’t fully reconstructed the tradition of community in America, 11 years later Meetup is at least a window into hidden corners of the city. It’s also a directory of the best public meeting spaces. The bustling Citicorp Atrium on Lexington and 53rd, which has free wifi, is a favorite. Every white table was occupied with couples, students or homeless men munching sandwiches, as I made my way toward a meetup in the corner on a recent Wednesday evening.

An older gentleman in a Coney Island sweatshirt, possibly in his 60s or 70s, was seated at a table with a plump blonde woman, Brenna, and her soft-spoken co-organizer, David. I introduced myself and scooted over a metal chair as David passed out a detailed worksheet. “NYC Hoarders-No-More Meetup Group,” it said. We were joined by a tattooed hoarder from the Bronx who sleeps in his living room because his bedroom is stuffed to the ceiling with junk, books, and defunct scuba gear. “I’m an atheist,” he said. “But I pray for a fire.”

A few more hoarders showed up as we worked our way through everyone’s updates. Brenna had thrown away about ten New Yorkers, some greeting cards and a notebook with amateur song lyrics that she had found on the sidewalk; Adrian, a former bank vice president, had made significant progress in the kitchen (“The freezer part is cool but the refrigerator part is out of control”).

Every week, the hoarders bring in some debris to discard. As they sorted, we talked about Meetup.

“I think there should be a values score on Meetup so you can put in your values and find meetups based on that,” said a grandfather-aged gentleman with wispy ear hair and rubber bands around his wrist.

“I love Meetup—I’m in a bunch of them,” said the Bronx hoarder. “I co-organize the New York City Depression Meetup. It has 900-some members.”

He joined the site for a scuba diving meetup and was on it for a year before he realized the site had other relevant offerings; now, he regularly checks the site whenever he develops a new interest. “I joined an evolution meetup and the book we read was Richard Dawkins, "The Greatest Show on Earth," and I fell in love with it,” he said. “After that, I started going to atheism meetups.”

David, who is a member of 15 meetup groups, asked him to write down the name of the depression meetup.

Meetup tends to be addicting. “I am very active on Meetup, in that I join a lot of Meetup groups to see what people are doing,” one Start Living in 2012 attendee wrote in an email. “Meetup probably e-mails me an average of five new groups a day for me to look at, and of those I may sign on to receive updates from one or two a week. Off the top of my head, I've been to meetings of a Beekeeping meetup, a Content Strategy meetup, an Artists Accountability Group meetup, and an Online Dating Conference meetup.”

It’s interesting to see what will motivate people to meet up. The site first got traction when the founders started inventing holidays. Mr. Heiferman and Mr. Meeker scoured the Internet for groups and special interest blogs. Then they sent the groups an email about an upcoming made-up celebration—International Pug Lovers Meetup Day, for example—and explained how to join a local meetup or host one. Today, there are 39,427 members of 179 Pug Meetup groups in 149 cities around the world. The biggest demographic on Meetup is moms. Political groups are also big, as are singles groups and New Age-y interests like “energy healing.” Group activities like language practice, sports and networking events are popular. There are even a few pickup artist-themed meetups, like the NYC Wingmen.

On a recent Friday night, I ventured out to an electronic rock show on the Lower East Side for a meetup of NYC Bands for Bands, a sort of networking group of musicians who go to each others’ shows. One musical couple started the group five months ago in order to meet promoters’ demands that their band bring a crowd. But filling up the club is part of it, Micha, a musician in a plaid cap, told me; he comes for the camaraderie. “I can’t imagine myself not going to this for as long as it exists,” he said.

With the glaring exception of the New York Tech Meetup, which has more than 20,000 members, meetups seem to have a natural size limit. Once a group gets large enough, it starts to replicate or “cell divide” according to set patterns, Mr. Heiferman said. “It’s an almost Darwininan ecosystem,” he said. Lance, a stay-at-home father, started the NYC Dads Meetup in 2008 as a group for at-home dads, but it’s expanded. “We’ve got dads of all stripes,” the group’s co-organizer Lance, told me at a NYC Dads drink-up at Heartland Brewery in Union Square. “Guys who lost their jobs, guys who chose the role. We’ve got gay dads joining now.”

