Finally, Moving Day! On August 31, 2007 we packed up our computers, took pictures of our notes on the white boards, and stacked our kitschy toys onto our desks. One by one we rolled our stuff into the service elevator and ascended. No longer would we be sharing a small windowless closet that barely fit four desks and four chairs that we have been in since April. It was the first tangible change since we got funding, finally I could back up my chair and not bump into anyone.

Upon opening the door of our new space, golden rays of sun poured through the door and into the room as if the gods themselves were welcoming us to Mt Olympus. I’m sure if we were quieter we could have heard the herald call of an angel choir, but in our giddiness, we drowned out any other sounds. The back wall is an entire window that looks westward toward Central and Harvard Sq. The other walls are modern with aluminum and glass while the loft like ceiling provides much head room for the taller members of the team. Could this space BE more perfect?

Well, it turns out that, yes — it actually could. What became apparent nearly immediately was that that we had already out grown this space and we hadn’t even been in the office for an hour. The next 3 hours could only be described as company-wide battle Tetris with 10 desks, 10 chairs and a ridiculous number of filing cabinets. For some reason the CIC folks continued to bring us a couple filing cabinets every few minutes.

To add insult to injury, the CEO of the company next to us stopped by to tell us that “You guys will be able to hear us as much as we can hear YOU!” Was this a “welcome to the 14th floor or were those fightin’ words?” Chill out guy, we’re moving in. What’s more is that Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, are two doors down and they have TONS of room, however we rarely see more than a third of their chairs filled at any one time. In fact, there have been times when we have walked by their offices in the middle of the day and don’t see ANYONE in there. Where are they and why are they hoggin’ the office space?

Well anyways, we have been in our new space for 2 weeks now and our tenth hire starts tomorrow. We are all pretty psyched. Over the next couple months we will ramp up the new hires, dive into production and look for a larger office space. Until then, the office chairs will continue to crash into each other, elbows will be rubbed, and some folks will have to suck it in to let others pass by.

I’m very excited to announce the closing of our A round of funding here at Conduit. Having just raised $5.5m from Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks, I figured this was a good time to open up the company blog with the story about how Conduit came together and what we are up to.

what do war reporting, sports, and live action role playing games have in common?

My father was a foreign correspondent, a broadcast journalist who had to go into Cambodia and Vietnam a number of times while I lived in Bangkok as a kid. Those were often dangerous assignments, and, not surprisingly, a special type of bond was formed with the friends that he made during that time. The danger, excitement, and sense of adventure helped to form lifelong friendships.

In 1994, the World Cup came to the US and both my father and I caught the soccer bug. In much of the world, the soccer experience is so tied to a person’s sense of self that it’s easy to see why it bonds people together. That passion helped me and my father get closer than we had ever been, and also led to my second start-up, an Internet sports media company.

And in college I got involved in Live Action Role Playing Games (LARPs), a mixture of improv theatre and gaming. I witnessed and experienced the strong friendships that LARPs helped to form on a personal level, as well as the global community of players that was a harbinger of Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Gaming. The extraordinary growth of that network we built highlighted the power of simulated conflict.

Each of these examples is profoundly about people. Not so much about how they met, but how they formed relationships, how they built communities, how they bonded. And, in their own way, each of these examples illustrates the concept behind Conduit.

anyway, back to the present day…

Today, you don’t have to spend much time online to realize that there really isn’t any place to “hang out” with friends, an online community where you can get involved in a whole range of activities, a place where you help create a steady stream of new adventures. MySpace is about visiting profiles and passing of messages back and forth, a kind of pen pal for the Intertubes. In Virtual Worlds, the ideas of complex interaction with friends seems to stop with chat. Even blogs, which we thought would be a great democratizer, have fragmented into echo chambers, with most people subscribing only to the ones that cater to their pre-determined beliefs.

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