To call myself a television star may be a bit of a stretch but…

A few months ago I was hosting the Denver Founders Network, a group that gets together once a month and talks about startups. After the event a guy came up to me and said he’d like to talk about a project he was working on that I may be able to help him with. My policy is to meet with anyone who asks because you never know where it will leave. I call them karma meetings. But I wasn’t too sure about this one. The guy, who’s name was Eli, said something about wanting to get me on TV and anyone who wanted to put me on TV was clearly nuts.

After a couple of attempts to meet up we settled on getting together at his office.

As I pulled up, my feeling of trepidation was not eased. The building looked like it was either a meth lab or chop shop. I rang the door bell… waited… rang the doorbell again and a rough looking guy with a blond pony tail opened the door a crack saying “Can I help you?” meaning “What the fuck are you doing here?!?!?”

“Uh…I’m here to meet Eli.” Thinking, “I should get the fuck out here before I end up as the lead story on the 10PM news.

I was ushered to a small conference room where Eli introduced me to his idea: a show that would highlight entrepreneurs from all walks of life tell their stories in authentic way… It would serve as place where startup folks could connect learn and grow but the whole story would be told from the perspective of the entrepreneur. Wow, that’s basically what we’d be trying to do with our little startup meetup group in Denver. Not surprisingly I thought it was a great idea!

Love it… but I started to imagine how this was going to work. The “camera man” would be a guy trying to hold his iPhone still while I interviewed Joe from Joe’s plumbing.  I probably couldn’t pull off a Between Two Ferns type of show with the same pizazz as Galifinakas.

Me-“Listen, I love what you guys are doing but I’m not sure I’m the right guy to help.”

Eli- “Wait, I forgot to tell you the best part. We can get access to the best entrepreneurs in the country.”

Me-“Tell me more.”

Eli-“Well we just interviewed someone for our magazine that may intrest you. This is the type of guy that we can get access to.”

He handed me a copy of Icosa magazine (it turns out the he was creating Icosa Media as a nalural extension of the magazine) with a big grinning picture of none other The Woz the cover. (The Woz = Steve Wozniak co-founder of Apple, genius engineer and one of the all time nicest human beings in the world of tech.)

Ok. No more poker face. That is freaking awesome but listen if we can get interviews with guys like Woz we have to have decent production value…right.

Right…Icosa Media was not messing around. They had already invested in state of the art equipment and a full green screen studio with the sickest virtual studio that I ever did see.

OK…I’m sold. The show would be called Starto and we would create something brand new. Coming soon to http://starto.tv

Fast forward through a bunch of meetings, the recruitment of an award winning director from Hollywood, the completion of the studio and much more… we had our first shoot this past Friday. We’re still very clearly in the “getting started” stage and just figuring out what the hell we’re doing but I’m having a ton of fun, meeting and hanging with some really cool people and I can say that I have my own TV show.

We’ll be shooting our first “real” show the week after next with a launch date sometime shortly there after. There is still a bunch of work to do but we’re trying to build something really cool.

The show will air via Live Stream and be edited down for iTunes podcasts with the eventual goal of finding network outlets down the road.

More to come.

Signing off for now…

Chris

When is the last time you actually built a relationship with someone online?

I never have. I’ve met people through LinkedIn and Twitter. People have introduced me through email. I’ve even accepted chat invites (on occasion) on Skype. But I didn’t really have a “relationship” with any of them… until I met them in person. 

My relationships* are built in face to face meetings.

I just read a great article by Rene Siegel’s article in Inc titled Five Reasons You Need to Meet in Person.

This is the heart of the reason why I started Moblify. 

You see, I have this thesis that goes like this: Shit get’s done when you’re looking someone in the eye. Shit does not get done when you’re looking at someone’s Twitter feed. There is tremendous power in talking to another human being face to face.

Towards that end…I’d like to submit the following to the committee on Rules of Thumb (I know you exist):

You are 10x more likely to develop a meaningful relationship with a person when you:

a) Meet them in Person.

b) Meet them virtually but shortly thereafter see each other in person.

c)  Shortly after meeting someone (either in person or virtually)  you realize that the person you just met is actually your long lost sibling.

Here’s what I’m driving at… get out there! Meet people. You never know who you’re going to meet. We at Moblify are working very hard to make meeting people in a business setting as easy as possible but for goodness sakes…. don’t wait for us! Go meet someone new!

*THE WORD RELATIONSHIP AS DEFINED BY ME: A connection between two people based on mutual trust, fondness and/or the idea that the connection could be mutually beneficial.