Tracking the growth of DC’s tech scene, one minute at a time

If you’re a local technologist with a minute to spare, you should probably check out Frank LaVigne’s daily video series.
The DCTech Minute, which celebrated its one-year anniversary last week, is a simple but visually appealing YouTube video recap of what made a splash that day.
The videos are produced by a professional amateur. “I started editing videos so I could make better home videos,” he explained. That’s how FranksWorldTV started.

But eventually LaVigne ran into more and more material at work, too. In the summer of 2013, he began focusing more on startup outreach in his “soft sales” capacity at Microsoft and witnessed a growing startup community. For this dot-com veteran, D.C. tech’s enduring strength is “the proximity to government regulators.”
“I had no idea at the time that D.C. tech was sort of taking off.” In time, the task of summarizing the day’s news became more arduous. “I have a much harder time sifting through what’s there,” he said.
He gradually changed his format into a bite-size compendium of weekday news. “I noticed a lot of the big players on YouTube started doing shows five days a week,” he said. LaVigne now has a green screen in his home office and produces the tech minute whenever he has 20 minutes to spare. Usually, that’s when his wife puts the kids to bed.
The first DCTech Minute segment came out Feb. 17, 2014. At this stage, LaVigne has gathered a few dozen subscribers — and has even been recognized in public for his voice as “the guy from YouTube!” But video views vary “from a couple hundred to four,” he said.
This reporter believes he deserves a larger following.
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