Have You Seen Bobby or His Shoes?

This is a running joke with Rajesh.  I saw him earlier today, and I asked him if he saw Bobby.  Rajesh was in New York City last week, and he and I had exchanged emails that he was meeting Bobby. If you don't already know, Bobby is Robert De Niro.  Ever since I told Rajesh about my Bobby story, he says, "Have you seen Bobby?" when something New York City triggers it.  Ahhh, my Bobby story...

When I moved to New York City, our first office location was at Manhattan Mini-Storage.  I found this place to move our company's assets into, including the filing cabinets and files.  I would go to the storage place almost every day to work on files and just get administrative things done.   The rest of the time, I worked in my apartment.

We then moved to an office in East Village at a plug-and-play setup that hosted many other startup companies.  One of them was Kayak - yes, the kayak.com travel site that you see all over television commercials and internet ads today.  I forgot the name of the plug-and-play place, but I remember it was located near Astoria Place that had the Starbucks where they filmed a scene from the first Sex and the City movie.  It was also right across the street from the theater where the Blue Man Group performed.  I lived in West Village, and it only took me about 10 minutes to walk to the East Village office.

We closed our Series B round there.  I remember that too.  I was desperate to run a Windows patch one night because my computer was not cooperating, and so I ended up staying there late.  Walking late at night back to my apartment from East Village to West Village was no bother though.  New York City is safe.

After about 5 months, we wanted to relocate to a place closer to Soho or Tribeca.  We looked around, even in a building in Chinatown. We finally settled on a building in Tribeca in Lower Manhattan.  It turned out to be the Tribeca Film Center, where they prepare and run the Tribeca Film Festival.  Robert De Niro owns the building, and at the time he had an office on the 8th floor.  I'm not sure if it's still the case.  We happened to lease an office on the same floor and even had a desk there that was rumored to have been owned by Jon Stewart.  We even hired a girl (I don't remember her name) who was a former backup dancer for Christina Aguilera.  I think her name was Mary.

There was celebrity-ism everywhere.  However, despite being located there and working in that office early in the morning to late at night almost seven days a week, I did not get to see Bobby.  He could not have been more elusive.

One day, one of my co-workers named Spam said he saw Bobby and Sean Bean.  I should have been with Spam, but I missed out.  Another time, I went to lunch with another co-worker named Anne.  When we returned and got on the elevator, she was trying to get my attention with a look that I couldn't figure out.  I had my back to the lobby as the elevator doors closed.  As soon as they closed, Anne told me that Bobby was in the lobby.  Ugh!  I had missed him again.

Another opportunity I had to see him was when one of his assistants came walking through the floor asking everyone if they had seen Bobby's shoes.  So I knew he must have been in the office that day.  I stepped out of our office to see if I could get a glance, but Bobby did not appear.

Alas, I did not see Bobby or his shoes.  Life went on this way until I eventually moved the company's assets out of Tribeca and back to California into the Campbell office. I have so many start-up war stories and the scars to prove it.  And not seeing Bobby or his shoes are deep scars that I cannot recover from.  If there is a slim chance that Robert De Niro reads my blog, perhaps he can heal them.