Jack Templin is one of the best-known figures in the local tech scene as co-founder of the Providence Geeks networking dinners and program leader of the R.I. Economic Development Corporation’s RI Nexus initiative. Templin is also the principal of ThoughtCap, a boutique Internet strategy & development firm, and a general partner in Betaspring, a Providence-based startup accelerator for teams of young entrepreneurs. He talked with Providence Business News recently about another year of Geeks, how the downturn is affecting the local tech community and the promise he sees in Google Wave.
PBN: Providence Geeks is now in its fourth year. How did this past year go?
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TEMPLIN: Really well. We’ve continued to grow – over 1,000 people have signed up for the Geeks announcement list now, and our partner RI Nexus, the EDC program, has over 2,100 people. We’ve continued to have a different Rhode Island start-up present at each month’s Geek Dinner. The crowds continue to grow – we always have well over 100 people now. But I think, most importantly, is that between the monthly Geek Dinners we have more and more of a community, a sense of camaraderie, a sense of a definite sector in the local tech and digital media community.
Also, our Geek Dinner host, AS220, added a new tech arm this past year – AS220 Labs – which has a partnership with MIT around the new Providence Fab Lab. This is a terrific development for the local “hacker” and “maker” scenes.
RI Nexus has also had a great year. The EDC continues to be very supportive of community building in the info-tech and digital media space. Our bi-weekly Open Coffees which I host with Allan Tear consistently attract a great group of local tech entrepreneurs. RI Nexus continues to do our college tours – recently we visited Salve Regina, where we met with students and gave them an overview of info-tech and digital media opportunities in RI. We also recently had a panel – “Consulting in the Downturn” – which was quite invigorating. We drew a large crowd on a beautiful July day, probably 75 people – including many expert consultants. It was terrific to see this community of experienced and new consultants supporting each other and giving one another helpful advice.
PBN: When you look back to when you and Brian Jepson started Geeks, is it surprising to you how much the community around this industry has grown in Providence?
TEMPLIN: Yes, although Brian and I knew there was a lot of great talent locally, the extent to which it has taken off is a little surprising, and very exciting. A lot of different people have taken leadership positions in the community and are doing amazing things. It’s cool to see how all these different organizations and initiatives are working together and complementing one another. Just off the top of head, these include Nerdsday, a monthly tweetup at Tazza; Concentric, a network of designers of all stripes, not just tech; DC401, a local “white hat” hacker group; and all of the local tech “Meet Ups” including the popular, longstanding Web Development and PHP ones.
PBN: As broadly as possible, what do you think would improve Providence as a hospitable place for tech types and other entrepreneurs?
TEMPLIN: While not specific to info-tech and digital media, everything having to do with supporting the local knowledge economy and stemming brain drain: I think Providence embracing being a city is essential.
A couple pieces to that. I think we have to start investing in the mass transit systems of a real city, because it’s only then that you really start to have the density and critical mass that a city requires to be truly dynamic. I would also say we need to foster a positive, exciting night life, and make sure that there’s a lot of interesting opportunities and fun to be had – especially downtown – because for a lot 20-somethings, their primary focus is their social life.
I also think that continuing to nurture what I would call young entrepreneurship, collegiate entrepreneurship. Clearly there aren’t enough jobs, not only locally but also in the country. Given this many of the best and brightest are taking this opportunity to do their own thing. If we can nurture this impulse and provide them what they need – whether that’s mentors or small amounts of capital or whatever else, we have a really good chance of keeping and attracting them. That’s what Allan Tear, Owen Johnson and I are trying to do with Betaspring.
Finally, I think we need to “double down” on creating more connectivity between the local business, entrepreneurship, innovation communities and the colleges and universities. So we’re all working on that. The EDC, the Providence Chamber of Commerce, Tech Collective, Brown, JWU and other schools all are playing leading roles in this.
PBN: The Rhode Island economy has been in terrible shape for more than a year now. How big an impact has that had on the information-technology and digital media sector?
TEMPLIN: Ironically, I think a real blessing for our sector was the downturn of 2001. It was tech-driven, and compared to this one, for the info-tech and digital media industry it was a full-on depression [in 2001]. It was much worse because our sector was the epicenter of it. And we learned some hard lessons – primarily how to do more, with less. In the years since then, we learned how to run smarter, leaner businesses, and that’s been paying off quite a bit in this new harsh environment.
Are we being affected by the economy? Absolutely. No question. But it’s nothing like it was for us in the last downturn. That period really taught us how to build a business to be more resilient.
PBN: A little off the beaten path, but I know you are really intrigued by the possibilities of Google’s new online communication and collaboration tool, Google Wave. What do you see there?
TEMPLIN: I think Google is addressing somes real problems with today’s Internet, one of which is that any given user, and especially a power user, has a bunch of disparate communication channels that they have to check and manage all the time. So that’s e-mail, chat, Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc – and that’s before you even get to things that are tied to a specific site, like forums.
Google, very much to their credit, has approached Wave in a progressive way, by creating some open standards and commiting to releasing a lot of open-source code. So they’re really not, at this point at least, pushing Wave the product – they’re pushing Wave the open standard protocol. It promises to be a technology that anyone can build on, and some have already started – in this nascent stage, Wave is being well-received by the developer community.
I think it will take a while, but I think Wave has as good a chance as any technology I’ve seen to date to be the integrator and/or successor to e-mail and a number of other messaging technologies. So imagine if you go into one interface, and you’re able to do the equivalent of your e-mail, of IM, of collaborative document creation & editing – but not only that – then when you go to a site and you post something on a forum, you just subscribe to that Wave – and so now it’s tracked in that same interface as well. So you have a consistent way of dealing with these different conversations – these threads all come into a single inbox. I think that’s a really, really big deal and could go a long way to addressing some of the inbox schizophrenia so many of us are experiencing.
