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.

NEW YORK  CITY'S START-UP SCENESTERS

Mr. Webb traced the outbreak back to the carbo-loading marathon that is South by Southwest. Or “beer and taco week,” as Mr. Webb described it. He and several other techies had recently become disciples of The 4 Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman, a life-hacking manual written by Tim Ferriss that distills a decade of experiments into chapters about slow carbs, self-tracking and, yes, how to make a woman orgasm in 15 minutes.

The book is a follow-up to Mr. Ferriss’s wildly popular debut, The 4 Hour Work Week, which also came with its own garrulous subtitle: “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich.” Mr. Ferriss’s second installment purports to help readers “reach their genetic potential in six months” and “lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing,” featuring seductive advice like “How to Lose 20 Pounds in 30 Days Without Exercise.” The near-600-page tome climbed up the New York Times’s best-sellers list over Christmas and has clung to the top 10 of Hardcover Advice & Misc. since. But judging by the uptick in “cheat day” tweets over the past few weeks and our sudden familiarity with the body fat percentage and breakfast habits of local start-up types, the diet—sorry, body-hacking lifestyle—has taken a few months to fully infiltrate the New York tech ecosystem.

An Old School MIT Hacker Gives us His Top Ten Hacks in History

Although better-known as a music festival, SXSW's 10-day affair in Austin also serves as a petri dish for start-up founders to culture their latest app with eager early adopters. To stay on the no-sugar bandwagon during SXSW’s 24-hour party cycle, Mr. Webb looked to another high-profile New York techie also in attendance, Michael Galpert, co-founder of Aviary, a Madison Square-based photo-editing site. Mr. Galpert knew he would need some kind of support group. So, like any self-respecting start-up founder, he found a way to automate the process.

GroupMe, a New York-based group messaging app, was heavily-hyped heading into SXSW. Mr. Galpert decided to use it to set up a public SMS group to text out what he was eating to fellow techies like Mr. Webb and “my boy,” Foursquare’s Naveen Selvadurai, arguably one the most recognizable faces out of the city’s tech scene. Mr. Galpert sent out messages like “You can eat here” or “This bar doesn’t have wine.”

“That was an important one,” notes Mr. Webb. (Did we mention you get two glasses of wine every night on this thing? Big selling point for folks who see every elbow-graze as a networking opportunity.)

The buzz around GroupMe, which eventually brought home SXSW’s breakout prize, was bubbling up. “Everybody’s trying the software out. They see this group with me and Galpert and Naveen and they join it to see what we’re talking about. Then they realized it was about men’s dieting,” said Mr. Webb, disintegrating into raspy belly laugh. Men’s dieting? “Well, it was a group of five dudes. They’re like, ‘What are you guys doing?’” Even Mr. Selvaduari was befuddled.  He put the group on mute.

“It probably seems like a cult, huh?” Mr. Webb asked The Observer, his deep laugh reverberating through the phone. Well, maybe more like an infomercial.

The word cult (or “cult-y” or “cultish”) came up repeatedly when we asked start-up founders, venture capitalists and developers why The 4 Hour Body was so popular with the city’s newly forged creative class. No one mentioned the sex advice. “Haha. Everyone’s read that chapter, but so far I don’t know anyone who’s claimed to try it,” Mr. Webb typed via gChat. Another acolyte, Meghan Keane, a former tech reporter and editorial director of B5Media, put it more pointedly: “If you’re staring at/thinking about sex diagrams while having sex, you’re probably doing it wrong.”

If you forgo the sex chapters, questionable tips on holding your breath longer than Houdini, and unapproved Chinese supplements (the readers we spoke to do), the slow carbs and kettlebell regime doesn’t sound that different from, say, the South Beach diet or Power 90 Extreme. Rather, the biggest difference seems to be who, exactly, is downloading it onto their Kindle or iPhone.

