Today my breast swells with pride as my brother, the CEO of TRIGGIT, inc. gets some props as the opening salvo in a Washington Post article about Web 2.0. Zach (that being the brother) is one hell of a hard worker and more than deserving of this…but it’s damn nice to see others agree! HOORAY!
At the Web 2.0 conference here in 2005 — back before Google had paid $1.65 billion for YouTube and people were talking about valuations for Facebook of $15 billion — Zach Coelius, a precocious 25-year-old who had snuck into the hall without paying, stepped up to the microphone and asked the speaker for a bit of career advice.
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Start a company, replied Rupert Murdoch.
Now, two years later, Coelius has wheedled his way in again, this time to the Internet A-list party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, sponsored by MySpace, which Murdoch purchased in 2005 for what now looks like a bargain price of $580 million. Within minutes, Coelius has pushed through the throng and buttonholed Murdoch to report on how it has all worked out — how he had parlayed a "chance" meeting with a venture capitalist into an invitation to a regular poker game with other VCs who seeded his new "widget" company with their poker losses and later with modest first-round financing. Now, with a small staff and a tested product, Triggit.com is about to launch.
For the next two minutes, the two scheming entrepreneurs traded stories, the jowly septuagenarian media mogul filling in some details of how he broke the newspaper printers union on London’s Fleet Street, the lanky young upstart riffing on the spectacular promise of social networking. It’s hard to say who was enjoying the conversation more. But like many in the room, they had the sense that this was one of those magic moments that comes along every decade or so, when nothing is certain, everything is possible and anything can be spun into gold.
Here’s the link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/18/AR2007101802462.html?sub=new
Go Zach go!!!
