(which rolled out last November) until mid-April of this year, when he joined oneforty. He is now transitioning Greenhorn Connect into what he calls a “sustainable mode.”
The key idea behind Greenhorn Connect, and what makes it unusual, is that it breaks down barriers to entry for people who are getting started in the tech community, Evanish says. “We make it clear and easy for people to find what they want. We break down the events, what a new person would want to know,” he says. There are lots of helpful organizations and events around town, but “when you’re getting started, you don’t even know who they are,” Evanish says.
I asked what he’s seeing out there in the trenches. “There is some clamoring that people are hoping there’s more investors,” he says. “More money in the ecosystem means more investments.” (Nothing too surprising there.) Perhaps more interesting is that Evanish senses that “there’s a changing culture to take chances…From what I’ve heard, this is a new wave. There’s a group of us who didn’t know any better, and we started doing stuff, and that woke everyone else up. It’s a snowball effect.”
As for the new job board, Evanish says it will help create “an overall system to help drive the ecosystem to be more productive.” He adds that through partnerships with local organizations, he hopes Greenhorn will have greater reach and do more. As of now, the site has more than 1,400 Twitter followers around Boston. If all goes well, that number is sure to go up.