Mr. Webb, who’s been a 4HB-er since January, said about 20 of his fellow Barbarians have now read the book. In late July, when Whitney Hess, who has designed user experiences for start-ups like Boxee and Seamless, tweeted, “What are the chances I vomit during cheat day tomorrow?” she CC’d seven other start-up folks, including First Round Capital’s principal, Charlie O’Donnell, and four members of New Work City, the co-working space in Chinatown where a growing cell of 4HB followers regularly plug in their laptops. “Tim’s use of social media probably drives a lot of usage,” Mr. O’Donnell told The Observer. “It’s the only diet I see with a hashtag.”

The tech appeal of The 4 Hour Body also lies in Mr. Ferriss’s personal brand. No optimization aficionado worth his real-time productivity app would be caught dead without The 4 Hour Work Week on his bookshelf. The man Wired magazine once called the “greatest self-promoter in the world” also comes dude-approved. Everything from the cover to Mr. Ferriss’s extreme experimentation barks: It’s not a diet, it’s a life hack, brah. The emphasis on quantifying progress using spreadsheets and tools like Fitbit, a sleep and fitness tracker you can wear around your wrist, also helps sell the idea that The 4 Hour Body is all about optimization, the same way you’d track the financials or traffic for a new web feature. We didn’t meet any 4HB-ers who attended the first-ever Quantified Self conference in Mountain View this May, but we imagine there was some overlap.

For New York techies in particular, however, Mr. Ferriss’s weight-loss philosophy happens to have arrived at a moment of reckoning. Between the late nights and the office kegerators, the first flush of the start-up lifestyle can play out with the same limit-testing zeal as leaving your parents’ house for the college dorm. Now with some experience under their belts, techies are stepping away from their keyboards and deciding to do something about that “founder 15.”

“It goes along with the hacker culture of optimizing and perfecting all different kinds of your life,” said Mr. O’Donnell from First Round’s conference room above Union Square Park. “The tech community in general is unsatisfied with the status quo and wants to find hacks and cheats,” he added, fidgeting with the water bottle that accompanied him on his 9.2-mile bike ride from Bay Ridge that morning. “This is like when they used to play video games and figured out the Contra code: Up-Up-Down-Down-Left-Right-Left-Right B, A, Start.” The 4 Hour Body operates a self-serve menu of hacks. Even Mr. Ferriss acknowledges there’s no need to read all 592 pages, although the hardcover edition does make a handy kettlebell alternative.

“IN MY CASE, IT WAS MORE LIKE THE FOUNDER 30,” said Mark Webster, who started his own interactive design consultancy, Kickstart Concepts, back in 2009, and is currently working on another venture. Mr. Webster got a copy of The 4 Hour Body when he attended Mr. Ferriss’s launch party in December. “It was at that horrible nightclub, Greenhouse, where there’s always tech parties.” Mr. Webster said he hadn’t seen a critical mass of compatriots on the diet, but a behavioral switch had definitely been flipped. “That whole Mountain Dew late-night pizza culture is dying out. When I go on business breakfast, we’re all ordering egg whites.”

“Maybe it is tech’s dirty little secret, because I’ve seen a lot of people opening their burritos lately,” he added, describing a recent tech lunch, “We were basically standing around some lecture, they got sandwiches, and everyone goes to throw the bread away and eat the filling.”

As evidence of the healthy-office trend, Mr. Webb said, just last month four employees asked him to swap out their office chairs for standing desks at the Barbarian Group. “Standing desks are definitely in vogue right now. You know Jay Parkinson?” he asked, referring to Williamsburg doctor behind Hello, Health. “All of us read his Tumblr and he’s been going on about all this new data about sitting and how bad it is. So, yeah, you’re out all night, you think ‘I don’t need to exercise if I stood up all day.’”

Last month, in a blog post announcing its new ergonomically-optimized 5,000 sq. ft. office space on 6th Avenue, ff Venture Capital partner David Teten also mentioned standing desk, as well as subbing out desk chairs for exercise balls and wobble boards for the VC firm and start-ups that would call the space home. The next week, Mark Peter Davis, co-founder of Kohort, a service for organizing groups, wrote a blog post about office culture entitled, “Why We Do Push-Ups.”

