0 Kudos
 

What's my story?

Who is Zac?

Zac loves making things happen, organizing people and communities, and solving problems that matter. He is currently a partner at LIFFFT where he helps build products and consults with large companies to help them move faster and think more like startups. Before LIFFFT, he was part of the core Startup Weekend team at their headquarters in Seattle.

When he’s not changing the world through entrepreneurship, he’s training parkour and doing backflips, making viral videos, and running the Hacker News Seattle Meetup. He also thinks Space is really, really cool.

What He’s doing:

  • Partner at LIFFFT, a startup that’s building products and consulting with big companies to help them think more like startups.
  • Facilitating Startup Weekend events around the world. Current number of events facilitated: 8
  • Running The Awesome List, a highly curated list of cool and high quality events to go to around Seattle.
  • Organizing the wildly successful monthly Hacker News: Seattle monthly meetups.
  • Vice-chair of the Board of Parkour Visions, the first parkour 501(c)3 non-profit.
  • Running “How to Survive The Email Onslaught” Seminars to help people get, and stay, on top of their inboxes.
  • Helping to organize and run Ignite Seattle.
  • Help produce funny viral videos for LaughPong and Satire, comedy Youtube channels with over 30 million views.
  • Mentor at 9 Mile Labs, a B2B accelerator in the Seattle area.

What He’s Done:

  • Was in charge of “Hacker Relations” at Startup Weekend. He worked with Google to run pre-event bootcamps to teach people about cool platforms, APIs, and technologies they can use in their Startup Weekend projects.
  • Piloted the Startup Weekend: Government vertical. These are Startup Weekend events that are focused on encouraging people to create startups that solve the problems of government or are built on “open data.”
  • Produced The Day the Lolcats Died, a Youtube Video protesting SOPA/PIPA that got 700,000 views in the first week after launch.
  • Helped make We’re NASA And We Know It, a viral video parody of “I’m Sexy And I Know It” that broke 2 million views in the first week. It’s been played at Mission Control in Houston, at the Museum of Flight’s “Wings of Heroes” Gala, to open TEDx MidAtlantic, and on the International Space Station to hype up the astronauts before a spacewalk.
  • Went on Reddit’s Internet 2012 Bus Tour. He hopped on in Iowa City and rode until Danville, Kentucky.
  • Guest Trustee for The Awesome Foundation
  • Organized The Seattle MetaMeetup, an event and private email list for event organizers to teach each other how to be better organizers.
  • Started The Neverending Fast, a collaborative fasting and self-discovery project.
  • Founded Rochester Parkour. He ran beginner workshops drawing over 100 people, attracted media coverage of our organization multiple times, and developed a sustainable, friendly, and positive parkour community.
  • Ran the American Parkour web presence, including daily news posts, social media, forum moderation, Youtube contests, Google Ads strategy and execution. Was also the Editor in Chief of their monthly newsletter.
  • Planned and took a trip around the country to teach and spread parkour, and to learn more about other parkour communities. Traveled for 8 weeks to 21 cities.
  • In High School he worked as a programmer for the National Security Agency doing [redacted] with [redacted] on the [redacted]. Was NOT involved with [redacted], [redacted] and definitely had no connection to [redacted].
  • Worked as the lead analyst for Parallels, one of Banyan Branch’s biggest clients.
  • Co-founded an Android gaming company called Happy Monster Games. He released one game called TrickyLeaks. The game lampooned Wikileaks, got coverage from some significant gaming blogs, and even got mentioned in a tweet from the official Wikileaks account!
  • Graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree that combined two years of Computer Science with two years of business/marketing.
  • Undefeated record in blackbelt Taekwondo tournaments (1-0. Hey… 1 and 0 is still undefeated!).

Guest Posts and Public Speaking