A couple of years ago I worked in downtown Seattle and every summer in downtown Seattle there are the Out To Lunch Concert Series. These are a great way for the artistically inclined Seattlites to enjoy a summer afternoon listening to great music during the week. These lunches are hosted by Seattle businesses and usually held outside…so if you go to lunch anywhere near the music your get to enjoy it.
Well, this idea of gathering like minded people from around town to share lunch together is replicated in the lunch 2.0 series….A lunch 2.0 event is hosted by a local company, the local tech community is invited, there is a good amount of eating, networking, and general enjoyment to be had, and afterwards everyone can go back to doing their own thing at their own companies. To be more precise, the definition from the originators is….
Lunch 2.0 A social phenomenon referring to a migration of web 2.0 company employees to other offices around the
Silicon ValleySeattle area; characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share food and ideas, and “the lunch as a conversation.”
Down in the Valley this Lunch 2.0 thing has been a hit! From web companies, to software companies, to just about any company that wants to connect with the web 2.0, blogger, podcaster community (including HDS, AOL – Mountain View, LinkedIn, Microsoft – Mountain View, Yahoo, etc). So what about the other areas where startups have been abundant? What about the mothership to some of these companies? What about the huge crowds that swarm events like Mind Camp, ignite, and gnomedex? What about casual Lunch 2.0 events in cities like Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, or Boston? These are all the cities that sit right alongside the Valley as THE place to start a 2.0 company.
So why aren’t Zillow, TheCobaltGroup, GearLive, WaMu, Pixpulse, Lockdown, Redfin, Bsquare, Treemo, LexisNexis Microsoft, Nintendo, Farecast, InfoSpace, WetPaint, Attachmate, Curious Office, Classmates, ProgrammableWeb, Google – Kirkland, BlueDot, Oracle, JamGlue, PopcapGames, MessageGate, Escapia, Pluggd, AOL – Seattle, Zoji, Fluke, Judy’s Book, Clearswift, Sampa, Impinj, Menuism, F5, LexBlog, Sun, Findory, Madrona, mPire, Motorola – Redmond, Limeade, Amazon, Jobster, Premera, iLike, Vulcan, Real, Adic, Twango, Adobe, Ontela, Denali, SecondSpace, EMC – Bellevue, UrbanSpoon, AMD, OneByOneMedia, Aditi, 3Sharp, Boeing, Newvine, Avanade, eyejot, Intel, Mixxer, XO Communications, eDiscovery Law, ZenZui, ZooDango, Isomedia, Mixpo, Loudeye Trailfire, eProject, Shelfari, Tmobile ImageKind, comcast, PicNik, Azaleos, BagBorroworsteal, Expedia, Trumba, Lucid8, Payscale, IBM – Kirkland/Seattle BuddyTV, Bocada, TheRobotCoop, Safeharbor, Vizrea, Isilon, Shackprices, Concur, OthersOnline, Jetstream, SmartSheet, X10, Wishpot, Opsware, GridNetworks, Clearwire, Synapse, CA, TrenchMice, Cingular, Quantum, and all the other Seattle Tech or startup companies…
I know, I know, there are the WSA events where people fight over Google and Microsoft…..or you can go get coffee with some startup entrepreneurs ……but for the actual techies…. developers, bloggers, technologists, server admins, PMs, entrepreneurs, etc, etc….we need a better easier way to get together for lunch. We need a better way to enhance our local tech community…maybe then Hugh won’t decline attending a Seattle Geek Dinner.
So who wants to sponsor a lunch 2.0 event here in the greater Seattle area?
We can help sponsor it!
Dude! It would be awesome to have Lunch 2.0 up in Seattle (I would’ve loved to have it going on when I was up in SEA working @ Microsoft 🙂 )
BTW, if you’d like to post on the official Lunch 2.0 blog to try to get more of an audience, let me know. I can give you authorship rights.
Maybe a sponsor can get me a plane ticket up to Seattle? 😀
Hey Mark, that would be great to post to the official lunch 2.0 blog!
