Michael Horn :: New York Based Internet Entrepreneur

I’m a lawyer. But for the past few years, I’ve focused the bulk of my professional time on building things (web applications and startup companies, in particular).  Recently a number of my friends who are building companies in New York have expressed some interest in working with an attorney who has been in their shoes.

I’ve always been excited about adding value to the startup equation wherever I could be helpful.  As every founder knows, the answer to “where can I be helpful?” might include an insanely diverse array of tasks that you never imagined tackling when you started out.  Personally, I’ve built complex financial models, mastered social media and SEO, taught myself to code in Ruby on Rails, turned myself into a frontend ninja and even learned to manage Apache servers.  Along the way, I’ve also handled all the legal matters for my own projects: from company formations to team-building to financings.

Today I’ve decided to expand my role in the startup community by providing legal counsel to founders and investors.  I plan to leverage my in-the-trenches startup experiences to help you launch and finance companies with a keen eye towards on-the-ground entrepreneurial realities.

I will continue working on my own startup projects as well, and I hope that my clients will benefit from my ongoing entrepreneurial endeavors. If you’d like to contact me about legal work, please use the contact information at http://nycstartuplawyer.com.

As an entrepreneur in New York, you quickly learn the value of a good networking lunch.   So many new ideas and relationships can come from a great lunch meeting. Still, too many people probably eat lunch alone.  I know I often get caught up in work or I’m not sure what my schedule will look like on a particular day, so I don’t schedule a lunch ahead of time.  Then, suddenly 2pm hits and I have a free hour.  Right at that moment, I wish I could connect to somebody interesting in my neighborhood who might be up for lunch.  I want to build an app for this.

Sure, you could post a message on Twitter to see if somebody is around, but I don’t think most people have a critical mass of followers for that to be realistic.  A Facebook post could work for some people, but it would be cool if serendipity could play a larger role, and you could connect to an interesting person that might live or work near you, but who you don’t actually know yet.

I’d like to build an app for this exact use case.  When you realize that you’re about to have a free hour, you could post your location, time and place.  Then other people could either check a site that lists everybody who is going to lunch and open to meeting, or the user could get notifications if they choose.

I think there are undoubtedly apps out there where some portion of their purpose is to facilitate this type of thing, but I’d like to make something that is super simple, straight forward, and focused only on this particular use case.

If this sounds like an interesting problem that you might like to help me solve, I’d love to hear from you.  I’d be open to coding the web app portion in Rails and handling frontend development, but I’d love to hear from folks who might be interested in handling the mobile side of things, as well as ux/ui designers.  I think it would be a fun weekend project, and it would be awesome to see really cool ideas and relationships form out of connections that we helped to facilitate.