Tonight is the IT Department’s Poker game, so why not a poker/tech story for Friday.
Zach Coelius came to San Francisco at age 25, as a Minnesota native and Silicon Valley outsider. Within a month he crashed the high-profile Demo conference and charmed his way into a top-secret poker game among venture capitalists, where he won a thousand dollars in seed funding for a then-nonexistent company.
A little more than two years later, Coelius is CEO of Triggit, a new web service that helps bloggers easily add pictures, video and ads. And Coelius, 28, has hustled his way into the upper ranks of the Silicon Valley web scene — thanks partly to his poker habit. When he first arrived, he played several nights a week, occasionally paying his rent with his winnings. He admits he’s a “pretty good” poker player.
“When I first moved (to San Francisco), I played all the time. If you wanted to, you could go to a poker game every night of the week. I didn’t really know anybody, and it was a good way to meet people,” Coelius says. “Now I just play my own game once a week.”
In a cutthroat business environment such as Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs use whatever tools they’ve got to get ahead. For Coelius an appetite for risk and fine-tuned poker skills helped him secure funding and get his startup off the ground.