Glenn Nano

Bio:

Principal at Centurion Venture Partners, supporting emerging market leaders and startup-driven behavior change. Former hedge fund technology analyst, trader, and portfolio manager, NYC public school teacher, and co-founder of an irreverent design/goods company. Loves (very) short stories and long (slow) runs. Organizer of Code Meet Print NY.

• Title: Principal at Centurion Venture Partners
• Age: 35
• Location: Midtown
• Contact: @soonisnow

You recently founded the Code Meet Print NY meetup group, which is focused on the community at the intersection of text and technology.  How did the idea for this meetup come about and why does this particular community interest you?

In many ways Code Meet Print NY commingles three of my passions: Technology (making life and work better, quicker, easier, more efficient, through 1s and 0s or other means), Innovation (anticipating and facilitating appreciable behavior change -- for consumers/users but also industries, companies, communities), and Texts (things contemplated and composed in thoughtful, provoking, artful ways whether fiction, journalism, poetry, memoir, history).  I think being a relatively new participant in seed stage tech investing enables me and the Code Meet Print NY community to ask questions and iterate solutions around Innovation, Tech, and Commerce that other investors/business people feel have already been answered.  Finally, if being a part of Tech Startups in NYC is all about helping first (which I think it is), then #CMPNY is just another platform to help a diverse but interest/passion-connected group of engineers, writers, bloggers, designers, and business people plug in to ideas and practices and human capital they might not have otherwise.  Our next Meetup is July 12th at General Assembly (our fantastic long-term host and partner!) -- I’m humbled by the lineup of speakers.

You wear enough hats as a seed stage investor that there are significant time gaps between your Centurion blog posts.  What are some of the titles to posts you haven’t had time to publish yet?

1.  Online Marketplace Success -- Fostering Trust and Comfortability to Create Two-Sided Liquidity
2.  Demand-Driven Dynamics -- Minimizing Transactional Friction in Hyper-Targeted Economies
3.  “Woohoo” Vs. Woot” -- Different, but also, the Same
4.  Some Problems of Philosophy, or, Why Pretty Moving Pictures are Not Necessarily Good Movies (cf: Terence Malick’s “Tree of Life”)

In your opinion, are we in a tech bubble?

Yikes!  I’m pretty sure I resolved not to discuss this topic on record..  From the vantage point of public (and retail investor-driven) markets, there’s little beyond media headlines to support much bubble-talk (LinkedIn and Pandora stock available for trading totals about just $1bn -- so any lofty valuations there day-to-day are perhaps more a function of the limited asset supply compared to the rest of the stock market).  From the vantage point of NYC?  The biggest bubble we have in this city, in my humble opinion: Cupcakes.  People are obsessed, man.