Incubators, venturous people, broken high heels, and the value of paying for LinkedIn

While working on my social skills, I've run across people who are looking for startups they can fund.  Really.  9Mile Labs is one.  This is a firm which is looking to help mentor entrepreneurs and are doing a buy-in.  While I don't have my head wrapped around the whole start-up / app thing sufficiently to say more than, "Hello, I'm an idiot, but that's okay," and stumble around in my wedge heels, this whole start-up thing is getting taken very seriously here in Seattle.  The city and the state have liasons and funding for startups.  If someone has an idea they'd like to pursue, lemme know (not what it is, but your interest) and I can at least give you some places to check out resources.

Again, I'm running into people through meetups from Meetup site.  And my reading material has substantially changed.  I'm not reading about telco related stuff, but thinks like Geekwire or Business Insider trying to get a grip on these small companies.  Back to 9Mile Labs, they've got a process lined out here and they're taking applications for their next round of mentoring / funding.  They're using F6S to apply.  F6S seems to be a contact list of accelerators and incubators.  I'm also using it as a jumping off point to check out companies.

I met the Community Manager of 9 Mile Labs, Brandy Rhodes, who explained a little bit about what they do, how they work with people who have the ideas and for something like an 8% buy in, add some capitol the mix.  I'm most impressed with the mentoring and the training.  They work with 9 start ups at a time and run them through a 4 month "experience" is best I can describe it.  They've got a graduation day coming up.  If you wanna come play hooky with me, send me an email and I'll lead you to the dark side of a social life where you also have fun meeting people outside your normal day.

Another interesting person I met at two of the meetups is Brendan West who runs the Tech Career Mentoring meetup.  This guy is a high-end programmer who's got some great questions and what appears to me a great deal of experience with the meetup / job fair mash-up.  He asks the best questions and pointed me out the TUNE job fair I attended last week.  Yep, I could use some mentoring, but could also give some too.

If you're paying any attention to LinkedIn, you should check my profile out on a daily basis.  I'm changing verbiage all the time, I just don't notify my network.  I'm not all that certain paying for LinkedIn makes a hill of beans of difference.  I'm about to cancel my prime membership, but I have been able to see specific numbers - like how I rank for searches based upon my skillset.  I've moved from 50 out of 99 to 28.  So that is quite an improvement.  I have to have a "current" job even though it isn't one, otherwise my LinkedIn profile is degraded.  But really, who gives a shit.  I've gotten requests from Indeed, but not LinkedIn.  So, I'm not seeing value there in that arena.

However, LinkedIn does have much better information about the possible $$ around a job, who else would be applying, your rating for the job, and other basic pieces of info than Indeed or Glassdoors.  I don't know what I'll lose by lapsing the subscription, but once I figure out all the data flying at me, I'll check that out.  But ping me if my summary or other stuff makes you throw up in your mouth.  It won't hurt my feelings and might help my job prospects!

Still, I miss y'all bunches.
-a