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West Coast Networking Party 'Ryzes' in New York
A Connection to the Dot.Com Days in a Bar on 49th Street
By Caroline Waxler
reprinted with permission of the New York Sun
http://www.nysun.com
It all seemed so 1999 -- a networking party thick with people from the dot-com world, sponsored by a Web site that's big in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Ryze party Wednesday night at the back of West 49th Street's Zanzibar restaurant, attracted 100 people, all wielding business cards, looking for connections, either personal or business.
Ryze -- as in 'rise' up and connect with each other -- was started last September in San Francisco by software developer Adrian Scott as a central place to keep up with dispersed friends and acquaintances, either laid off or moved to other cities.
"Once someone leaves how do you find their contact info?" said Mr. Scott, an early investor in Napster who earned his Ph.D. in math in 1993 at age 20. "I had 2,500 emails on my list and only 1,500 email addresses worked."
So, he set up Ryze, interactive high-school yearbook-like site that gives members a Web page and the ability to contact each other. The members -- dot-com luminaries as well as the not quite luminary -- fill their pages with pictures, quotes, personal histories, lists of their previous employers, whatever they'd like. There's even a "guestbook" function on each page permitting other members to write notes and a section to list and link to friends' pages. In true High School fashion the pages list hobbies. (Hiking and "wireless" rate big with this crowd.) The Web site also displays how many people have checked out your page as well as a list of the most popular members; a weekly personal statistics email tells you how you stack up comparatively.
Mr. Scott said that there are now nearly 5,000 members and new members are now joining at a rate of 500 per week. New Yorkers now account for 250 of the members, but that is expected to increase; Wednesday's party was Ryze's first New York event.
"Ryze is my connection to the dot-com days and all the pioneers from the late 90s," wrote Mark Goldstein, the former chief executive of Kmart's online site, BlueLight.com, in an email to the New York Sun. "Turns out many have moved or changed industries...but we all found a home on Ryze." Mr. Goldstein's page offers a cartoon who caption does double duty as a help-wanted ad, "ExCEO clearance. Save up to 75%."
Others on the site include Tim Kane, unsuccessful candidate for a San Diego Republican Congressional seat. Another member, Donald Munro, works for William Simon Jr., who is running as a Republican for governor of California. Napster founder Shawn Fanning is a member, but he doesn't seem to have spent much time on the site: his page is sparse and he's added no names of friends. But he does list his interests: security, music production, and basketball. But Ryze members have been trying to network with him: "Mr. Fanning -- the man who dragged the music industry into the digital age kicking and screaming. Kudos!" Another: "Shawn welcome what's next for the big brain?"
Though Mr. Scott wouldn't say what percentage of the members are unemployed, it appears to be considerable. Many of the members whom The Sun spoke with are using the site to land job interviews and arrange funding for new startups.
Robert Glass, 55, a veteran of Sun Microsystems and Apple, said that he is currently using Ryze to get funding to put together a software company. He said that through the site he has met several venture capitalists.
And never mind the venture capitalists; there are other uses for the Ryze site: Mr. Scott met his current girlfriend through a Ryze hiking event.
Mr. Scott earned a bit of notoriety as an early investor in Napster. At the age of 16, he graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, received a math Ph.D. from the school at 20, which he said makes him the youngest Ph.D. from the school. (Rensselaer said that it doesn't keep track of such things.)
He moved to San Francisco to do consulting in 1995, developing Web sites for companies such as Hewlett Packard and Charles Schwab. To keep in touch with friends -- and to garner more potential employment -- he started a series of networking parties called the Web of Finance. That same list of people are now Ryze members.
After several months of offering the free service on Ryze, Mr. Scott decided to start charging a fee for more advanced services. For between $4 and $10 a month he offered various levels of access to both other's people's contact information and the means to search for shared commonalities, such as interests or schools attended or previous companies. So far, "less than 10% of the members are paying." A conservative estimate would give Mr. Scott about $1,500 a month in income from the site.
Even the employed are spending hours on the site. Mr. Scott said that 25% of the members check the site once a day. According to Denise Garcia, an analyst at GartnerG2, that would put Mr. Scott's site in the top 6% of all Web sites in terms of frequency of visits. How does the site attract traffic? Every time a member links to you or sends you a message you can get an email directing you back to log onto the site. Once you're there Mr. Scott keeps you by randomly displaying pictures of members and quotes from guestbooks -- with links -- on whatever page the viewer is on. The voyeur follows these conversation threads.
"Ryze is very addictive: Who is linked to you, what messages they write to you," says Auren Hoffman, chief executive of the staffing company BridgePath. "Today I got three interesting people who have wrote me notes. I haven't seen two of them in 6 years. Yesterday, a guy from a pretty important staffing vendor wrote saying we could do lunch. He could be a potential partner." Mr. Hoffman, a San Francisco resident, was in New York for business on Wednesday and attended the Ryze party at Zanzibar.
Among the crowd were a handful of former Internet World employees, some Russian programmers, and the head of a defunct libertarian political party in Norway. About one-third of the guests The Sun spoke with were unemployed and about half were undecided on whether they came to party looking for a date or a new job lead.
Said another guest, Andrew Kraft, from the research firm Basex: "So far tonight I've met 3 potential hires, 4 people who wanted information on my services, and I connected with 3 old friends I haven't seen in awhile. Not bad for an hour and thirty-five minutes."
Copyright NY Sun. Appeared May 10, 2002.
(Thanks to the New York Sun for letting us reprint this, and for TJ DuWaik for typing it in!)
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