I was buying some domain names for my prior company, OurStory on GoDaddy when they offered me "chrislunt.com". It seemed like I should probably own it, so I bought it, not knowing what I was going to do with it. It sat there for about a year, and when I became an Entrepreneur-in-residence at Venrock, I figured it was high time I did something with it.
Starting a new company, nothing has a greater effect on the outcome than the people that you get involved. I need investors, advisors, employees and business partners, so I need to be prominent on the web. So what to do with ChrisLunt.com? The obvious choice would be a blog, but I'm not well motivated to maintain a blog. I don't find writing that much fun. A tumblelog seemed like an option, or Twitter. Still, if my goal was to bring together enough content to get people's interest, I might need to commit to a little more. So I ended up starting a blog.
And I got a sense that I wasn't the only person with this problem. I have a variety of content on the web, and I don't necessarily want to create new content--I want to just collect what I've got, and point people to the places they can connect to me. So from this Nombray was born. I started collecting other personal sites and seeing how else people had solved this problem. I decided in June that this idea really had possibilities, because the web was becoming the place where you met, found, and rediscovered people. Facebook and LinkedIn do a decent job of this, but I wanted something that was more about me. I want people to find me whether they type my name into the address bar or the search box. So by the beginning of July, I was actually designing and building the website (with the help of my colleages here at Venrock).
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