Cereal Bar is famous (among dozens)
Dan Fost of the SF Chronicle starts off his article, Web 2.0 has a local address, with Rubyred’s cereal bar. Here are some of the juicy bits:
The unofficial meal of the Internet comeback is a bowl of Kellogg’s Crispix and some fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice - served with pleasure at the Monday morning “cereal bar” hosted by the six-person Internet startup Rubyred Labs.
A few dozen people gather each Monday at Rubyred’s Brannan Street offices in the resurgent South Park neighborhood, eating cereal and chatting about the latest technology, the latest conference, the latest blog postings and Flickr photos.
South Park, once heralded as the “town square of Multimedia Gulch,” and then nearly abandoned when the dot-com bubble burst, is making a comeback.
The article details the rise and fall of the first wave of South Park’s popularity, culminating with the release of a truckload of tumbleweeds in the neighborhood by an out-of-work techie in 2002.
Lots of our friends got ink in the piece, including Scott Beale, Maggie Mason, Janice Fraser from Adaptive Path, Mule Design, Matt Sanchez from Video Egg.
Dan captures something of the cooperative spirit, silliness, and frugality of our environment. While we want our jobs to be genuinely fun, we have no intention of replicating the excess of five years ago.
The new companies are also a bit more conservative in spending money…Rubyred spends $50 on its cereal bar. Almost as proof of the new parsimony, Rubyred’s Jonathan Grubb analyzed the “cereal bar graph” of cereal boxes stacked up: Crispix led by far, with Lucky Charms and Kellogg’s Pops close behind. A $9 bag of Galaxy Granola from a farmers’ market was relatively untouched after several weeks on the buffet.
The Mullers, in their early 30s, have a 4-year-old who has his own Gmail account and his own Flickr photo page. They’re dot-com veterans who fled to the suburbs after the flameout but now live in Noe Valley and run Rubyred, which, according to Amy, strategizes, designs and develops Web and mobile applications.
In the new ethos, the Rubyred team helps Margaret Mason out with her site in exchange for copywriting…