DATA NERDS KNOW that adding variables requires measurement to see what works. “Oh, yeah, personal informatics? I love that shit,” said Mr. Webb. “We all have Daytum and RescueTime. Do you know that one? It’s a personal productivity thing for your computer. It tracks how much time you spend on each program. You look at your stats and you’re like, oh, I spent half my week on Facebook.”

Mr. Webb lost his Fitbit, but he’s created his own system. “I have a spreadsheet in Evernote where I do all the abdomen and leg and arm measurements each weekend and still measure my weight every day. You lose weight so fast, it’s rewarding. I keep it all on a giant spreadsheet and chart it out.” He uses the Withings scale to weigh himself. “Of course we all have it. It’s a scale with Wi-Fi in it that sends your weight to a personal informatics site, which is awwwwwwwwesome.”

Ms. Hess, a self-described numbers person,who got into the 4 Hour Body after watching fellow New Work City denizens Tony Bacigalupoand Fredrick Selby encourage each other by texting photos of cheat day meals and emailing support, says she’s just as into the self-quantifying aspect. “As a curvy woman I did a few different measurements in my torso--butt, hips, belly button, and waist--and then I did bust and I did face. My friends were like, what’s ‘face'?!” Ms. Hess, a pretty, diminutive redhead, told The Observer, moving her hand up her body as she listed each area. “I get puffy in my cheeks when I gain a few pounds, so I put the tape measure around my neck and under my ears and then around to just over my mouth to see what the horizontal circumference would be,” she says, miming the movement. “I tweeted it and people were like, how do you measure your face? They thought I was doing it vertically, like to see how big my chins were.”

After adopting the plan three weeks ago, Ms. Hess says she’s still in the euphoria stage although she’s heard it takes woman longer to drop the weight. “It definitely skews tech and that’s because of Tim. I’d also say it skews very male,” she explained. “There are not a lot of diet books if any out there that a man would be caught dead reading on the subway. But The 4 Hour Body, it sounds like something futuristic, it sounds like Superman.”

An Old School MIT Hacker Gives us His Top Ten Hacks in History

The absence of women in tech is not really news, but since it remains a Situation, it's worth hammering away at.

This morning we wrote about the lack of women at the top positions at Twitter, Facebook, Zynga and Groupon, arguably the biggest four companies on the social Web.

Now local designer Whitney Hess has put together a counterpart to that list with a roundup of the gender breakdown at some some well-known startups.

Most of the women working at hot startups are in marketing, she noted.

"Not only are women in tech mostly invisible, the vast majority of those who are on display are selling, not making," she wrote.

Foursquare? Six out of 40 employees are women, Hess writes. Their roles include Community Manager, Lead Designer, Marketing Manager, Head of Recruiting and Community Support Coordinator.

Kickstarter? Four out of 14 employees are women, Hess writes, working in Customer Service, Marketing and Community.

Tumblr's lone female employee, according to Hess, is Director of Outreach. (She left out intern Annie Werner. UPDATE: Turner was recently hired as Meetup Coordinator, bringing Tumblr's female employee count up to two.)

New York's BankSimple had nine employees, none of whom are women.

"Thanks for highlighting this," CEO Josh Reich responded in the comments. "As a company, this is something we would like to rectify."

BankSimple isn't excluding women from its team, he said, but it's tough to hire women who are technical. It's much easier to find women to take a marketing or communications position, he suggested.

"I just scanned through all the applicants we have received for advertised 'making' positions. To date, we have yet to receive a single female applicant. We currently have an open position in customer relations. Nearly two-thirds of the applicants to this position are female," he said.

Hess was briefly the only woman running for a spot on the board of the New York Tech Meetup, the largest tech organization in New York City, before she dropped out. When Tech Observer asked why, she declined to comment.

The ratio may be shifting, however. Newly-elected board member Anil Dash has said he wants to make the NYTM more diverse, and some local techies like developer Sara Chipps of Girl Develop It are working to teach women how to code.

Of course, women aren't the only faces missing from the tech industry.

Disclosure.