In celebration of his 5,000th blog post, Fred Wilson announced this morning that he will “host AVC Meetups everywhere that you would like to do them.” The announcement not only unveils new feature on Meetup.com (as well as a series of events worldwide that entrepreneurs may want to pay attention to), but also a new way for like-minded people to network and share ideas.
While yesterday, we wrote that entrepreneurs should cut unnecessary meetings and other time-wasters out of their schedule (on the advice of Mark Suster), many of the commenters on Suster’s own blog post advocated these sorts of gatherings as effective tools for making connections and getting in some face time.
Wilson pointed to the Meetup Everywhere API, which could be used in a number of ways. Instead of thinking in terms of just mashups for the public, think of looking at Meetup data as a way of targeting an audience. As you can see in the API demos, the data can be used to find out what people are talking about and where they are creating meetups around these topics. This could be a great way to gauge interest for your startup in terms of real-world location, whether you’re considering places to launch for location-based technologies or where to look for other people interested in the same topics.
To start everything off, Wilson created a Meetup Everywhere page and added meetups for the 50 most active communities, with 38 in the U.S. and 12 in other countries. Already, 14 additional meetups have been added and more are likely on the way.
Wilson announced the AVC meetups as part of a new feature, Meetups Everywhere, of his portfolio company Meetup. The feature allows users to create meetups centered on a central theme, such as startups or location-based technology (or poetry, for that matter), and could be a great way to connect with similar-minded people in your locale.
