 20070927 Easy iCal event creation
I've been looking for an easier way to make iCal events, without having to open iCal (eg. I'm checking Animal Collective's website and see they're playing NYC on 9/30 at Webster Hall -- I want to add to my calendar). With text2cal, I can highlight any text any where and it will parse an event and automatically add to iCal -- and it's smart enough to know that tomorrow means today's date+1.Now, looking for a good way to share iCals without having to pay for iLife. I'm from Indiana and I made this shirt so that people know it.
 Indiana is a brand whose identity I want to improve. Soon, I'll have made enough to sell to you other Hoosiers.
The Guardian published pictures of contemporary English writers' "Writing Rooms".
Working from Jelly today.
20070920
iTunes, Album Only:
20070918
I looked at the “Album Only” button. Album after album on iTunes allows you to buy individual songs. You can do this from classic albums like The Who’s “Quadrophenia.” The Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds.” The Flaming Lips’ “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.” Albums that were conceived, and meant to be listened to, as complete pieces, whole works of art not meant to be broken up for individual consumption. And yet I couldn’t buy this single song because the integrity of the entire soundtrack to “Garfield: The Movie” had to remain intact. God forbid I should listen to anything other than “Fat Cat Keeps Getting Fatter,” by the Squirrel Nut Zippers, after the Stray Cats’ “Stray Cat Strut.”via Ricky. Jihad, The Music
My friend Ben Scheuer's musical Jihad sold out night after night at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and CNN reports that it's causing controversy too.
Scenes from my last day
zach's closing time from sox on Vimeo. Start at 04:30 to see everyone sing farewell. Going Solo
 First day in our NYC loft office. Three and half years ago, my business partner Josh Abramson called me to ask if I wanted to move to New York. I was a couple months from graduating and had been working full-time on CV from my dorm room in North Carolina. My partners finished school a year earlier and moved out to San Diego to run CV while I wrapped up. I was all set to move out there, too. "Ricky wants to buy a new car, " Josh explained, "but I think it's a better idea to sell our cars and move to New York instead. We can afford it now." Ricky had driven a late-model Camaro since high-school and was fed up with making excuses for it (people used to ask whether it came with a mullet when he bought it). In demonstration of his reformed taste, he decided to buy a Mercedes. He priced models and ran the math, however, and realized that a place in Manhattan might be cheaper than what the four of us might spend on car payments, insurance and gas every month. And recently, there had been some chatting about moving to New York someday, because that's where you go when you want to do something big. "Sure, let's do it." I called my mom after hanging up with Josh. She had planned to give me a surfboard as an early birthday present. She switched her order; I received 'kitchen stuff' instead. It was a bummer to miss out on San Diego. It's just one of those things you should do once, to live near a beach with a bunch of your buddies. Ricky used to send updates like, "We bought bikes for cruising the boardwalk today!!! Hurry and get out here!!!1". I was hurrying as fast as I could. I couldn't wait to join! As months passed, San-Diego-is-awesome emails arrived fewer and further between and the ones I did get read more like, "Hard to relate to people here. Their idea of ambition is picking up an extra shift at Longboards (nearby bar, Sublime cover band every other night)." In hindsight, I think their conflict with relaxing San Diego improved our company. They lived in an environment that starkly contrasted with our ambitions, and it emboldened them. They felt like overachieving rebels. I ended up going out there for six weeks to help them pack up and move to New York. When they picked me up at the airport, they pushed me into the backseat of Josh's jeep, put a blanket over my head, blared John Mayer's Room for Squares on repeat, drove for 30 minutes, dumped me off in a liquor store parking lot and sped off. They left me with a survival kit consisting of some twine, few cents short of a phonecall and a map of Los Angeles. Sometimes working at CV is exactly like what people assume. On July 1, 2004 I blogged my first entry from the kitchen of our sublet in Tribeca, which would double as our office for the next three months as our loft was being remodeled. It said, "I just woke up in Manhattan ... and realized