A great night out with Keith Ferrazzi and the Greenlight Community

Some of the CampusLIVE team and I rode the T into Boston last night for a Keynote by Keith Ferrazzi, by far the favorite author of our staff. He was speaking about his new book titled “Who’s Got Your Back“. If you haven’t read Ferrazzi – now is the time.

I knew the night was going to be great after Keith ended up in our elevator. We introduced ourselves and he showed a genuine interest in what we were doing. We all headed into the keynote at this point.

Keith is incredibly inspiring and the exercises he had the audience go through clearly resonated with the crowd. After discussing how we all needed to go home and really put his ideas to work he pointed out our company to the entire audience. He said we looked like a “Group of Mormons” which everyone got a chuckle out of.

After the talk almost everyone took off – not us. Anyone who has read “Never Eat Alone” knows one of Keith’s big lessons is to plan your attack and to be audacious – Get out there and find a way to meet the people you want to meet. We knew Keith would appreciate us staking out his entourage after the evening.

We stuck at the exit of the room and like clockwork Keith walked by us and invited us to drinks after his dinner with the governor (Deval Patrick). I was impressed – I’ve never heard someone say so matter of fact that they were having dinner with the governor.

It turned out that it was Keith’s b-day and the governor was having dinner with him and about 25 of his close friends. After the dinner we were invited into the party and had a great time with Keith and a lot of the Greenlight crew. We bounced some questions off him and got some great feedback. The even invited Mark to play some guitar for the guests – we couldn’t believe it.

Lesson learned: Always dress well and be ready for anything. You just may see the governor, sip champagne and cut birthday with your favorite author – all without expecting it.

We told Keith we’d get back to him in a few weeks after trying to implement some of his strategies. I have a really good feeling that his feedback is going to make a big difference.

Posted in Business, Entrepreneurship, Questions Answered
Tags: Keith Ferrazzi

The five people I’d like to meet in 2009

Everyone at the office is coming up with 5 people they’d like to meet this year. We’ve all been quite privelaged to meet a lot of influencial people this past year. I think 2009 will be a lot of fun going after this list.My Top 5

• Jeff Bezos – Founder of Amazon
• Craig Newmark – Founder of Craigslist
• Dean Kamen – Inventor of Segway & Slingshot Water System
• Richard Branson – CEO Virgin
• Jimmy Wales – Wikipedia 

With our networking styles here I think I can get to three of the five. I’ll update later.

Posted in Entrepreneurship

I Made Businessweek!

I’m psyched – Businessweek featured me in their “Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs” article.

Posted in Entrepreneurship

Quote worth reading

It’s always great when I read a quote from someone and can relate completely to it. Today I came accross a quote by Tony Wright, the CEO of RescueTime, a timekeeping tool i use regularly:

“There is nothing that drives a team forward like the fear of public failure, debt, and starvation. Leap off the cliff and start building the airplane on the way down and you might be surprised with what you can pull off.”

With CampusLIVE, I know that we’ve built our best applications and made our biggest sales when a crash looked imminent. Our plane is running smootly now, but only because of the effort we put into building it during tough times.

Posted in Entrepreneurship