Returning From a Week on the Road

I’m onboard my return flight from D.C. with Kevin and so happy to be coming home to San Francisco. I’ve basically been on the road for two weeks, last week I was in Seattle for the Seattle 2.0 awards and then I made a quick flight back to SF Friday to do a 12 hour turnaround where I repack and jump onboard the redeye to New York with Adam for the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon. Flying the redeye can be painful since usually i don’t fall asleep, but it does save money on a hotel — which is worth it for New York. Fortunately I flew Virgin America, and the sleep deprivation caught up to me and i was asleep before we even took off.

We got to New York, and due to last minute planning we didn’t actually have a place to stay yet. Fortunately, our friend David Lifson from Postling connected with us on Twitter and he and his girlfriend met us over at Dogpatch Labs to drop our backs and grab dim sum. $4 per person dim sum in Manhattan – amazing!

We parted ways with them after lunch (they were headed up to the Apple store to get their iPad!) and headed over to the conference location to get ready for the hackathon. New York is so awesome, jump in a cab and we’re there. So the hacakthon begins, we have a little table for Twilio and try to chat with as many people as we can. Its so amazing having people walk up saying they already use Twilio, and even more incredible when they gush about how much they love the API. By late in the night, a handful of the hacks being created were using the Twilio API (including the Mr.Stabby robot from NYC Resistor!) and everything was going well, but the one problem was we still didn’t have a place to sleep.

Fortunately, the AirBNB folks were at the event too and offered to help us with our search. I had been working the website all day for an affordable place (hotels were coming up on Priceline for a minimum of $600) and around 10pm we got a message back letting us know we could get a 1 bedroom apartment in Soho for just $190 per night ($95 per person!!). I razzed the landlord bait about he bad reviews he got for cleanliness to make sure he would take care of it before we arrived, and we headed out. All in all, when we got there it was clean enough to fall asleep and thats all that really mattered.

The rest of the New York trip went smoothly, including many highlights:

• new friends from SimpleGeo
• Catching up with Jeremiah and the MediaTemple crew
• Awesome app demos from 6 hackathon projewvts using Twilio
• camping out at Fedex off for 5 hours to make sure we got collateral to our friends at TechCrunch by 3am
• A walking tour of parts of New York with Tim from Foursquare, followed by several games of shuffleboard
• delicious steak dinner at Quality Meats, courtesy of Bradley from 2tor
• meeting Cyan, founder of Zivity.com
• extending my streak of awesome iphone photos of the Empire State building to 3 trips in a row (link)

On Tuesday afternoon, with Disrupt still in full swing and the rest of the evangelism team headed to Colorado for Cloudcamp and Gluecon, I hopped my short flight to DC to meet up with my husband and get us all set up to represent at O’Reillys Gov 2.0 Expo at the a washington Convention center. Major discovery: the JetBlue terminal in JFK has these little counters where you can sit and order food to be delivered to you. I didn’t use it this time, but what an awesome idea!

Connected with Kevin at the airport after a three hour wait and we headed to a place i had booked us, a 2 bedroom townhouse within walking distane of the convention center. We arrived in a neighborhood that was pretty rundown (the house next door had all the windows busted out) and were greeted by our host and a friend of hers (a woman) carrying a gun – turns out she is a police officer but i am just not used to that i guess. We were only getting a room, turns out there was a long term tenant in the place and airBNB had listed it wrong. $149 per night for a room in. A house in a crappy neighborhood we couldn’t walk around in at night seemed lame, so we spent one night and switched to a hotel for just $10 per night more and lucked out and got a huge suite because things were slow! Two days of tradeshow goodness, which pretty much amounts to education people about Twilio and cloud technologies in general, collecting businesss cards, and dreaming up new uses cases. I spent Friday in the hotel room catching up on work and that brings me to today, where we worked and went to the National Gallery to check out the sculptures (my favorite medium) before heading back.

And there you have it, links and typo fixes coming later when I’m not on the iPad. Happy to be bak and hope to see many of you soon