Hi everyone, my name’s Imran Ali.
I’m one of the organisers of BarCamp and also LSx, the Leeds Web Festival, now in its 3rd year.
Since 1998, I’ve worked in 6-7 startups, variously as a founder, board director or early employee.
Every culture has been unique, but generally staffed by an intoxicating mix of idealists, iconoclasts & visionaries.
So I’ve always been interesting to see how these cultures were represented in other media;
Invariably as awkward nerds, highly strung creatives, greedy monopolists or megalomaniacal “desktop despots”.
One of my various projects is producer the of LSx2010 web festival; a series of 16 events taking place around Leeds throughout May and now in its third year.
Will Robbins as the murderous CEO of a software company under investigation for antitrust (sound like anyone? except for the murder part!)
BBC’s Attachments was novel in that characters lived on between shows on personal web pages and updates to the fictional company site.
Look carefully at the cover and you’ll see a young pre-Little Britain David Walliams
Charlie Brooker, Chris Morris
Acerbic piss take of London’s shoreditch creative community
How idealists sell out - post-bust deflation
Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, anonymous blog, collected as a blog - now a TV series in development
Will Arnett’s batshit insane “GOB” from Arrested Development would be perfect!
In 2008, Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse finally jumped the shark with Harry & Paul
Recurring characters Steve Jobs and Bill Gates - just oafishly apeing nerdy stereotypes when there was a chance for some biting satire.
Hartnett produced, Bowie as a venture capitalist!
Fictionalisation of Startup.com and GovWorks, re-imagined as a morality tale of two brothers
Jason Calcanis introducing Hartnett’s character at a conference
The Social Network ”greed, obsession, unpredictability and sex”
Comedy/Drama - October
Written by West Wing’s Aaron Sorkin, Produced by Kevin Spacey, Directed by David Fincher of Fight Club and starring Justin Timberlake!
I wanted to end with The Startup, a 20 minute, 4-part documentary
a young tech startup trying to make it in NYC.
Produced by a local tech blog NYC 3.0 that started as an experiment in hyperlocal journalism
Always strong - Doubleclick, AOLTW, but the intersting thing about NYC atm is
The banking crisis released a lot of smart quants and engineers from finance
many are turning to startups to reboot their careers.
