Three years ago today, I grabbed the domain name BrooklynBridgeVentures.com.
It's kind of a funny answer to "When did you start Brooklyn Bridge Ventures?"
What might be a more relevant date is May 22nd, 2007. That's the day I sat down for lunch at Coffee Shop with Henry Blodget, just six days after Silicon Alley Insider launched. Henry told me that I should start a fund--me, a 27 year old former VC analyst turned product manager with no MBA at a startup that wasn't really headed in any particular direction. It's probably the first time I'd really ever had the thought of starting my own fund.
So thanks for playing Inception, Henry.
I guess it's true what they say. It's easy to be right about market predictions eventually. It's just really hard to predict timing.
The stories we tell ourselves about how things get started are often much more linear than they actually happened. Who had what idea when? When did you actually commit to something?
Getting a domain name... I guess that's about as good a demarcation line as any, but that's never really the full story.
So when did I really start Brooklyn Bridge Ventures?
Well, I was born in 1979.
My godfather got me IBM stock right after that, so that's how I knew that a stock market and investing existed.
My dad brought home an IBM PS/2 in 1987.
I got an internship on the buy side at the GM pension fund in high school--in 1997.
I started a business newspaper in 1998 in college covering the stock market and the economy.
I got my first job in venture--at GM--in February 2001.
I tried to write a book for college kids in 2002-2003, couldn't get it published, so I started blogging in February of 2004.
I met Brad and Fred in the Summer of 2004, agreeing to join them later that year--my first job at a fund.
I started a company, failed at it, and joined First Round in 2009 to help them open up their NYC office. In the middle of that whole thing, I wrote a blog post about Foursquare that a lot of people noticed.
After my two year stint was up, I bought a domain name.
Yeah, so, somewhere in there.
Chances are, your story of starting something is already happening but you don't even realize it.