Stan the Man
Photo credit: Chris Schultz (https://www.flickr.com/photos/cschultz/3644406547)
When we were opening Launch Pad, I flew up to New York to visit a few coworking spaces. The concept was still relatively new, and I wanted to learn as much as I could.
“The first 10 members are the hardest, because nobody wants to join an empty coworking space.”
We started posting pictures of Launch Pad and blogging to build momentum in the weeks prior to launch. One thing that was really important to us was for Launch Pad to not look “corporate” so we went for the black ceiling tile option.
This was the advice I got from Tony Bacigalupo when I visited New Work City and it stuck with me. So we decided that we’d do whatever we could to open with “butts in seats” as Barre Tanguis would say.
At the time, Net2NO was the New Orleans tech meetup, so we printed a bunch of signup forms and would bring them to the meetings trying to sign up members.
“Coworking is like BarCamp every day…”
… was my pitch at Net2NO, a quote attributed to Tara Hunt, who with Chris Messina founded one of the first coworking spaces, Citizen Space.
Leslie Jacobs, who funded the grant we won from 504ward that helped us open sent me an email introducing Stanford Rosenthal, her nephew, who had just graduated high school and wanted to join Launch Pad before heading off to Washington University to study computer science.
I don’t know if Stanford was actually the first member on our rolls, but for purposes of the legend, he is. He also might be the only high-school student we’ve ever had as a member.
Stanford and Marla Pierce (also an early member) had their mugs on the Launch Pad website that Stanford built for us.
Stan the Man helped with everything in the early days. We featured him on Launch Pad TV, our weekly live web show. He built our first website in exchange for future free months when he was in town from college (I think we got the better of that deal.)
It’s been a rewarding experience to watch Stanford “launch” his career at Launch Pad. When he was back in New Orleans on holidays I’d always ask him what he was up to, and each time he had built something new, had a new internship, had started something. You can just tell when someone is going somewhere in life, and Stan the Man was that kind of guy.
Stanford Rosenthal lives in San Francisco now and you can follow him on Twitter @stan.