The wild rumors are all true. Tim O’Reilly has joined the Fluidinfo advisory board!

I’m an unabashed fan of Tim, his company, and everyone I’ve ever met who works at or has worked at O’Reilly (especially Sara Winge). I’ve been talking to Tim on and off about FluidDB since March of 2007 after being introduced by Esther Dyson. Tim would blog about something, and I’d email him and say “FluidDB will be able to do that” or (more recently) “FluidDB can do that.” When we first met, we spent 90 minutes together and I showed him a demo of a few things. He drilled down hard in the first 2 minutes: “Tell me what’s different about it.” So I went for it. When the meeting was over, Tim left the room and went to the elevator to leave. I was packing up my stuff when suddenly he was back, wanting to ask and suggest more. He came back to the room four times, lastly to get my phone number

Since then, Tim has been extremely generous, introducing us to many great people. You can see who very easily in the graph of introductions I put together over the years as I talked to people about FluidDB. He made the introduction that led through Gerry Campbell to John Borthwick and Andy Weissman at Betaworks who led the Fluidinfo investment. Tim invited me to the Social Graph Foo camp in 2008, to a Science Foo camp, and to two general Foo camps, and he’s been helping me in the (ongoing) attempt to get a US visa.

It’s a personal thrill to have Tim formally involved with Fluidinfo. During years working on what at times seemed like the dark side of the tech moon in Barcelona, to have had Tim and Esther (and others!) behind us along the way has been wonderful. I often feel I want us to succeed as much for them as for anyone else.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 7:42 pm by Terry Jones under Awesomeness, Happiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.