![I landed in Los Angeles this morning (proof above). I’ll be here until Friday, February 24. If you’re around, shoot me an email at max [at] quipol.com so we can try to get together. I’d love to meet as many people as I can while I’m here, so don’t be shy.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzq4swgaZV1qhu9o2o1_500.jpg)
I landed in Los Angeles this morning (proof above). I’ll be here until Friday, February 24. If you’re around, shoot me an email at max [at] quipol.com so we can try to get together. I’d love to meet as many people as I can while I’m here, so don’t be shy.
A new TIME article by Olivia B. Waxman hit my inbox this morning. It’s about the growth, influence, and reality of social polling. Olivia is a wonderful writer, and it was an honor to meet her and be involved in the discussion.
I hadn’t heard of Eason Jordan and his team at Poll Position before today, but I’d love to sit down with them one day and have a philosophical debate about the future of opinion polling. This might be pretty obvious by now, but it’s a field I’m really interested in.
—Chris Dixon, from his post “And then, suddenly, it works”
As a follow-up to my Quipol is a Remix post, here’s Kirby’s fourth and final installment.
—Deborah Kerr to Clark Gable in The Hucksters
When you register for Quipol, you tell me your first and last name.
I take that information and append it to the bottom of your Quipols.
Most of the time, this works out well. Sometimes, though, people want to use their pseudonyms or business names instead of their real names. If you’re one of those people, here’s how to make it happen.
Just log into your account and click your name in the upper-right corner of your screen. From the drop-down menu, select “Account settings”.
Then, clear the “Name” field and change it to whatever you’d like. Just try not to be nasty, and, please, don’t impersonate anybody.
A writer from Forbes might change their “Name” field to Forbes, and the result would look like this.
All of your Quipols will update to automatically reflect your change—no manual updating or re-embedding necessary. Hope this helps!
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My other co-founders: my mother, my brother, me, and my dad. If Carolyn and my sister, Maggie, had been there, this picture would be complete.
I hadn’t planned on telling anyone about my meeting with Fred Wilson. I figured I’d share the secret with Carolyn, my family, and a few close friends, and that would be that. It just didn’t seem all that polite to go yelling anything from the rooftops—even if it was an exciting moment in my life.
Turns out, I didn’t have a whole lot of say in the matter. The day after our meeting, Fred wrote about Quipol on A VC, and the cat was out of the bag. Believe me, I wasn’t complaining. In fact, you couldn’t have punched the smile off of my face.
For the next twenty-four hours, I read and responded to the hundreds of comments that came in on Fred’s post. I received a lot of great advice, some solid critiques, and a whole lesson on color theory from the A VC community. It was a blast and an honor, and Fred’s 108 words have made a huge collective impact on Quipol and myself.
Since then, a lot of people have asked me how I landed the meeting, so I’ll try to clear that up here. But before I get to the how, I should probably get to the why.
I’ve admired Fred ever since I started reading A VC about a year and a half ago. My former boss, Kristian Andersen, once said, “If you can pair humility with confidence and intellect—that’s the holy grail.” Fred, in my mind, does just that. He’s the kind of guy you implicitly trust and want to befriend, which I’m sure does wonders for him as a VC (and rightfully so).
Anyhow, when I realized how accessible the world can be, I decided that Fred would be a great guy to get to know personally. My network outside of Indianapolis didn’t really exist, so I figured I should start growing it with a guy I really admire.
I sent my first email to Fred telling him just that. I explained what Quipol was, how I’m funding it, and added, “I’m contacting you because I don’t really know anybody in the tech scene, and I’d like to get to know nice people if at all possible.”
He got back to me about an hour later, asking me a bit more about Quipol. I filled him in, and he responded again three hours later with a note that exemplifies his character. I won’t copy it here, but it basically said this: “There might be some conflicts of interest here. I invest in things that may compete with you, and I just want you to know that. I want you to be aware that you’re talking to a potential competitor.”
I replied with, “I know, and I appreciate you making that clear. I would still like to meet you.”
He replied again, saying (I’m paraphrasing all of this), “Okay, I will meet you. I just want to make sure that you understand that I have ownership in companies that might be your competitors.”
It kind of made my heart melt. Fred was assuming that I knew very little about the facts at hand, and he very carefully spelled them out for me—even repeating himself just to make sure I got it. He was showing his integrity, and I thought it was super, super cool of him. His clear replies of, “Hey, you might want to stay away,” just made me want to meet him more.
So I responded with some dates that we could meet. Over the next few days, I didn’t hear back, so I kept following up. This went on for two months and roughly 25 more emails. Fred’s a busy dude. In fact, just a few days ago, he commented on his blog that he had 901 unread messages in his inbox. That’s insane. At the time, I figured a lot of my emails were falling through the cracks (and now I know it was for good reason), so I just kept sending him short, one- or two-sentence notes. I’d get responses to some of them, others would go un-responded to indefinitely.
Eventually, around our thirtieth email, Fred replied and asked me again what days I could meet. I threw out six times, and, a few days later, his assistant confirmed that January 25 at two o’clock would work. (It was the day after my birthday, so I considered it a present.) She followed up with the address of Union Square Ventures, I got excited in a really non-macho way, and I booked my ticket to NYC.
I won’t take up too much more of your time, but I will say that Fred was cooler than I hoped he would be. He was humble, polite, and honest. If you’ve built something that makes sense for him to invest in, you’d be lucky to have him on your team. It should be noted, though, that his friendship comes investment-free. Just be sure to say thanks.
Tweet—Yann Tiersen - La Noyée
I’ve been working to this song since Clay Reinken introduced me to it. The whole Amélie soundtrack is superb and makes me feel like I’m cooler than I am.
