4 lightning talks worth watching from Northside Innovation Meetup

The Northside Media Group produces L Magazine and Brooklyn Magazine as well as various events, including the Northside Innovation Meetup. If you haven’t been, it may be because they are invitation only.

Instead, you might want to watch their wrap videos from the events they hold at the Brooklyn Brewery. Perhaps best known for its annual music celebration Northside Festival, the group has a team of contributors numbering roughly 20 and seems to have interest in that music-innovation intersection that SXSW has defined for a generation. Northside is the Brooklyn media empire founded by Daniel Stedman and his brother Scott.

Here are some of our favorite recent lightning talks from their events:

Phin Barnes, First Round Capital, on the launch of the company’s editorial venture First Round Review.

• Seed stage venture company that decided they wanted to become an editorial machine in their own right: First Round Review, billed as the Harvard Business Review for startups. [Full Disclosure: our Philadelphia team has offices inside First Round’s HQ there]
• Launched in July 2013. Nearly a million unique views as of this talk.
• The company believes in building a community of entrepreneurs rather than a portfolio.
• How they got to a successful editorial launch: built a closed community from 2007 to Summer 2013. CEOs in their network were asking them to share the content.
• “The great thing about knowledge is, if I know something and I tell you, I still know it, but you know it, too.”
• Treat every piece of content as if it is a product.

Ajamu White, New Creatures

• Creates live experiences. White previously worked at Red Bull. He first got interested in creative recreation at a Red Bull event.
• He started his company because he wanted to provide platforms for people to do something, have fun, meet new people and achieve their goals.
• Divides every event into three parts: the buildup, the event and the content that gets the spirit of the event shared over time, which is what brands really want.

Sara Kate Gillingham, Founding Editor of The Kitchn

• Her partner at the time founded Apartment Therapy while she was in culinary school, right after Sept. 11th, because they both wanted to help people spend more time at home.
• The Kitchn was one of the earliest food blogs to reach out to a broad audience, making its success a tough one to replicate now.
• That said, Gillingham believes these things go in cycles, so it may be that what’s big now will soon be toppled.
• As a food blog, she says that you can always see its most popular posts are how-to’s and recipes, and there’s always a big reshuffling each night as the households of America go through dinner time (in other words, good SEO has been important for the site).

Brian Bordainick, Dinner Lab

• Described his story as an entrepreneur as one of constant failure.
• Vowed to start something with a partner and only $200 in hand. This led to the first iteration of Dinner Lab in New Orleans.
• In their first event invitation, they asked people not to share it. Which made it explode and they sold way more tickets than they could actually handle.
• They host dinner parties in all sorts of strange places now. As a private, members only event, they can mostly skirt rules about inspecitions and health codes, but says they get subpoenaed in almost every location they go to.

Northside Media Group writes on its mission page that the word Brooklyn has come to mean “What’s next?” They organize events for brands in Brooklyn, as they show in this video.