Wall St. Journal covers Lunch 2.0
A few weeks ago, amid the usual throngs of Lunch 2.0 attendees, I bumped into Anjali Athavaley, who reports for The Wall Street Journal. She asked a lot of good questions, then disappeared back into the crowd. I saw her again at several more Lunch 2.0 events, and now I know what she was up to: today the Journal wrote a thorough and positive article on the Lunch 2.0 phenomenon entitled “The Power Lunch, Cafeteria-Style.” There’s a color teaser on the top-right of page A1, and a large color spread on the front page of the Personal Journal section on D1. It’s also available online. Needless to say, we’re honored and thrilled.
Athavaley examines the Lunch 2.0 phenomenon through the lens of traditional journalism and explains it well for people outside the valley. When you’re in the middle of something like this, it’s easy to take it for granted and think of it as natural, but an article like this–which for many will be the first time they hear about Lunch 2.0–provides some perspective on how fortunate we are to live in such a passionate and open community.
[Edit: The part Joseph misses is where Kay Luo of LinkedIn and I talked Anjali’s ear off for months trying to convince her to do a story of this crazy idea. (I think I’m on her blocklist now.) Or the stealth work Mark did in trying to get AOL in Mountain View and Powerset in SF to host back to back.
In other news… for those of you just reading this in the Journal, it’s not to late to go to http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/241856/ in the East Bay today, or future Lunch 2.0’s in Santa Monica, Bangalore India, Silicon Valley, Seattle, the SF peninsula, and San Francisco (two announcements forthcoming). We hope you are inspired to start a Lunch 2.0 Area Network (LAN) in your area: Lunch 2.0 is an open idea in the spirit of having fun over food, not an organization… and we’d love for you to eat our lunch!—Terry]
August 30th, 2007 at 7:28 am
[...] Lunch 2.0: First local, now national, and soon global The Wall Street Journal covered the Lunch 2.0 community event phenomenon in yesterday’s business section (Read Terry’s thoughts). If you’re not familiar with Lunch 2.0 it’s a grassroots community event where savvy corporations and startups host the web community for a casual meal and opt-in demo or presentation. We have founders Terry Chay, Mark Jenn, David Kellogg, and Joseph Smarr to thank. [...]
September 28th, 2007 at 8:54 am
[...] First, Brett Petersel of Lunch 2.0 NYC has managed to score the first Lunch 2.0 in the Big Apple at the Ladders on October 16th. Nice complement to our hit in The Wall Street Journal. I’m going to invite everyone I know in NYC and you should too. [...]