The group now has a popular blog, a long list of sponsors, and business cards. But Mr. Heiferman, who is a member of NYC Dads, decided neither it nor any of the other 50 parenting meetups on the Upper West Side was quite right, so he recently started a splinter meetup for parents of children on the aged 9 to 16 months. It now has 29 members.

I felt I had just scratched the surface, even after a week of random meetups. I didn’t get all my first choices. Organizers of the NYC Vinyl Meetup did not email me back quickly enough; I picked the hoarders group over the A Course In Miracles Meetup Group, devotees of the cult classic spiritual text. I got a few rejections. “The 3 p.m. sword balancing is for folks that have 2-3 years of belly dance experience,” wrote the organizer of the Manhattan Tribal ATS Tribal Belly Dance Meetup NYC, somewhat of a relief. I was also excluded from a private dinner held by the Psychedelic and Entheogenic Society, fans of Timothy Leary, although most of their meetups are open.

There was a spate of meetups on Saturday morning—running, walking, breakfast clubs—that I slept too late to check out, opting for Exciting NYC Mandarin Chinese Learners at 2 p.m. at the Chinatown Y. The class was $40. This is not unusual; independent teachers use Meetup to coordinate and advertise classes, and some business-oriented events also charge a fee. Meetup has made this easier by integrating PayPal. Every meetup group organizer pays $10 a month.

For the final outing in my week-long experiment, I caught a nighttime gathering of the New York Parkour Meetup. I was soon in pain from banging my body as I tried to hurdle over stacks of mats while our limber instructor heckled at us to do flips. Luckily, this session took place inside the colorful gymnasium in the Field House at Chelsea Piers, and not at the Sanctuary, the group’s concrete Upper West Side practice area.

I walked out into the icy night exhausted—partly because of the exertion, partly because I had just spent the last week hanging out with strangers. In that moment, I thought, if I never, ever saw another human, it would be too soon. At least until Tuesday. That was Euchre night.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified a New York punk band as Lunar; the band is Luna. Betabeat regrets the error.

Mr. Diamond giving his candidate speech from the heart at New Work City.

About 60 of 200 registered attendees gathered at New Work City last night to hear two-minute speeches by the candidates for an open New York Tech Meetup board seat. Meetup and NYTM founder Scott Heiferman stood in the audience in a red hoodie, board member Esther Dyson settled on the window ledge in a #newsfoo t-shirt, and scene staple Gary Sharma wandered about with his sponsored tie (Pivotal Labs and Inkba) as 15 candidates gave their vision of what should change about the largest meetup in New York, which last year incorporated as a nonprofit 501c(6), giving it the power to lobby government, among other things.

The other bold-faced names, as far as New York tech goes, were among the candidates: Eric Friedman, head of business development at Foursquare; Shai Goldman, a 10-year veteran of Silicon Alley Bank who moved to New York a year or so ago; and David Tisch, the most talked about candidate of those who couldn't make it, as he had a prior commitment out of town.

NYTM held its first election for the board last year, when proto-blogger Anil Dash and NYU computer science professor Evan Korth were elected. A few things were different this time. Last year, speeches took place at the Skirball Center in front of the usual 800-some audience instead of the cozy New Work City Soho digs; there were also no women running last year, while this year there are four; and only one board member will be elected, rather than two. "This ties us directly to our membership and holds us accountable," NYTM board chairman Andrew Rasiej told the audience.

Whitney Hess, a user experience designer and NWC resident, almost ran for a seat last year before she realized she had massively overscheduled herself. She was the last candidate to step up to the mic last night, a prepared speech on her iPad, and proceeded to thoroughly critique the NYTM user experience from entry to afterparty, including the hated "hovering" until tickets become available "like a Justin Bieber concert."

Other candidates talked about improving the experience of attendees, broadening NYTM's role as an advocacy group, and making the meetup more welcoming to hackers and new members from the outer boroughs and other communities.

