The May Report
Scoop[Actually 8/28]: Briefly noted, by Ron MayBriefly noted, by Ron May
* First, don’t forget the latest podcast done by Tim Keelan with Brad Spirrison and me: http://www.midwestbusiness.com/news/viewnews.asp?newsletterID=15314
* Sunday afternoon, I went up to Dollop, a bohemian style coffee house with a very homey atmosphere. Dollop is owned by Phil Tadros and he’s been bugging me to come visit, so I did. I wondered where I met Phil and he tells me that it was at the Evanston ITEC panel discussion on Series A venture capital. I demanded Phil’s card as usual and now I am glad I did.
Phil is the owner of Dollop which is in the Buena neighborhood on North Clarendon (4181 N. Clarendon) and the cross street is Gordon Terrace. They seem to get a lot of business and in the three hours I was there, a wide range of people circulated in and out. In the back was a private first birthday party, and one woman came in with a baby carriage, except the carriage was carrying her dog — an Australian Terrier. The women serving coffee were dressed in mime! It was a gimmick just for that day, but they did not say a word.
One more digression before I get to the main point of the story. Phil left about 2:30pm and when I left I took a cab home. As I was getting out of the cab, and I live a full ten blocks south of Dollop, a guy on a bike called out to me. “Ron,” he said. I did not recognize that guy, but it was Phil Tadros! How could I not recognize a guy that I just saw less than two hours before? Well, it turns out that when Phil left, he went home and shaved off his full beard! He tells me that he does this periodically — grow a beard and shave it off. And what are the odds that I would have run into him two hours after he left the store? He does not live by me.
OK, let’s get to why meeting Phil Tadros is important. Phil is an interesting guy. He ran a couple of coffee shops before he ran Dollop, and he had a couple of cell phone stores. Phil is 27 years old and comes from Orland Park. Orland Park?! Yikes!, as Darcy would say. That is where my brother lives. Phil and I agreed on one thing. That suburb is nothing but a bunch of houses surrounding a mall. Phil could not wait to get out of there.
Another interesting fact: Phil is Jordanian and Catholic. It turns out that 6% of Jordanians are Christian.
Let’s get down to business, shall we?
Phil does not run the coffee shop on a daily basis. “It runs itself,” he says. The employees know what to do.
Meanwhile Phil loves projects —- the more the merrier.
And one of his big projects of late has been a networking site called metroproper.com. The site is within a few days of being launched. Phil bought up all the metroproper.com URLs he could get his hands on —-some 400 or more.
So, for example he has ChicagoProper.com, NewYorkCityproper.com, etc. That costs him about $7 per URL per year.
Phil held a “launch” party for MetroProper on July 15th on Michigan Avenue. The event got about 275 people and it was sponsored by Motorola. I inquired about how Phil managed to get Motorola to sponsor an event, and the connection came from the coffee shop, it turns out.
What is Phil trying to accomplish? A networking environment that can help small business people. He wants everyone to have a web presence. One of his targets is freelancers. His target audience is entrepreneurs of all kinds. They don’t have to be in technology per se. He says he likes snippets of things and wants to “make it productive”
In fact, Phil does not know too many people in the tech community, but he has run into a few of us. One is Adam Fendelman who lives near the coffee shop, and Adam wrote an article, Phil tells me, about the MetroProper party on July 15th. Another person Phil has met is Ron Kirschner who seems willing to help. That is one thing about Kirschner. He is generous with his time. Phil met with Al Wasserberger (Al, what is your interest in this?); and another person he’s met is Robert Jordan who is working at HighBeam.com as well as at his interim CEO job.
The most helpful person Phil has encountered, he told me, is Wendell Davis who runs www.splicemusic.com and who also founded www.meetro.com, at least that is what Phil says. Another website that appears in my notes is www.tribe.net which from the looks of it is a site that services many cities and is HQ’d in San Francisco. The site appears to have a ton of things from discussion groups to job listings and much more.
Another name that popped up in my conversation with Phil was Dave Dalka and Phil said that Dalka wrote about the MetroProper party.
MetroProper.com is only one of the sites that Phil is working on.
Just to finish up on Dollop. I ate some very good strawberry rugala pie which was made by Hoosier Mama Pie Company. And I talked to a guy who asked me a lot of questions and was supposed to send me his email but did not. He never told me what he did, so I got the info. elsewhere. His name is John Michailidis and his email is brainforgepress@gmail.com and the firm he appears to be associated with is Chicago Building Exchange/Chicago Realty. John told me that he’s written a number of books and that he has his fingers in many things, but he never just came out and said he’s in real estate. I am curious to know more about him, if anyone knows the guy.
Oh, before I forget, on Saturday evening I ate dinner at Greek Islands Restaurant and there was a Greek street festival on Halstead at the time. I saw Chris Bloom and Gail Longmore Trenarthan walking to the festival and separately, Rich Schweik (spelling?)zoomed by. You know Rich. He is quite tall and very thin. At least as tall as Grosshandler.
