The question “Why?” gets asked a lot. It’s a very good question, other then a shrug of the shoulders and a ‘why not’ response, bowling 2.0 grew out of a half joke between members of the meetro team. Being that meetro is social software that encourages people to meet in the real world, and we here at meetro are always looking for a good reason to throw a party, we were brainstorming some ideas of events to throw around silicon valley.
There are too many events that are heavy on the professional and networking side, but not many events where people just hang out, drink a few beers, and trash talk the competition. We started tossing around ideas of competitive sports, but quickly threw that idea out as we figured most geeks aren’t too physical! Then a joke came out… “Why not bowling?” After we all had a few good laughs, we said, wait a minute, bowling would be kinda cool… After all, it’s a sport, it’s competitive, beer pitchers are of the plenty, and it’s completely ironic to have all these high tech companies hanging out in such a low-fi atmosphere. Half the bowling machines look like they were produced before the Atari was invented!
So we thought about the idea a little more and decided we needed to make this happen. We reached out to a few companies and ppl really bit into it. We started talking to bowling alleys to see what was required to start a league. Heck, most of us here at meetro hadn’t bowled more then a dozen times in our life. For some, the last time they bowled was at a friends 6th grade birthday party.
We sent out a few emails and everybody was really excited on the idea. So we reached out to a few more companies, and they were excited about the idea as well. Then it was picked up on valleywag and interest exploded, we had to start turning companies away!