First up to the mic was Ben Kessler of CrowdTap--"you guys might know me as @kessler on Twitter"--followed by longtime NYTM volunteer Brandon Diamond, who dumped his script to the floor in favor of speaking from the heart, promising to bring more hackers into the organization if elected. Mr. Friedman's platform was "always be helping," which he illustrated with a quick survey of who was hiring and who was looking for work. Other highlights included the cosmopolitan Jalak Jobanputra, whose resume includes "NYC 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.," stints in venture capital, government and finance. "It's my goal to evangelize New York as the top tech hub in the world," she said, promising to make NYTM's voice heard in the White House.

Jonathan Askin, a tech law professor at Brooklyn Law School, emphasized NYTM's power to advocate. "We haven't stepped up," he said. "We haven't engaged the government to the extent that we should." Google, Amazon and Facebook are directing government policy on tech, he said, and that doesn't represent the interest of startups.

Murat Aktihangolu, director of Entrepreneurs Roundtable, spoke passionately about making New York more welcoming for startups; Mr. Goldman had a three-point plan: making it easier to move to New York, making sure entrepreneurs have a voice on policy, and reforming the image of New York as a two-trick pony (web and mobile) and getting some attention for cleantech and biotech.

Other candidates who showed up to give a speech included Gregory Schnese of Kikin, Jack Welde, Jesse Landry, June Cohen of TED Media, Luke Haseloff, Matthew Knell and Wei Zhao.

Audience members showed a bias toward the candidates "who showed up." "You just don't like David Tisch," one attendee chastised his friend. "These are community board members," the other pointed out. "Tisch would be better as a board member, don't you think?"

After the talks, the group swigged the Brooklyn Lager and Blue Moon and gobbled their way through several boxes of excellent pizza, talking enthusiastically about New York tech. "I think New York is the best place to start a company!" Mr. Aktihangolu said. New York is an "emerging market," founder Mattan Griffel explained excitedly. Many of the attendees had been to their first NYTM in 2004, 2005, 2006, when the scene was much dinkier, they told Betabeat. Now, Vanity Fair and "The Dylan Ratigan Show" are on the Meetup's press list, managing director Jessica Lawrence told Betabeat. "We should get Betabeat, New York Tech Meetup, Entrepreneurs Roundtable and some cool startups and go to Silicon Valley and recruit!" schemed Mr. Sharma. An entrepreneur in the conversation, Seth Bannon of Amicus, was working on a similar idea (currently in stealth mode), inspired by Paul Graham's recent visit.

Voting for the board seat opened at midnight, and will close December 20. As NYTM adjusts to its new nonprofit status, board members are figuring out their duties (candidates we asked weren't quite sure what they would be doing if elected). Board members serve three year terms.

(twitter.com/heif)

Meetup joins Foursquare, Tumblr and ZocDoc on the list of New York startups growing too big for their britches. Yesterday the 10-year-old startup demolished its desk setup at 632 Broadway in Soho. "Like the circus leaving town," CEO Scott Heiferman tweeted. Who needs movers when you work at a can-do startup? "To keep up with all of us and make room for future Meetuppers, the Meetup HQ offices are undergoing a serious overhaul," says the Meetup blog. "We could have left all the heavy lifting to the professionals, but where's the fun in that?At Meetup, we are all about DIO: Do It Ourselves. So earlier this morning, we grabbed some tools and dismantled our office space together." So they do call themselves Meetuppers! 

The deconstruction took about two hours, Meetup says. The company even posted a time-lapse video.

Meetup HQ Demolition Time Lapse from Richard on Vimeo.

Zuccotti Park, the Occupy Wall Street protest's headquarters. (flickr.com/shankbone)

On the Saturday that thousands of protesters marched to Times Square, the brass bells of the New York Stock Exchange rang out at noon--signifying the takeover of the trading floor by the New York startup community. Companies like Etsy, Meetup and ZocDoc were handing out t-shirts and branded ping pong balls to fresh-faced engineers in backpacks who circled the screen-filled roundabouts while munching the complimentary sandwiches provided for SA500, a Silicon Alley recruiting event.

The choice of venue could be interpreted as symbolic aggression. New York startups compete fiercely with the finance sector for programmers and MBAs--and while they can’t match Goldman’s salaries, they do make the social argument. Knewton wants to transform education, Sulia wants to reinvent news, and the mobile payments app Venmo wants to replace credit cards. Meetup is “starting a local community revolution”; Etsy’s mission is to “empower people to change the way the global economy works.” The lofty talk of startups is not unlike the rhetoric of the protesters, who are advocating--albeit vaguely--the most radical agenda of any political movement in recent memory.

