It's hard to believe, but the most recent Entrepicurean dinner was the tenth in the series since we started back in November of 2011. In this span, almost exactly 50 people have been able to join us! However, the list of people to invite has been growing faster than the list of people who have attended: I now have a spreadsheet of an additional 130 people, and the two co-hosts each have huge lists of people as well. We are scheming to make some changes that will expand the Entrepicurean community more broadly... stay tuned.
The Tenth Entrepicurian was great fun. We had an interesting mix of people (well, we always have an interesting mix). Of course I got distracted and forgot to take a picture until after two people had already left, so I had to photoshop in the two missing people–I am sure you can tell which ones. Through a statistical aberration, five of the seven participants are women. Speculation had it that this might not have been a statistical aberration...
Counterclockwise from the right you can see Maggie Wells, Corey McAveeney, Mary Chiochios (once again as co-host), Ihsan Ecemis, Judy Laster, Becky Curran and yours truly. Yes, the apron with my name on it gives it away.
As is often the case with when more than 5-6 people attend, there were many conversations sometimes simultaneous, so I will not be able to do justice to all the topics that were discussed during dinner. Interestingly, four of the seven people have lived in California (Becky and Maggie in the LA area, Corey in Silicon Valley, and Paolo in Santa Barbara); three people have or have had direct involvement with the film industry (Becky, Judy and Mary); three people are involved with companies that in one way or another deal with the sale of advertising (Ihsan, Maggie and Paolo); and three people either have lived, are living, or want to live in New York (Maggie, Becky and Paolo).
There were lively debates about some key differences between Boston and New York, one of them being diversity (which is much more evident in New York). We also had some great discussions about being different, and how difficult it can be in our society to be accepted as a person who stands out in terms of race, gender, religion, size, skin color, sexual orientation, age, etc... Becky in particular does an amazing job of disseminating motivational information to overcome perception biases - if you don't know her you should check out her Facebook and Twitter pages for some moving videos and stories.
The food was washed down by generous amounts of wine. You can see a selection in the picture to the side. As a disclaimer, you might notice that not all the bottles are completely empty! :-)
