On Friday Nov. 14 I attended the Uncubed NYC event in Chelsea. I heard about this event from the NYC UX Acrobatics Meetup (a sponsor of the event) group which led me to believe it was something entirely different. The onus is on me entirely for not doing my homework. I’ve had lots of balls in the air lately, but I’m glad I went.

What I Liked About It

• LearnVest presentation – also a sponsor of the event. The firm’s founder Alexa Von Tobel gave an energetic and compelling presentation on her financial planning startup.
• David Rose, who wrote the book on angel investing, introduced the audience to what looks to become my favorite new site: Digital.NYC
• Chef Watson/IBM . The brains that beat Ken Jennings on my must-see Jeopardy has taken up cooking, my new diversion. IBM’s Steve Abrams dispersed a link if you want to get in on the beta: http://chef.watson.ibm.com/beta 
• A speaker from Behance put up a slide about how he had Uncubed to thank for his job with the portfolio platform, now owned by Adobe. Here’s mine, although admittedly I haven’t done much with it. My favorite part of the event was when the organizer of the event rushed the stage and asked him to keep the slide up so he could take a smartphone pic. I found myself agreeing; there’s no better testimonial.

What I Didn’t Like About It

The app for the event arrived on the same day, and this didn’t allow me enough time to evaluate the openings and the firms who were onsite recruiting. Again, my fault… I could have looked at the participating firms in advance and prepared accordingly. I have simply been too busy. To get heard above the din of the crowd on the floor of the Main Event would require me to be prepared with laser-precise advance work on resumes and my own pitch tailored for the firm.

Also, I never really knew if lunch was included in the price of the ticket. Since the event space was a few blocks from my first NYC apartment, I had lunch near there.

To wrap up, it was a great, fun recruiting event for talent interested in the opportunities in NYC’s booming tech field. “We’re hiring like crazy, that’s why we’re here!” was a popular closing to the presentations.