How I moved to New York City
In the Fall of 2006 I had left my first job after college. I was living in Northern Virginia at the time doing consulting work. With some free time on my hands I decided to drive up to the December New York to check out the New York Tech Meetup. I walked into a large auditorium at Cooper Union and was instantly grinning, here were 400+ people listening to presenters talk about their new startups. Nothing like this existed in DC. After everyone had given their 5 minute speeches, a series of people were allowed to make 30 second announcements. One person said that he would be teaching a class about web 2.0 applications next semester at Cooper Union and he requested help from people interested in contributing to the class.
After everyone was finished speaking there was a chance to mill around and talk to people. I ran into the guy who spoke aobut the web 2.0 class. His name was Sanford Dickert. I said, “Hello, I’m Paddy and I’m interested in your web 2.0 class. I have built large AJAX applications for Verisign and AOL”. He said, “well I really have to go, but here is my card”. I continued to enjoy the excitement of the city for the rest of the night.
A couple of weeks later I was in New York again and I met with Sanford. I had been expecting to give a talk to his class about AJAX techniques. I told him about my background, how I was interested in startups and building web applications. He told me that the class would be different from traditional cs offerings, more about the product design aspects of building a product than the theory or implementation details (students would be expected to provide those on their own). I asked him, “How do you think I could be involved with this course?”, he replied “Well I could see you being a TA, but you don’t live in New York”. I said, “I didn’t say I wouldn’t, I would just need to figure out how to get back and forth and where to stay”. It ended up working out that Sanford offered me his couch one night a week until March, so that I could TA.
After talking it over with some people and wondering what I was getting into (no pay, a couch from a guy I really didn’t know) I accepted. Sanford came through with his part of the deal and I was TA for the class for the whole semester. On March 1st I moved into my place in Brooklyn. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made. Because I was spending a lot of time with Sanford I was instantly tapped into the New York tech scene, he seemed to know everyone.
Thank you Sanford.