January 24th, 2011 
Ryan 
This summer I faced a few challenges that didn’t have solution. So, I brought together a team and we delivered our MVP to market. Before I found my co-founder and CTO, I made a concerted effort to focus on meeting more people in the NY tech community with the hopes of networking into and building/earning street cred with folks possessing a technical skill-set that I don’t have.
One of the first events was Find a Co-founder night at AOL Ventures. After leaving Yahoo!’s Right Media team a few months earlier, I was particularly interested in the pitch from Simple Reach founder Ed Kim. I was impressed with Eddie’s market knowledge, technology, solution & delivery, so I approached Eddie after the meeting and we exchanged business cards. A lot of folks lack the fundamental “skill” of following up. Eddie didn’t. We met over the next week at the Ace Hotel to talk tech, dive deeper into each other’s business models, and like all scrappy entrepreneurs identified ways to help each other.
Eddie started his first company while studying abroad in Shanghai and spent the next 4 years there as a serial entrepreneur. One of his companies, NextStepDirectory.com, was acquired in July 2010. He graduated from the University of Virginia as a music major, currently volunteers with Wokai.org, and is an avid traveler (having been to over 40 countries).
His company, Simple Reach, has built and is continuing to improve upon a paid content distribution layer for the web. Their technology helps companies reach targeted audiences across the web with their own updates. Its a way of taking content that you create and integrating the title, message, or call to action into a display ad for distribution to a very targeted audience. This is a great solution for any size company, and an optimal way for the tail and torso of businesses to augment their marketing, PR, social, and advertising efforts by placing focus on content. We use the service for Let’s Gift It and I highly recommend it to other business owners.
Eddie and I meet every few weeks for coffee to catch up, talk shop, and have a constructive feedback session.
You can find him at @edwkim
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