Errant Ramblings: Mitzi Szereto’s Weblog

Mitzi Szereto with the KebabCampers

“The best startup in town, we don’t make anything, we just eat.”

Google Schmoogle. Who needs Larry Page or Sergey Brin?

Yeah, I know, everyone’s an entrepreneur. And everyone’s got a startup – from your crazy Uncle Jack who’s always grabbing the breasts of strange women to your potty old Aunt Tillie from Temecula. Hell, even your cousin Ernie with that twitching left eye and the embarrassing case of Tourette’s fancies himself as the next Jeff Bezos. Oh, and let’s not forget all those socially inept internet geeks with Asperger’s (a word of advice, ladies: don’t ever get into a relationship with one of these guys! If you’re not sure who they are, just think Mr. Spock).

In Silicon Valley alone you’ll find yourself tripping over the number of people doing startups, and let’s not forget their little brother on the East Coast, Silicon Alley. Frankly, I’m surprised there are this many things to actually START UP. Admittedly, London is lagging a bit behind its Yankee relatives, but hey, we’re catching up! Of course not every startup king (or queen) has a cunning master plan, but not to worry. If they don’t, they’ll most assuredly have a team all set to go… providing they ever come up with that startup idea they hope will set fire to the world (or, at the very least, set fire to their garage “headquarters” when things go down the pan). I believe this is known in the business as “an escape plan” – ie start up, then get the hell out!

Therefore not to be outdone, here is yet one more startup to add to the fray: KebabCamp. And I’m damned proud to be a founding member of the team.

We don’t need fancy offices in Canary Wharf or some “campus” in Palo Alto full of tykes playing Hide and Seek or frolicking in sandboxes. (Err, wait – that’s for the employees, not their kids!). And we don’t need some grungy garage either. Hell, we don’t even need a business plan! You won’t hear us bandying about terms like “Venture Capitalist” and “Angel Investor” and “Seed Money“. Who needs capitalists and angels and seeds when you’ve got a nice juicy kebab staring you in the face? Nah, we’re above all that stuff.

We hold our meetings over an orgy of food in a Tower Hamlets‘ kebab house. No, I won’t tell you which one, since it’s a bitch to get a table there even if you’ve booked. Mind you, I’m sure we’ll have an easier time of it in future, since last time we were there one of the waiters kept taking a perverse delight in brushing against me whenever we passed one another. (Is that a gun in your pocket…) But hey, if it gets us better service, who am I to complain? I’ve made sacrifices before – what’s one more?

When our team isn’t out kebabing in the East End, we’ll be busy Skypeing, since everyone knows that any startup worth its weight in bootstraps holds meetings on Skype. You’ll find us online day and night, 24/7, rain or shine. No one sleeps. Who has time for sleep when you’ve got a startup to start up? From various locations in and around London, there we’ll be: eyes and fingertips glued to our computers, an ethernet cable stuck up our arses, because baby, we mean business! If things go well, we might even launch an IPO.

So keep an eye out, because KebabCamp may be coming to a ticker tape near you!

Mitzi Szereto hanging wiv some geeks

Random nights out in The Big Smoke…

Right, I know exactly what you’re thinking: drugs, booze, wild parties, The Old Bill, riot gear… Bet you can hear the sirens wailing already as a police van carts me off into the sooty London night. Booked, fingerprinted, tossed in the nick. Oh, the shame of it!

Well, think again.

How about a Turkish kebab with a bunch of tech geeks? Scary stuff, huh? And it gets better. How about a Turkish kebab with a bunch of tech geeks in a Turkish restaurant located across the road from a mosque? You guessed it, Habib – no booze! But what the hey, the meat was Halal and there was little chance of catching swine flu from anything on the menu!

You might well ask how our charming group of geek-kebabites hooked up in the first place. It was random destiny, my dears – “random” being the operative word here. It could be that we were all foreigners to some extent, therefore not confined to the Britishness of needing to have downed pints at the local with someone for a zillion years before venturing out for a curry together. See, I belong to a ton of groups – Facebook groups, Meetup groups – you name it, I belong to it. Ergo this whole mad kebab caper kicked off with a mass email via one of my Meetup groups inquiring if anyone was going to the TechCrunch party in London. I replied that I was, and that kicked off still more mass emails with others RSVP-ing that they were going too.

Anyway, I forgot all about it till the night of the party, when one of the mass messagers recognised me and came over to introduce himself and his mate. Riveting stuff so far, eh? Well, give me a chance! Three nights later I was at some geek networking event in Brick Lane and there they were again, along with some other guy who recognised me from the party – and soon we were all hanging out with our drinks and chatting about cloud computing (yes, I’m serious.). Then yet another character from this geek play entered our arena, and the next thing I knew we were chasing down the street after the elected Pied Piper of our party as he endeavoured via the GPS on his phone to lead us to an Indian kebab house that was so good everyone back in Delhi was raving about it.

As we ventured further and further away from the relative safety of Brick Lane and I became hungrier and hungrier, I began to wonder if the place truly existed. Had I stumbled upon (no pun intended) the geek version of the Manson Family? Was I going to be murdered and dismembered in a Muslim neighbourhood near Aldgate? If so, I could only hope it would be done under strict Halal guidelines. Suddenly I recalled a conversation I’d had earlier that evening with someone who stated that these people (as in tech geeks) shouldn’t be let out on their own. Indeed, the words rang ominously in my ears…

When at last we reached the holy grail, I breathed a sigh of relief. Aside from the fact that I would live to see another day (not sure if that’s a blessing or a curse), it had already gone past 10pm; I’d have eaten pretty much anything by then. Alas, the divine scent of our Mecca was so packed with people waiting for tables that we were told it would be at least an hour’s wait. I stared desperately at the sweets counter, having an hour earlier embarked upon a mad dash to my favourite (past tense) Bengali sweet shop on Brick Lane, only to find the shutters closed. I was NOT happy. It was clear we would have to take our patronage elsewhere.

And that’s how we ended up at the Turkish kebab place across the road from the mosque.

Was it worth it? Yes. However, I think the excitement of being in the company of so many geeks proved too overwhelming for me (I don’t get out much), because I got a bit carried away when, halfway through my ground lamb kebab, I took a bite of an innocuous-looking object on my plate, which turned out to be a chili. The nice young gentleman seated beside me appeared to be on the verge of ringing the fire brigade, but I persevered and downed a hearty gulp of my yogurt drink, attempting to put out the flames. I tell you, I never realised those Turks could be so sneaky!

We’re now planning to make this a regular gig. Furthermore, we might even allow newcomers to join our ranks, providing they can prove their worthiness. It’s been suggested that an initiation ceremony involving the chili should be used to separate the men from the boys. Hmm…. I wonder what Amnesty International would have to say about that?