That being said, I always assumed that it was because it would create conversational tension, that it encouraged people to keep engaging in conversations. It seemed to work well in that regard in my experience.
I'll ping the organizer and see if there was any deep significance here or if it was just "I don't know, how about 7?" kind of thing.
The place has fancy red velvet furniture, oil portraits on the wall, and a dark feel. It's sometimes full of older women who seem to be looking for younger men. We don't fill that bill anymore, but sometimes someone younger friends can be suckered^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconvinced into coming along. Good times, good times.
Decent scotch selection. Not great, but workable.
> We took our $400 travel reimbursement check from YC and
> used that as seed capital for Grouper
That aside, it sounds like a fantastic idea.
> Co-founders Jerry Guo and Michael Waxman like to joke
> that Grouper is a Y Combinator-funded startup.
I would be okay if they don't. Privacy matters aside, it lets everyone present themselves at the meet-up as they want to, and not be judged by some small sampling of pictures or posts on their profile.
In this case, I can see how not sharing that info would make for a more exciting experience. e.g some magical algorithm paired me and my friends up with random other folks. I'd go along just to see how well it worked.
If it is a date but for whatever reason they don't want to say so (I'm guessing because of the social stigma around online dating in some circles -- check out the description of Blendr: it's exactly like Grindr but it's totally different), what about gay people?
Because when the average person wants to have fun, he or she usually is looking for a gender balanced group with attractiveness levels similar to him/her. Even a tangential experience with greek life or the party scene while in college gives you a pretty good feel for why this is the case. There's actually significant strategy and human capital that gets devoted to achieving a gender balance for your average college event.
is this really the case? I mean, it's hard enough for me to find other gay guys, but if even heterosexuals are established in a forced equal balance solely based on gender... what hope have I?
Their big problem is where they're going to find all of those girls. Only going to get close to those ratios in the Northeast around college towns.
What has happened to journalism.
... That is the ex that I don't want to see.
What exactly is this if it's not a date? Or kinda a date? Or "something that might be possibly misconstrued as a date"?
But then thinking back to the dating sites I've tried where the match was poor anyway I thought maybe I'll give it a chance.
Most dating sites don't live up to the promise of a perfect match so you might as well opt for a quick one ;<).
We applied to YC with paperbuff.com. In the 36 hours before
our interview, we ditched paperbuff and built qomments.com,
were rejected, then decided to build a product people would
actually want
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/08/just-launched-grouper-...
It's not a date! And when gay guys want to "just have fun" rather than "go on a date" don't you enjoy the company of women just as much as men?
The old adage "you are not as lonely as you think you are" (replace lonely with ignored/unhappy/bored/whatever) tends to be wrong (IMO), but "other people are just as out of it as you are" is generally true. The world would be more content in general if more people realised this: a lot of depression and anger tends to be magnified by the feeling that everyone else is having a better time of it when that often is not the case.
It's about the people, not the idea.
Everyone says that ideas are bullshit, but there isn't anything much like watching the evolution of your own idea and that of nine of groups of peers. But, it wasn't really until this year, watching ten budding companies from the outside, that it became so hilariously apparent that no first time entrepreneur has any fucking clue what they are doing.
I've overheard some of the companies pitch half a dozen ideas in a single afternoon. At least one or two of these wildly off course teams are the ones who are showing promise of discovering deep insight into their respective markets. For some teams, bouncing around is simply part of the process.