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Zach Verdin and his co-founders lived in a rented apartment in San Francisco for ten weeks. They paid their rent until the end of this month; There is no guarantee that they will be able to pay for another month.
At the inspiration meeting with me, Verdin was talking fast and talking with his hands, furiously running his fingers through his hair as he explained to me exactly what brought him to the city: why an entrepreneur, artist, and programmer had to leave everything behind to be here.
Startup stories
This is the first in a series of startup profiles by Jolie Odell, interviewing aspiring entrepreneurs in San Francisco coffee shops. follow Jolie’s Twitter feed To know when the next interview will be.
He lived for many years in Seattle, where he met his co-founders. He went there after dropping out of college; He chose Seattle not only for the technology platform, but also for the actual, geographic location.
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“At that point, being close to nature, being able to hike, really fueled my creativity,” he tells me over two bubble-wise hipster coffees under the hazy San Francisco sky and near the Golden Gate Park Panhandle.
“The magic of Seattle in that sense. It’s just a very creative place.”
His eleven-month stay in the Pacific Northwest was spent with his co-founders on a small island in the middle of Puget Sound. On a quiet, wooded private property, 13 chickens were very close to the community. The young founders ate a lot of quiche.
“Besides, it’s always raining, so there’s nothing to do but work on your startup.”
Verdin’s launch is The New Hive. The WYSIWYG Page Builder is a one-time, disposable set of pages – original content, media collected from around the web, anything, really. With a little tech savvy, users can maximize their online self-expression. It’s a great idea that I think loud musicians will especially like. Verdin Yes, musicians love it.
It’s less templated than Tumblr or other content management systems. Instead of giving you a format and a text editor, it gives you a completely blank canvas, a website that can hold anything you can imagine and in any format or layout. And you don’t have to futz with buttons and dials; Instead, like Jackson Pollock, you drag and drop pixels until the page looks like what you envisioned in your head.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/18836819 w=560&h=315]
“We believe that everyone is an artist and we strive to bring out the inner artist in everyone.”
Music, art, creativity, self-expression: these are all great, romantic concepts, especially when compared to the dry bones and bytes that make up the tech community. How did Verdin come to be in San Francisco, who was clearly so keen to marry these disparate subjects?
Verdin started in Ventura County, California. These days, the sprawling outer edge of the Los Angeles metro area includes tracts of small housing. If you think so weed Suburban version, you have an accurate mental image of the place. But at the time of Verdin, the residence of the tract had yet to develop; He remembers riding horses with his grandfather over rolling hills.
He moved from Ventura County to Minnesota’s Twin Cities to study urban revitalization and sociology. But as he dug into the dynamics of social life shrouded in physical spaces, the wider world began to bring sociology to vivid life in online spaces. In the year Around 2003 or 2004, Verdi packed up and took a train to Seattle, home of grunge and Starbucks and Microsoft.
Microsoft, in fact, ended up giving Verdin one of its best assets for its upcoming gaming startup: Founder.
“Kara [Bucciferro], she studied fine arts; She is the creative leader in the team. She previously worked at Microsoft in one of the labs. It was a perfect pairing for a man deeply focused on online creativity, arts and self-expression.
“No Abram. [Clark] It is our CTO. He had one unsuccessful start before. Before that, he was a developer at the University of Washington,” Verdin told me.
Raised in northern Idaho, he got his first computer at the age of eight. He is a self-taught programmer, very unique and creative.
Each had their own interests and skill sets, but this became the glue that held the online arts together. “We all had a need for self-expression and we all valued our creativity,” says Verdin.
That group of three* became the founding team of the new Hive, and through the three and a half years that followed, they began to build a life of struggles and disagreements and start-ups and grow closer as a family within close quarters.
“Shouldn’t you be?” Verdi asks. Don’t issues arise at startups that only families face? Shouldn’t you resolve conflict as a family? “
*After this article was published, we learned that the “band of three” was originally a group of four. New Haven founder Andrew Sorkin met Clark through the Seattle music community and introduced Clark to Verdin. UX designer Sorkin didn’t go on the Whidbey Island retreat with the other co-founders, but stayed involved with the project until the other co-founders moved to San Francisco. He is currently working on a mobile startup in Seattle.
