Chris Hutchins

Last weekend I attended PresentationCamp in San Francisco. It was my first non-LaidOffCamp “camp”, and I was surprised (and flattered) that some people turned to me for guidance about how to run a camp. I personally tried my best to deflect questions to Dale Larson who I knew had much more “camp” experience than me.

Anyways, I only managed to catch one of the presentations on video, Dave McClure’s “How to Pitch a VC (aka Startup Viagra: How to Give a VC a Hard-On)”. For those of you who don’t know him, Dave is a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur, angel investor, startup advisor, and blogger. Enjoy!

I’m in the midst of a much longer post on LaidOffCamp, but I wanted to share a few highlights of last weeks inaugural LaidOffCamp in San Francisco:

• Over 400 people showed up
• 35 Sessions were held by over 50 different presenters / facilitators
• Over 30 sponsors made the event possible

Here are some of my favorite posts / articles / videos about the event:

• Great article from Michael Calore at Wired
• Great Evening News segment from Thuy Vu at CBS 5
• Awesome video / blog post from Amy Ziari (who is new to SF)
• Great Slideshow (with Audio) from James Martin at CNET
• More media coverage here

Note: This was intended to be released a few weeks ago, but do to some unforseen circumstances it is a few weeks late.

So it’s finally 2009… As you may or may not know, 2008 was definitely a year of many changes for me. This time last year I was just getting settled with my girlfriend, Amy Fox in New York City. Now we’ve both moved across the country together and are living in San Francisco.

Here are a few updates:

• In September (right before the economy started to crumble), and after a year and a half in NYC, Amy and I decided that we wanted to be in a place that we could see ourselves living in for more than a couple years. We looked at a few different cities (Boston, Chicago, Denver/Boulder), but ended up going with San Francisco, primarily because my company had an office there and would pay for our moving expenses. So Amy left her job (which she wasn’t very happy with in the first place) and in mid-October we headed West.
• In December, less than two months after arriving in SF, I was laid off (read more here). I am now working as a “self-employed consultant” seeking clients in need of business, marketing or Internet strategy advice. However, on a more positive note, Amy just recently accepted a job offer with Evolve Discovery and is looking forward to starting an exciting new career as a litigation consultant.
• I’ve finally done something with my personal website (where you are at right now). Going forward, it will be a place for me to share my thoughts, ideas and experiences. Check it out and let me know what you think.
• The Big News: I just recently announced that I am planning an event in the Bay Area for unemployed and self-employed people called “LaidOffCamp” (read more here). It’s become so popular since receiving news coverage from TechCrunch (article is here) that it is quickly expanding. As of today, I am in the process of helping organize ~5 more LaidOffCamp’s around the country.
• Three months in, Amy and I are extremely satisfied with our decision to move to SF. Every day we’re finding new reasons to love living in the Bay Area. We both hope that you’ll let us know the next time you’re in town.
• Finally, I’ve migrated my entire photo collection to Flickr and have created a 2007/2008 highlight reel, enjoy!

Thank you so much for taking the time to read. I’d love to know what you’re up to in 2009, so feel free to comment below or send me an email. Stay in touch!

~Chris

For the last month, I’ve been planning an event called LaidOffCamp. It’s gone through a ton of iterations, but it’s finally at a point where I’m ready to announce it to the world. Please check out the site for details!

“LaidOffCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of unemployed & self-employed people (including entrepreneurs and startups) who want to share and interact with each other. LaidOffCamp SF is the first LaidOffCamp ever! You do NOT have to be unemployed to attend!”

LaidOffCamp SF will occur March 3rd, 2009 somewhere in San Francisco. Please feel free to contact me if you want to help or have questions!

If you’re a Mac user, then you probably get frustrated by the way the tab key functions (or should I say DOESN’T function). When navigating forms, instead of tabbing to drop down boxes or buttons like it would on a PC, the tab key will skip to the next text box or list (see example to the right). Fortunately, there is a simple solution built into OS X.

Step 1: Open up your system preferences and click “Keyboard and Mouse”

Step 2: Click the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab and in the “Full Keyboard Access” section at the bottom, select “All Controls”

That’s it. Finally you can fill out forms without constantly switching between your keyboard and your mouse / trackpad. If for some reason you don’t want this setting active all the time you can enable/disable it by pressing Ctrl+F7.

On December 3rd, at 8:45pm, I received an email requesting that I come to an “urgent, important meeting” the following afternoon with a partner I’d never met before. Given that almost every day I read about another company laying off some of its workforce, I immediately began “preparing for the worst”.

The next morning I heard that someone in our New York office (where it was already afternoon) had been laid off… I was almost certain of what was to come. Despite that I had enjoyed my time working as a consultant for the Monitor Group, I always had an internal itch to go out and do something more entrepreneurial with my life. Sure enough, the afternoon went just as expected and my preparation made the situation far less awkward.

While many people are quite torn up after losing their job, I chose not to dwell on everything negative associated with the situation and immediately began to brainstorm ways that I could sustain my lifestyle doing what I love. For now, I’m spending my time consulting to a former employer (Fusion Telecommunications), rock climbing and getting to know San Francisco and all it has to offer with Amy Lynn Fox.

If you know any interesting projects that I can get involved in, please let me know!

Final parting advice to anyone losing there job in this economy: take your transition period to figure out what you’re passionate about and find a way to make your next job/career/project reflect that passion.

Just like most of the people reading this post, I use Twitter quite a bit (@hutchins). In the last few weeks I’ve noticed that the number of followers I have on Twitter has starting to pick up quite a bit (see why here). Anyways, it has left me in the middle of a major Twitter decision: does one follow everyone that follows them (auto-follow) or not.

As I often do with most decisions I looked at the pro’s and con’s:

Pro’s:

• It’s polite (I kinda feel like a bad person when I don’t return a strangers follow)
• Won’t miss DM’s
• Expand your network
• More tweets in your Twitter stream = more chances to learn something new / interesting

Con’s

• Irrelevant tweets in your Twitter stream
• Makes it difficult to stay on top of your closest friends’ tweets
• Opens the door to twitter / DM spam (especially annoying if you get SMS notifications for DMs)
• According to twitterratio.com, it would give me a friend-to-follower ratio closer to 1.0 and thus make me less “popular”

As for now, I’ve adopted a policy of checking each user’s tweets before deciding to follow them (for spam and type of content). However, in the long run (once I get more followers / day) it might be more worthwhile to auto-follow than spend the time to check out each user.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments!

(Twitter graphic courtesy of Smashing Magazine)

My resolutions for 2009… please hold me to them!

• Attend SXSW for the first time
• Get beyond the brainstorming phase for at least one startup
• Find some possible co-founders (hopefully some developers and designers)
• Travel somewhere new / exciting with my girlfriend Amy (Any suggestions? did Europe in ‘05, Asia in ‘07)
• Find a second client for my consulting work (so I don’t have to get a “real” job)
• Regularly climb at a 5.12 / V4 level
• Get better at NOT procrastinating
• Get in better shape
• Regularly Blog (hopefully about something interesting)