How the Heck Did I End Up Here?

In case we’ve never met, let me introduce myself. My name is Andy Kaufman and I’m a founding member of the MyEastBayAgent team out in the Bay Area where we specialize in working with investors and selling bank owned REO properties.

If I HAD to describe myself, I’d say that I’m part snarky agent and part super geek who radiates an egoless kind of cool… but I’d rather not talk about myself, so pretend you never saw that. Besides, if you’ve seen me around on facebook or twitter, you’d probably already know most of that anyway.

One of the recurring themes that I’ll be talking about here on AG is community. Building and feeding a vibrant community that works together to help everyone achieve their goals is how we’re building our business, and I’d love to share with you how we’re going about doing it.

Looking back, I had been unknowingly doing this in some capacity for the past 15 years, but the concept that I could create abundance through building and contributing to communities didn’t really take hold in my consciousness until about a year and a half ago. Not to say that I hadn’t been exposed to the idea, but that’s when it finally clicked.

In August 2006, I was the the end of my rope. As I was immersing myself in the Bay Area tech community and building my knowledge of social media and bleeding edge technologies, I found myself migrating away from real estate. As luck would have it, I saw that Blogging Systems was hiring Community Managers to support their new product, a blogging platform which they called Community Publisher.

Community building is hard work. It’s extremely time intensive and needs to be done with authenticity and passion in order to succeed and it was soon became apparent that the model that we were working with just wasn’t going to work. As a result, in early 2007 I found myself back at square one.

Even then, with a floundering business and an abandoned blog, I knew that I had a growing network and unique knowledge base along with a burning desire to keep adding to both.

Most importantly, I had a seedling planted in my psyche that would lead me to where I find myself today. I was convinced that I could utilize social media technologies to transform my existing network into an active community and that by feeding and providing value to that community, opportunities would come my way…

…yada yada yada, now I’m here on AG. Sure, I’ll fill in the blanks as time goes by, but I wanted to spare you from what, in draft form, was turning out to be a monster of a post that no one would read completely without falling asleep.

Long story short, I’m super excited to be here and I’m looking forward to seeing you around.

flickr photo credit: brian solis / bub.blicio.us. Taken at BarCamp block.