Jelly: Making work sweet

Posted June 23rd, 2009 at 11:05 am by Amit Gupta, Jelly

Number of Comments 2 Comments / Filed in: Guest Opinions

When I describe Jelly to a friend, I usually detect a note of disbelief in their response.

“You let total strangers in your house?”

It all started a few years ago in my midtown apartment in New York City. My roommate Luke and I worked from home, and though we loved the freedom this afforded us, we missed the opportunity to brainstorm, share ideas and interact creatively with our peers. We decided to invite a friend over to work with us on the kitchen table every week or so — that friend brought another friend, and that one brought another, and another. All of a sudden, our living room was filled with 20 friends and friends of friends typing on laptops.

We’d talk about what we were working on, look for solutions to problems we were trying to solve and we’d work. Most of us were developers, designers, or entrepreneurs, some worked alone, some worked for large companies. The common thread was we all wanted more creative interaction with those in our field. Thus Jelly began and started to spread.

Jelly was on NPR, in Wired, on NPR again, on CNN, on the Today Show. People all over the world started writing in and I helped them start their own Jellies. It seemed that our needs weren’t unique; people everywhere were craving a new way to work.

Now nearly 100 Jellies exist around the world. The phenomenon of Jelly caught Yahoo!’s attention over a year ago and together we created Jelly Talks, a live speaker series. Each month we host an influential speaker at a Jelly location and stream the conversation online via live webcast, allowing the global Jelly community to participate in the event. We’ve had JellyTalks speakers from Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Google, Yahoo!, and independents like Guy Kawasaki and Chris Messina talk about the latest in tech.

This Friday, June 26th, we have a special JellyTalks Q&A event with marketing guru Seth Godin (little known fact: he used to work at Yahoo!). He’ll be at Jelly New York City and live on the web starting at 11am PST. Be sure to tune in at http://jellytalks.yahoo.com. The webcast will not be archived, so don’t miss out!

Amit Gupta
Co-founder, Jelly