What do you get when you mix a room full of ambitious young startup passionistas (yes, I just made that word up) and experienced, successful, and helpful entrepreneurs, angels and mentors with some great food and an amazing setting to spark conversations and new friendships? You get DartBoston’s Dart Dinner. This is where newcomers like me (at the time) can get fully submersed into Boston’s swaggertastic tech startup scene in a single night.
Back in September, out of spontaneity, I applied to the first Dart Dinner: Angels & Mentors (yes, you have to apply – it’s *that* popular). Now, you have to understand, before this dinner, I hadn’t met a single person in the Boston tech scene, let alone had any close friends who were as passionate as I was about tech startups. I was running a failing startup trying to radically change how college students found entry-level jobs and internships. Even though I was perhaps the opposite of what I’m sure DartBoston would have liked to see in its applicants for the dinner, I got an invitation to come to the dinner a few days later from Victoria Song (who is an amazing girl, btw!). When I received the email from her, I remember just laughing inside thinking, “How did I get an invitation?”. I continued reading the rest of the email and I was blown away at the list of mentors and angels who were coming to the dinner. People like David Cancel (CEO of Performable – recently acquired by another Cambridge-based company, HubSpot), Roy Rodenstein (Co-Founder of Going.com and now SocMetrics), Katie Rae (TechStar Boston Managing Director & Partner at Project 11), Bill Warner (Founder of Avid), and many more.
Entrepreneurs and mentors just hanging out (I'm not in this picture)
Holy sh*t, I was about to have dinner with Boston’s undisputed tech startup leaders.
September 28th, 2010, I leave Babson’s campus and get to NERD at 7:15pm. I walk into the location and I am so excited about what I see: ~30 other young startup founders chatting it up with the angels and mentors. As I try to contain my excitement in having realized, “So I’m not weird. Plenty other young peeps love tech startups, too!”, it quickly hits me that I know absolutely *no* one here. For the 30 minutes or so, I was that kid at the high school prom that sat in the corner of the dance hall sipping his apple juice too shy to talk to anyone. If you know me, you know that this is just about the farthest thing from who I am. I don’t know why I felt so shy the way I did. I almost even left! I sucked it up (I think I slapped myself), started making some conversations and within minutes, I felt right at home in a setting of strangers. My friend Jason Baptiste (CEO of OnSwipe) showed up a bit after and we ended up getting a seat in the same table and enjoyed chatting with other young entrepreneurs. Although I wasn’t able to meet with all the mentors, I was able to get to talk to Roy for a bit near the end of the dinner and I was just thrown back by his humbleness that was visible in the way he talked with the other young entrepreneurs and I.
Long story short, I met people at that dinner who I still talk to this day. Even more importantly, I met mentors that night who still shoot back advice whenever I contact them regarding my new startup, Redeemr.
From a series of events that started from this dinner, I got plugged into the startup scene in Boston quick and it lead to the start of my tech startup career – largely, in part, due to the relationships that spurred from this dinner. About a month after this dinner, I joined a micro-VC firm in Cambridge as an Associate who recruited me for my involvement within the young startup scene in Boston, met with friends of new friends which lead to me starting Redeemr, and with the help, support, and feedback from the people I met at the dinner as well as the people I couldn’t have met if Dart Dinner didn’t exist, I was able to develop Redeemr enough to not only raise a $90K seed round, but also in winning the Babson Business Plan Competition (which was something I had been wanting to accomplish since applying to Babson). Of course, there was a lot of luck and other factors that didn’t spur from the Dart Dinner involved in experiencing a lot of this, but I’d be a fool to not give DartBoston’s Dart Dinner and Victoria huge credit for spending time to facilitate such an amazing event for us, young entrepreneurs.
So, what did Dart Dinner mean to me? This is the place that started it all for me. The next time they organize a dinner, make sure you do everything to get that invitation. And for us young entrepreneurs braving out here in the West Coast, I can only wish you, too, have a chance one day to partake in such an experience.
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[...] I actually got an invite from Victoria Song to the Dart Dinner, I was blown away. Just like when Tim Chae got his first invite, I thought, “How did I get an invitation?” We had just begun development [...]