“I see them as very, very similar,” said Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of Meetup.com, who orchestrated a field trip to the protest after a recent board meeting. “Most of the successful startup people are out to make a dent in the universe and change the world in some way, and that's what they're trying to do downtown. I can't speak to the people who are just hanging around for the free pizza, but there are people downtown who are really fired up to see some sort of systemic change in culture.”

But while they’re definitely talking about the protest, many techies aren’t sold. The movement has high engagement (and revenue!) but the brand, the marketing and the roadmap need work.

“It's all about your pitch,” said Reece Pacheco, the co-founder and CEO of the hot video-sharing startup Shelby.tv, who was at the N.Y.S.E. that Saturday scouting for talent. “Right now Occupy Wall Street’s pitch is really bad because no one know what they're really about. You got some people saying ‘yeah, stop spending money, and get the troops out of Iraq,’ and like, ‘free Nelson Mandela!’ They’re all over the place.”

“My view of it is that they have not been utilizing technology to their full advantage,” said Brandon Diamond, founder of the Hacker Union, a collective of New York programmers. “What they should start with is a centralized resource where people can find out what they're protesting. Even a Twitter account.”

“I think the way it's been executed has been really poor,” said Melanie Moore, a former financial analyst who is now on her second web startup, a subscription-based site for fashion essentials. “That list of demands that came out? It was like, Marxist bullshit. It was crazy. Like, ‘we should abolish government.’ Like anarchist ... they've gotten to the point where their brand is very diluted.”

Ms. Moore, who lives on Wall Street and regularly walks past the protest, advocated a pivot. “If I wanted to go about it the right way I would get a group of people together, break off from Occupy Wall Street, call it something else, rebrand it and start the right way, with people who maybe have some connections in Washington.”

Despite criticism from the techie peanut gallery, Occupy Wall Street is nothing if not tech-savvy. (One of the earliest criticisms was the preponderence of Macbooks among the protesters.) The protest has had a near-constant Livestream from the headquarters at Zuccotti Park, which has also broadcast from Times Square and during the now-infamous mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a fixture on geeky forums like Reddit and SomethingAwful; even the Bitcoin community and the hacktivists of Anonymous are into it. The protest has also voted consistently to use open-source software for everything from its website to its accounting, and the still-grassroots funded movement is hip to crowdfunding sites Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, which raised money for tangential projects such as The Occupied Wall Street Journal. There are also more than 200 occupation-related campaigns on the Y Combinator-incubated WePay.com. “It's not a coincidence that much of the success of the #OWS movement comes from their nimble use of technology to organize and get their word out,” the venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote on his blog.

Betabeat happened to be standing at the corner of Zuccotti Park on the second Saturday of the protest, as a march that had resulted in about 80 arrests was returning to the park headquarters. As the much-thinned stream of sign-holders neared, the N.Y.P.D. tensed and started to shoo protesters off the sidewalk and into the park. “Cameras up, cameras up!” one man shouted, needlessly, as the small crowd had already sprouted a halo of smartphones.

Atlantic staffer Conor Friedersdorf, who lives in the redwoods of Northern California, discovered a sign at the New York protest bearing an excerpt from one of his blog posts--alerted to him by a reader on Twitter who had seen it on BoingBoing. The way his words had traveled, transformed and disseminated back to him led to an epiphany: “I now see how Occupy Wall Street is like the internet,” he wrote, adding another layer to the remix by referencing words written by CNN’s Douglas Rushkoff. “I now understand a little better what it means for a protest movement to be without ‘a traditional narrative arc,’ to be ‘the product of the decentralized networked-era culture,’ to be about ‘inclusion and groping toward consensus.’”

The New York tech community would seem to be in a prime position to help the webby movement. The protest has been using Vibe, an anonymized broadcasting app similar to Twitter built by a New York techie. One Meetup engineer organized a small hackathon that produced a few Occupy Wall Street apps including OccupyVotes, a platform for deciding on the specific demands everyone has been clamoring for, which has already collected some 19,000 votes on 64 proposals.

