One might argue that, by design, all Entrepicurean dinners are "social." What earned this particular group the monicker is the large number of people who are involved with companies with a social spin, or whose lives involve a significant amount of networking.
Tonight's list of Entrepicureans includes, counterclockwise from the right in the picture, Don Dodge of Google, Claudia Santoro of Dyn (recently at VSnap), Ryan Kabir of ProBueno, Dejan Duzevik of Concentric ABM, Chandra Jacobs of EMC and Tripchi, Carrie Stalder (a familiar co-host) of Arms Reach, and yours truly.
Don, whose career reads like a timeline of the success of the PC and the Internet–culminating in his current position at Google–has been an advisor to a number of start-ups, including some recent forays into social networking. Claudia was cofounder of Vsnap, a messaging service that leverages email, LinkedIn and Twitter. Ryan is cofounder of ProBueno, a social fundraising platform that allows individuals to offer their talents in exchange for a donation to their favorite nonprofit. Dejan is cofounder and CTO of Concentric ABM, which simulates the behavior and interactions of consumers to help brands understand the impact of their activities. Chandra (who makes me look lazy with all her activities) spends her "ample spare time" on Tripchi, a startup that helps business travelers make the most of their time while at airports (would have been handy during the recent snow storms). Carrie has done more social and networking activities than anyone I know, including of course her founding contributions to Venture Café. (Which Chandra heard about while in Mumbay!)
My own relationship to social is through Infomous, which I can blame for the amount of time it has taken me to write this blog: literally the day after this dinner we were selected by Super Bowl XLVII to help them with social media monitoring, and had to fly out to New Orleans two days later to set things up. The last two weeks have been a blur...
Conversation through the evening touched on many fascinating topics; not surprisingly, many of them revolved around social themes. Don mentioned stumbling upon a Dinner in White in Paris, a really cool concept that started almost as a joke and became a world-wide social event. We had lengthy discussions about initiatives that combine networking and entrepreneurship, such as the Mass Challenge, Tony Hsieh's incubator in Las Vegas, social travel companies like Dopplr, shared office spaces for start-ups like WeWork. Someone mentioned the recent "Blind Gates" promotion by New Zealand Airlines, which pairs compatible strangers and sends them flying from London to L.A. And of course no discussion of social and tech could have avoided the mandatory conversations about online dating.
The food was designed to ward off the wintry chill in the air: after a healthy round of appetizers, we enjoyed a single-course meal consisting of polenta, garnished with four different sauces: a beef spezzatino (stew), gorgonzola cream sauce, peperonata (sauteed peppers and onions) and trifolata di funghi di bosco (sauteed wild mushrooms). The dessert tiramisú could have passed for home-made, but was actually from the Whole Foods down the street... All of this washed down by a few bottles of excellent wines.
