Hacker News Seattle Meetup 5

Sorry everyone for the late notice! The holidays threw off my planning schedule a bit.

The fourth Hacker News Seattle Meetup will be Tuesday, December 13th at 6pm at the Bookr offices in downtown Fremont. (SECOND Tuesday of the month this time around.)

As always, the event is free, and there will be free pizza, beer, and refreshments. Andrew Kinzer will be our speaker this month. He's a cofounder of Group Talent, a company that just came through the most recent TechStars batch. He volunteered to coach the teams at the latest Seattle Startup Weekend on how to improve their pitches, and it made an amazing difference!

Pitching is something that everyone does, whether they realize it or not. Everyone always thinks of pitching to investors, but if you're explaining to your mom what you do at Amazon, or telling someone at a party what your PhD research is in... those are pitches too! Andrew will be giving some great advice on how be more effective when making these style of pitches.

There are a couple companies that are critical in helping make this event happen.

-Big thanks to Bookr (http://bookr.net) for providing the venue again. They're a startup looking to disrupt the music ticketing space with a great product, good analytics, and a kickass Ruby dev team (and they're looking to hire). They also have a really cool space (and an awesome rooftop deck!).

-Gist (http://www.gist.com), who provides the only full view of your contacts from email, social networks, and other sources by creating rich business profiles that include the most news, status updates and work details.

-Rooster Park (http://www.roosterpark.com/), who is sponsoring a third time! They're a small, engineering-driven consultancy and staffing firm, finding the right people and building great software for some of Seattle's best companies, from gigantic to garage.