that this is going to be the start of an amazing city life." It's reads corny to me now, yet without fail New York has never been anything less. Finally, we felt, here's a place that matches, if not exceeds, our energy. I was an orphan returning home to my birthplace after a stint in suburban Indiana foster care. The following year was a whirl. We learned a hard lesson by trashing our new loft during our first party after naively allowing the invitation to spread virally (the walls had to be repainted!). Busted Tees picked up steam and sold more than 100,000 shirts and was stocked by Urban Outfitters. CollegeHumor's audience rose from 4 million to 7 million users and increased ad sales allowed us to hire our first employee to work with us in our fifth bedroom office. Subsequently, we established office hours and wore pants to work. Most importantly, we made contacts that were out of grasp when we worked from San Diego. Nick Denton, who motivated by goodwill or his swelling crush on Ricky, I'm unsure, introduced us to everybody we needed to know, to teach us how to scale big. And, that's how we met Rebecca Mead. The writer who interviewed us for months and went on to write an article entitled Funny Boys, which was published in the New Yorker on January 24, 2005. And that's when everything changed. When good became great. Overnight, our inboxes were filled with inquiries from publishers and studios and entrepreneurs, and old classmates who now worked for banks and wanted to manage our portfolios. Within a few months, we had deals with Penguin and Paramount, and we used the book advance money to grow our staff to 12. In the next year, we doubled our staff size again and hired our first employee aged over 30, and took over the residential loft a few floors above our own for a separate office. Big Media courted us, and after conversations with Fox and Viacom and what seemed like a dozen VCs, we sold a majority stake to Barry Diller and his company IAC. There are more than 50 of us now and we work from a 17,000 sqft office near Union Square. We even have a COO who went to a fancy school. There are vending machines and interns, too. Yet, we haven't changed. We're still defined by our charisma, and what we do still feels less like a business and more like a lifestyle. And, it's still accurate to say that CV is just a bunch of friends working and living together, doing what they like and profiting from it. So, I hope you understand that it's difficult for me to announce that I'm leaving CV. My last day is this Friday. I put in my notice a few months ago, but hadn't really thought about it much until this morning when I realized this would be the last week of an era that has spanned most of my adult life! One unanticipated and stinging side-effect to building a stable business, I've observed, is that when you leave, it continues on without you. Then you quickly realize, however, that you've made a sustainable model employing dozens. That was the achievement, and there comes a time when it no longer needs to be maintained by you. You can let it be. Maybe that's what raising a child feels like. Anyway, thankfully, we made an effort to fill the company with brilliant and independent personalities that will take over for me. I'm eager for them to make it their own. In case you're curious, the reason for my leaving is simple: I have lots of ideas! and relationships! and I want to spend some time with them now. Over the past 5 years, I've sidelined several personal projects to remain focused on CV, but it's clear to me now that they're vital to maintaining my creative health. I want to focus on:
*** Thank you Jakob, Josh and Ricky. I'm happy to know that we're not much different than brothers. *** PS. Ricky now owns a Prius. |
 |
 Hi, I'm Zach. I grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana and graduated from Wake Forest. After college, I moved to Manhattan to get serious about a company I ran with friends. We sold it to Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp in 2006. I just wrapped up with a project I co-founded called Vimeo and left CV to focus on being a twenty-five year old. I have another blog called Copy and Taste, where I post about learning to cook. I live in Brooklyn now.  Del.icio.us My Flickr Me on Flickr Last.fm Linked in MySpace Netflix History Vimeo  Amir Blumenfeld Chris Bodenner Mareen Fischinger Fort Wayne Observed Nick Gray Hype Machine Jake and Amir Jakob Lodwick Oh My Rockness Jonathan Marcus Youngna Park Megan Scheminske Eliot Shepard Shorpy Signal vs. Noise Alex Soth Stereogum Ricky Van Veen Khoi Vinh Eugene Wyatt  June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007  Postal Skype SMS (via AIM) |