Grand Central… What’s up?

My Mom used to answer the phone at our house : GRAND CENTRAL !@#$%^ STATION.

It was nuts with activity; cats sleeping with dogs, kids not sleeping at all, random neighbors, dangerous art projects, three legged bunnies, ninja turtles- with real num-chucks, 1,000 ping pong balls, 60 foot tree swings, snakes in sleeping bags and ill-advised science experiments. It was an incubator of sorts, but all she was able to raise was a bunch of crazy kids and a few Estes Rockets (with pet mice aboard no doubt). The fact that four of us survived to adulthood was testament to her unique no-helicopter policies ( I am not sure how many she started with). To cry about anything short of a compound fracture was simply bad form. Cuts without stitches were basically just for finger paints.

Which reminds me a lot of the coming of age of many of my start-ups.

The recently announced sale of Mocean Mobile and the sudden void in my calendar, I am taking up a new home-Grand Central Tech – as their mentor and advisor. One would think that any sane man would take a breath and decide what he wanted to do next after the run we had building Mojiva/Mocean. Well, I already knew… I love making order from chaos, trying things out, solving problems and working with great teams to make things that matter. Pretty much like the last five years on Baxter Street, where we:

• • Conceived of, developed and sold to global enterprise clients one of mobile media’s largest ad servers
  • Served over 200 billions mobile ads per month- 77,000 per second- to over 1.1 billion unique devices
  • Built a team through over 100 hires of the best and brightest in Mobile ad tech
  • Raised seed, angel, and four rounds of venture capital totalling about $50,000,000
  • Sold company to [INSERT NAME]

Grand Central Tech needs little introduction. Conjured up By Matt Harrigan and Charles Bonello after a Regis Demo day last year, GCT landed in the former Facebook HQ compliments of the very generous Milstein Family. With a 0%/0$ offer to house and mentor great Metro Start Ups, GCT was quickly innundated with 450 applications for 20 spaces. In the next few weeks, the first class will be situated and we’ll get down to the business of solving problems and creating cool products.

No word as yet about my pet snapping turtle.