And yet most of the New York tech community, while fascinated by the protest, is keeping Occupy Wall Street at arm’s length. Most of the techies we spoke to had not visited Zuccotti Park. First Round Capital’s Charlie O’Donnell, who has sounded off about the protest on his blog and weekly email newsletter, has merely “biked by it several times,” he said. “I think I’d be too frumpy if I went down there,” said Mr. Diamond, who has stayed away.

Part of the hesitation seems to derive from the self-deterministic nature of founder exceptionalism: entrepreneurs are the ones who quit the comfort of cubicles and health insurance and convention in favor of uncertainty, 80-hour work weeks and the remote possibility of glory. Startups, not protests, are the real mechanism for change, some feel.

“Anger doesn't create wealth or work,” said Jason Kende, a founder who works out of the SoHo coworking space WeWork Labs, where members have been debating the merit and meaning of Occupy Wall Street in an internal email thread. “For me, it's a loud giant arrow pointing to the underlying problems of how we work, how we make wealth, the lack of flexibility or margin for error in our lives, and the enormous gap between relevant talent and real opportunity in our workforce. I think we all want solutions. It's just a question of whether we demand someone else fix everything for us or create real solutions ourselves.”

While the protest against big banks raged outside the stock exchange that Saturday, Mr. Pacheco told Betabeat, the startups inside were seducing Wall Street’s workforce away. “Outside people preaching against capitalism, and then inside there were people who were pro-capitalism but saying ‘don't do it the way they're doing it, come do it with us,’” he said. “I've never really liked the system. But I’ve always known that I've had to play within the system to win, you know what I mean?”

Tech entrepreneurs have plenty of reason to feel conflicted. They’re funded by one-percenters, to start (although some tech VCs seem to recognize a familiar potential in the upstart movement: “#occupywallst proving to be a classic disruptor. dismissed as whiny hippies a few weeks ago now doubling every three days,” tweeted Bryce Roberts, co-founder of O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, who flew to New York from San Francisco explicitly to check out the protest). Technological innovations tend to eliminate American jobs; tech companies are also scraped for programmers, which sometimes means outsourcing to Mechanical Turk or a development shop in Estonia.

And of course, for a startup, the ultimate win is an IPO on Wall Street.

“I believe in business, I believe in capitalism, I believe in the free market and the ability of one to say, ‘I'm going to create a business, I should be able to do that the way I want,’” Mr. Pacheco said. “If you make money, you should make money! On the other hand, there's a strong part of me that is always looking out for the social good of the world, and it’s tough to say, ‘oh well, sorry you didn't start a company,’ or ‘sorry you didn't get a job at a bank, you're screwed.’”

But the symptoms of Occupy Wall Street mania are strikingly similar to to the startup fever that’s been going around. Betabeat recently accosted a spokesman for the movement’s finance committee, Tim Hollinger, who had deflated on a park bench after hollering an update at one of the protest’s nighttime assemblies. He was too tired to follow our line of questioning. “I was just going to go home and sleep for a few hours,” he admitted, reminding us of a young type-A founder. Another organizer, Patrick Bruner, the 23-year-old who has taken the lead on the protest’s press relations, told Betabeat his work on the protest will be “the most important thing I ever do,” in an awed voice reminiscent of the esteemed Biz Stone, who once said, “Twitter is not a triumph of tech. It is a triumph of humanity.”

Occupy Wall Street is in many ways, a triumph of Twitter--although the fact that #occupywallstreet has not cracked the trending topics has become a pet cause for a certain subset of activist Twiterati. It’s also a triumph of Facebook, Tumblr, Kickstarter, Livestream, Wordpress, Google Docs and the iPhone, without which it would be considerably impaired. And Occupy Wall Street could end up setting the stage for startups like BankSimple, an online-only bank that proposes to take the pain out of personal finance.

“I think that if you look at a lot of the most exciting startups in the country right now, they are right in line with what's at the heart of Occupy Wall Street,” Mr. Heiferman said. “So if you think about, what is Kickstarter, what is Airbnb, what are things like Meetup, Skillshare--at the heart of it all these things are about creating an economy where people are, they're creating a new economy, creating this people-powered economy as opposed to a top-down corporate economy.”

