Becoming Brian O'Kelley

I met up with Brian O'Kelley, another good Irishman, earlier tonight at Starbucks in Soho and chatted with him about his life as an entrepreneurs and his experience raising investment. I met Brian only a few weeks before at one of the Tech and Media brunches and was impressed by his knowledge of how to start a business and then how to exit a business;-) Brian had a ton of great advice tonight but something that I walked away from the meeting with was "Launch, Launch, Launch" which is what my boy Blue, I mean Paul Graham says in number 8 here. Even though Brian is a Princeton grad, we promise as Penn grads, to not hold it against him ;-) We still aren't even sure Princeton grads think of Penn as their rival but maybe just in basketball and total number of students from New Jersey;-)

Having only just returned from his travels around the globe (see picture above of Brian loving life in Sydney) for business mixed with a bit of nightlife pleasure, Brian is gearing up for his next big venture called AppNexus, which is changing the way people build web-scale software (but it's a stealth for now). Watch out Amazon and you other wannabes. Keep an eye out for his new company after it launches post January 1st. We are expecting bigger things after his successful run at Right Media where he was the CTO and helped to sell the company to Yahoo last year. Here's an article about the Right Media - Yahoo merger.

Tech / Media Peeps CEO Brunch

I had a nice brunch yesterday with plenty of interesting people who work in Tech, Media and the investment community at Gemma in the Bowery Hotel set up by Hilary Rowland of New Faces. It's fascinating to hear how each side views the other and how each other can work together to fill gaps in experience or knowledge the other side may be lacking. I was really impressed with some of the accomplishments and I was excited to see other people venturing out on their own and making a living doing what they love.

Some of the guest were from the Gathering, Right Media (sold to Yahoo), Getty Images, Conde Nast, Matrix Partners, Editor of an Aviation Magazine/Corbis rep'ed Fashion photographer, SocialDiva CEO, New Faces CEO, IACI Private Equity, and Paltalk. That just hit on the list of people who were sitting next to me ;-)