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Random story about Chris... I saw him speak at a startup event in 2010 at MIT called Startup Bootcamp. It was probably my first startup-related conference and
by andygcook 9y ago
Random story about Chris...
I saw him speak at a startup event in 2010 at MIT called Startup Bootcamp. It was probably my first startup-related conference and he was the first talk in the kick off slot at 9am. He gave a great talk recapping the origin of GitHub and how it grew out of another projected called FamSpam, a social network for families.
After the talk I had to run to the restroom and happened to run into Chris out in the entry way. I introduce myself and we starting chatting. As we were talking, people started walking into the event late. They saw us standing in the entrance, and started asking questions on where to go.
Instead of deferring responsibility to someone working at the event, Chris sat down at the empty welcome table and started checking people in by giving them schedules and helping them create name tags. We ended up checking in a few dozen people together while we talked more. No one knew who Chris was when they walked in, and just assumed he was a member of the event staff. I think had they known he was the co-founder of GitHub they probably would have paid more attention to him.
I ended up sending him a t-shirt and he took the time to shoot me back an email saying thanks. The subject line was "Dude" and the text was "Got the shirt. It's so awesome. You rock. Tell your brother yo, too!"
Anyways, I just thought it was kind of cool he took it upon himself to help out with checking people in at the event even though he had volunteered to travel all the way to Boston to speak for free to help out young, aspiring entrepreneurs by sharing his learnings. It always kind of stuck with me that you need to stay down to earth and pay it forward no matter how successful you get.
- Waterluvian 9y agoThat's a great little anecdote. Thanks for sharing.
- aacook 9y agoBrother Andy. I read this article and before clicking into the comments I started drafting an email to you with a link to it: "Hey, didn't we send Chris a t-shirt and he sent us back some dino stickers or something? I remember him being awesome." Yo Chris!
- andygcook 9y agoFunny that we're catching up on this story here instead of in person or on the phone, Brother Alex. HN, bringing families together since 2007.
- shanev 9y agoHeh yeah this is typical Chris. Excited that he might code again. Him and ErrTheBlog were such a huge asset to the early Rails community. Also if it weren't for Chris and his vision, we'd still be using Subversion. I remember him trying to convince me to switch to git. I told him that it needed to be 10x better than SVN. Git by itself wasn't, but Github was. Github was to git what Rails was to Ruby.
- lowkeyokay 9y agoNice story but, I couldn't concentrate cause inside my head was this crazy person yelling: 'WHEN IS HE GONNA PEE!'
- andygcook 9y agoDon't fret, I eventually got there.
- infinity0 9y agoYeah Chris is cool. He once personally answered some random minor UI suggestion I sent into support@github.