Many local entrepreneurs don’t seem to see it that way, we noted.

“If any startup can wrangle the attention of the country and the world as fast as Occupy Wall Street has, then I'd love to hear about that startup,” he said. “Like, if you're running a startup that no one's ever heard of, and you're complaining that this movement has gone from nothing to near 100 percent awareness in the developed world, well then, you know …” he trailed off. “You get my point.”

He'd advise Occupy Wall Street to worry about making the jump from early adopters to mainstream users, he said. "One of the seminal Bibles of the startup technlogy world is an old book called Crossing the Chasm, and it talks about how there is an adoption curve," he said. "Plenty of startups that get popular amongst the social media crowd don't make it to Middle America and the moms."

But there’s one question no one’s asked so far: Is Occupy Wall Street a bubble? "I don't think there's a bubble," the sardonic tech pundit Alex Blagg told Betabeat in an email. "In fact, I'm aggressively bullish on Occupy Wall Street. It has all the hallmarks of any real buzzy tech startup: seemingly limitless idealistic potential, great 'anti-establishment' brand positioning, and most importantly, a vague coolness among kids on Tumblr."

He estimated the protest, which had raised about $300,000 as of Tuesday, could get a valuation of more than $6 billion.

Mr. Gupta

This is a guest post from Nate Westheimer. Nate is an engineer, entrepreneur, and angel investor. Currently, Nate serves as Executive Director of the NY Tech Meetup, Advisor to Flybridge Capital Partners, and Founder/Advisor to Ohours.org. He blogs at innonate.com.

As the NY Tech scene has gained momentum over the past few years, I find myself talking to a lot of journalists who are trying to understand what’s going on here and how we arrived at this point.

In these interviews, I always highlight NY Tech’s unique culture, and in so doing I point out that this culture is both native to New York itself, but also cultivated and defined by folks in the tech community 5 to 10 years ago, before this Great Boom showed up in Gap ads and magazine covers.

In my opinion, the culture we have here has been defined by three people:

Scott Heiferman, the NY Tech Meetup, and the culture of building “interesting things.”

Let me be clear, I’m talking about the NY Tech Meetup I became a member of, not the one I run now. Scott created a culture, from the very beginning (2004) of “show the demo, not a PowerPoint.” Scott set the tone in this City that building amazing software that did amazing things was more important and intellectually interesting than who your investors or partners are. When Scott picked people to demo at the NY Tech Meetup there was never a question of “is this a business” — it was always, “Is this interesting?”

Charlie O’Donnell, nextNY, and the culture of coordinated, decentralized community.

When I was elected to run the NY Tech Meetup, it was on the platform of supporting a decentralized community, not creating a traditional, monolithic trade association. Saying “no” to doing more, and instead using the NYTM platform to nurture and support other groups (hackNY, TechiesGiveBack, NYHacker.org, etc) is the thing I think we’ve done best at NYTM. That idea and those values came from the community in nextNY, the non-incorporated, non-hierarchical Google Group-based “organization” Charlie founded in early 2006 and which served as the back-channel conversation and organizational tool for many of the leading entrepreneurs in NYC from 2006 to 2009.

Amit Gupta, Jelly, and the culture of working together.

And this brings me to Amit Gupta. When Amit started Jelly, there were no co-working spaces or hacker spaces or Barcamps or people hosting office hours in NYC. If you wanted to jam out with people about what you were working on you had to show up to a meetup and talk about it, but you’d never just open your laptop, show a stranger some code, and ask for help. Jelly created the idea in NYC that literally opening our homes (or offices) and having other people come work along side us could make us better at what we do and that in turn we could help others do what they do better. We owe the culture of working together to Amit…

AND SO, this brings me to another matter. Recently, Amit was diagnosed with Leukemia.

This Friday, there’s a big event in NYC to get people swabbed to see if there’s a potential genetic match to donate bone marrow to him. I can’t make the event, but I’ve already followed this link from Seth Godin’s blog post on the matter and requested a free home-swab kit.

You see, while chances are slim that I’ll be a genetic match for Amit (chances are higher that a South Asian person would be a match) there’s absolutely no reason not to get swabbed yourself in honor of Amit, especially given his incredible role in shaping the NY tech community — a community which supports my career and likely supports yours as well.

