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]

As VC of Lunch 2.0, it is my job to make sure we run at a loss until we sell out. With all the free schwag that we’re getting from our gracious hosts, we’re in danger of recouping the $5 investment that I put in for the domain name.

I can’t let that happen and I’ve forced the others to seek a second round of venture financing with a pre-capitalization of… well… to be honest… it sort of breaks down there.

Oh well, I’m trying to increase exposure of Lunch 2.0 because a lot of people hear us through word of mouth and have complained that they don’t know how to get in touch with us to host an event. So I had business cards printed out:

I had an extra deck printed and I’m trying to give away all the cards from it. The way this works is you view them on Flickr, mark the one you want with flickr’s notes feature, and contact me and tell me how I can get the card to you. Pretty easy, huh?

Quick links: one, two, three, four, five.

This is my way of saying thanks for coming out to Lunch 2.0 and thanks for hosting! Without you, we’d just be four guys trying to sneak into cafeterias in the Valley.

Noticed in Computer Weekly that Lunch 2.0 is backlash again:

Tim O’Reilly has a lot to answer for. When the publishing guru coined the term Web 2.0 at a 2004 conference he spawned a generation of marketing puff. We have had Marketing 2.0, PR 2.0, Democracy 2.0, Identity 2.0, Jobs 2.0 and even Lunch 2.0. The numerical suffix has become shorthand for anything new and, more dubiously, groovy.

Score! But Danny forgot to mention: “tasty, funny, and subversive.”

Speaking of which, Josh Maher writes about the Seattle Lunch 2.0 kickoff. Hmm, looks like our buddies to the north are showing us up! Let’s make that up by being at the next Lunch 2.0 at Ning on Thursday, June 14th!

Jeremiah (host of the upcoming Lunch 2.0 Web Expo Blowout at Hitachi Data Systems) just pointed me to an article in The Register about Tim Berners-Lee complaining that “Web 2.0″ is all hype and nothing new. As evidence that the “2.0″ suffix has become trendy and meaningless, the author Gavin Clarke writes:

We have: SOA 2.0, enterprise 2.0, grid 2.0, VoIP 2.0, voice 2.0, BPM 2.0, Office 2.0 and - outside of pure technology - advertising 2.0 and marketing 2.0 (both - naturally - taking advantage of Web 2.0’s social networking technologies), business development 2.0 and - subverting the genre - hidsight 2.0 and lunch 2.0.

I don’t know what to be prouder of–the fact that we were included in this article, or that we’re apparently “subverting the genre”! :) 

But actually, when I think about it, Lunch 2.0 really does embody a lot of what (with all due respect to Sir Berners-Lee) makes Web 2.0 special: connecting people to people (meeting fellow valley folk and seeing how they work), user-generated content (all of the work is done by companies choosing to host lunch 2.0 events–they even write the announcements!), and customers as active participants (if you didn’t come to lunch 2.0, it wouldn’t exist, and it certainly wouldn’t be as fun and colorful as you always make it!). So in response to Mr. Clarke, I’d say if anything, we exemplify the genre!

Thanks to you all for making lunch 2.0 what it is, and regardless of what happens to web 2.0, we’re here to stay!

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