There has been some small interest so far, but there are a lot of tech companies up here who could host one of these…
Ping me offline for the details to post over there josh.maher@gmail.com
Harvey Nash would be excited to either sponsor or co-sponsor lunches like this. Feel free to contact me regarding this.
Harvey Nash would be excited to either sponsor or co-sponsor lunches like this. Feel free to contact me regarding this.
mike.dades@harveynashusa.com
TrenchMice uses a virtual office, so hosting a lunch 2.0 event would be a little tough. I could do it in my house, but my primary spousal domain controller might throw an exception. 😉
I wonder how many of the other Seattle area firms have virtual offices? It’s worked out great for us, and I’m sure that others are doing the same thing. I wonder what the percentage of virtual-ness is here, vs. in Silicon Valley. Anybody know?
I’d partake in a lunch 2.0 that’s hosted somewhere else!
That’s great, I’ll contact you offline David
Thanks Mike, I’ll contact you as well!
John, That is awesome that you do it all with a virtual office!! I’m sure there are plenty of people who want to hear how you do it!
We’ll work on a place to have it etc, would you be up to talking about operating the whole company in a virtual office? People would be interested to implement it for their teams and/or get some ammo to ask their boss to allow it 🙂
I’m perfectly fine with talking about it, but I’m not sure how worthy it would be as the basis for a talk. It’s more about mindset than technology — either you’re up for making e-mail, IM, phone, coffee houses, etc., work for you, or you aren’t. As with so many things, you can find a zillion reasons why something’s unworkable if you’re inclined that way, or you can choose to make it work.
But if others would want to hear about our experiences, sure, I’d be game.
This sounds great! I’ve been looking for something like this. Like Trenchmice, Human Proxy is all virtual office but it’s probably easier for us since it’s basically just me. The only miscommunication happens in my brain. 🙂
If there’s anything I can do to help though, I’d be happy to!
Best regards,
/Juan
I would try to attend such a lunch…
This is a great response…..while I get the details squared away…let me know if you want to attend one of these http://seattlelunch20.wetpaint.com/
Right now I’m thinking a friday afternoon lunch on June 1st for the first one….
I would love to attend this lunch and future ones and spread the word around Amazon.com
I’d love to attend the lunch. We would also definitely sponsor one and hand make Italian food for everybody!
Hey Max! Hand Made Italian food!!
You are so on the sponsor list!!
YUMM!
Sign me up….!
I’d be interested in joining these, and it might make sense for Ontela to sponsor some of them… Send me an email with more info.
It’s such a well done post I don;t have the heart to tell you we are not in Seattle, but perhaps when we are there in July at MindCamp we could do a lunch!
Great idea!
Like Jim said … we’d be happy to have lunch. I’m actually based on the other side of the water in Victoria so I could theoretically take the Victoria Clipper over. Hmm, wonder if they have WiFi…
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Hey Tris, you all would be more then welcome to come down to attend or help sponsor an event. I personally think we don’t do enough cross the water stuff in the tech industry. After all, ferries to/from victoria and driving to/from vancouver can be done within a day quite easily. I think the WA State ferries may have the wifi your looking for too 🙂
Hey Josh – great idea…and if someone sponsors the June 1st lunch, we’ll bring a couple of dozen home-baked chocolate chip cookies for dessert.
Cindy
(check us out – we’re hiring! http://www.zenzui.com/careers.html)
So – how’s about we do a Lunch 2.0 event at the next Seattle Mind Camp? Lemme know what you think 🙂
Interesting idea, MindCamp is still my favorite ongoing conference in Seattle….how are you thinking that would work?
Btw, Wetpaint, Eyejot, & ZenZui are confirmed for a June 1st event @ Wetpaint!! more details to come soon….
Josh –
I am thinking we replace the “grab some lunch and wait around until we get started” part of Mind Camp with actually kicking off the event with a mini-event if you will, that being a Lunch 2.0 🙂
Drop me an email – I think this could end up being pretty cool!
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TalentSpring can sponsor food at an upcoming event. These are great events.
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