So, please, if you’re appreciative of what Amit has done for us, do something for him: either attend the swabbing party on Friday or order a kit for yourself today.

It’s a super easy way to send a big thanks to Amit for all that he’s done and I know you’ll feel good doing it.

But what became of the beloved Brooklyn coworking space Mr. Langer bore, groomed and subsidized out of his own pocket? The Makery will continue as a coworking space, but is not accepting new tenants, Betabeat learned. Makery resident Bnter, headed by co-founders Lauren Leto and Patrick Moberg, has taken over the lease, Ms. Leto said. "It's Bnter offices, but everyone is still here," she told Betabeat. "As people leave, we will not replace them, because Bnter is growing weekly." The startup has four employees now and will have five as of October 17, and probably seven by the end of the year, Ms. Leto said. "So weekly isn't true," she amended. "Ha, my math is lovely."

The Makery officially closed on Sept. 1, Mr. Langer said, which coincided with the space's one-year anniversary. "I was so happy to let it go because I was just losing so much money on it," Mr. Langer said. "Like SO MUCH." (We were speaking on Gchat.) "PEACE OUT, $500 CON ED BILLS."

BLIND RAISE, BROOKLYN. A two-person, once-pivoted startup has closed a seed round for just under $250,000 from the Knight Foundation, Betabeat has learned, which will be formally announced later this month. The young team persevered despite a failure to gain traction on the first iteration and has now produced a tool with a different name and which bears little resemblance to version 1.0. The entrepreneurs are still hammering out the bugs, but they (and Knight) hope media companies will find it useful.

OCCUPY SILICON ALLEY. Meetup's socially-conscious co-founder Scott Heiferman and New York tech staple Dave Winer have both come out in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement. "Let's stop turning our brightest students over to the VCs to become mini-Zucks," Mr. Winer wrote. "Most of them will fail. It's a bad deal for the kids, and it's mortgaging the future of academia, the same way the bankers are mortgaging everything else."

But the tech scene at large seemed to be largely turning up its nose. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was tweeting and Instagramming about his lovely walk down Wall Street on Wednesday, which caused a few sympathetic local techies to pause: "It would be so cool if @Jack were heading to Occupy Wall Street!" but nay, Mr. Dorsey was headed to the New York Stock Exchange for the elbow-rubbing, Guest of a Guest-snapping SAI 100 party.

Steve Jobs was a hippie-lefty-radical (sorta) leaning mind; Google's co-founders go to Burning Man every year. Tech innovators have historically been in line with the creative underclasses, one entrepreneur told Betabeat, so why is it that the well-scrubbed necks at General Assembly are going around saying people at Occupy Wall Street just need to get a job (or learn how to code)? "While the aimless and outraged struggled to get pics and videos of police abuse downtown and telling tails of the horrors of pepper spray, some people actually attempting to *create* change were busy hacking together funding projects for UNICEF at the NYC Famine Hackathon," Charlie O'Donnell wrote in his This Week In Innovation newsletter on Monday. "While protesters demand undefined 'change' by stripping down to their underwear, the team at Banksimple works hard at ending the tyrrany of bank fees and customer abuse by actually building a new kind of bank from the ground up—one with the consumer at the center."

The tide of tech sympathy, however, may be turning. Even Bryce Roberts got on board, putting it into techspeak: "#occupywallst proving to be a classic disruptor. dismissed as whiny hippies a few weeks ago now doubling every 3 days," he wrote on Twttr, and said he plans to visit the protest and at least see for himself.

THE NEW NORMAL. Apparently the mourning period on the internet is 48 hours, as Betabeat's Ben Popper noticed with amusement, because the day after the glowing stories about Steve Jobs was followed by a day of negative ones. "The Other Steve Jobs: Censorship, Control and Labor Rights," writes ReadWriteWeb's newest hire, Alicia Eler. In the comments, to pacify angry Jobsians, editor/publisher Richard MacManus weighed in: "While we adored Jobs, we wanted to share the other side too in order to give a fuller picture. I would recommend however also reading my article linked to above, for a more balanced profile of Steve Jobs' immense achievements." Under the bus with you!