30 years update
Update. The fire marshal shut down new entrants. Six hundred grumblers in a big lobby. Six degrees outside. All of us in a huge snaking unmoving line. Oof.
I stood solo, and listened to VC murmurings.
Someone said: It’s a large fund.
Someone said: He’s surprisingly not liquid.
Someone said: I never knew what Diplo even looked like.
My friend made it to the 41st floor. “I’m by the broken TVs,” he texted me. “It’s crowded.”
It is very hard to do something for a truly large group in New York City. Event spaces are okay but at a certain scale you need to go through a hotel or a theater, or a museum. But then the costs explode.
Alas humans at scale are a liquid. You have to manage them like a liquid. We spill everywhere. A large group desperately wants to be a mess. Just like NYC wants to become a forest.
They kept trying to pack us into tighter cordons because the line wasn’t moving, to kind of compress the situation. People were running around with iPad clipboards and yelling a little. But in 30 years I’ve learned to recognize a proper mess. Time to go.
In NYC the fire marshal—the whiteshirt—is a sacred figure of total power. They are why we don’t have as much death as we used to. They have the power to set the human flow: No bodies in until there are bodies out. There must have been three hundred people in front of me, and hundreds more behind me—meaning I’d have to wait for three or four hundred people to leave.
Or leave myself. Which would make room for someone else to move up in the line. Ah well. No social validation for me. My friend got me a copy of the event magazine. I’m the foreword. Mayor Bloomberg is the afterword. So there you go. Paul Ford and Michael Bloomberg, bookends to 30 years of NYC tech.
I feel very bad for everyone involved. It wasn't their fault! They were utterly pleasant to work with and they'd put an enormous amount into it. I had lots of friends upstairs. The next day, they sent out a contrite email offering full refunds. They tried to do a nice thing and look what happened.
That said, it's also remarkable that upstairs, on a high floor, NYC VCs were in the VIP area, celebrating each other, or as I like to say, LinkIn' in, having recently rung the closing NASDAQ bell—while below, in the overbuilt lobby of this vertical Snowpiercer, there teemed a mass in cocktail dresses and zip-up sweaters, who'd bought tickets, or been handed tickets by a more senior partner, and could not achieve ingress. Metaphor-wise a little on the nose.
Seeing that level of irony become real and manifest makes me love having a personal website once more. Part of what made me resurrect this blog was the sense of that impending 30th anniversary—of anniversaries in general—and what is Ftrain.com if not for moments like these? What is a blog if not a venue for finally exploring all the aspects of ones own hypocrisy?
So it all worked out.
No bars down that far east on Maiden Lane so we bailed to Brooklyn. After a drink, just one, I took a car home.
The thing I left out of the foreword, and out of the piece I wrote before this—because it would have been very off topic—is that, even if the city will outlast the tech industry, the odds are incredibly good that, eventually this all will become the Anthropocene discontinuity, an inch of plastic-y rock in the geological record. Even the base of the Brooklyn Bridge will be subducted into the folding earth. Unless we tesseract the city, geology will have its way, and that is how it goes. I think constantly about that. The train tunnel is just a stack of geologic eons through which we push our little bodies. Far-future scientists, finding our bones, may prefer to study ferns. Anniversaries are sweet—even ones where you can't go upstairs—but the world craves to turn us into something very thin and mineral. At some level you need to welcome it.