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Message 00134: Fwd: pacer and lollapalooza

P.S. ... he's the rainmaker, so don't be surprised if he does an initial call but quickly hands you to a nonprofit lawyer in his firm. Let me know if you need help on this process.
My biggest advice: choose your board *really* carefully so that you can keep control of your vision. You don't want a paper board, but you almost never want your funders on the board as they have a different vision than you do. There are exceptions, but not many. :) 

Begin forwarded message:


From: Carl Malamud <xxxxxxx@media.org>
Date: July 25, 2008 4:18:59 PM PDT
To: Rhett Millsaps II <xxxxxxx@gmail.com>
Cc: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
Subject: Re: pacer and lollapalooza

Hi Rhett -
I'm David Halperin's friend. I used to be Podesta's Chief Technology Officer at the Center, am now running a c(3) nonprofit out of California that puts primary legal materials (e.g., court cases) on the net called Public.Resource.Org.
I'd like to introduce you to Aaron Swartz who has created Watchdog.Net. The advice they received from their first funder, the Sunlight Foundation, was that they should be a c(4). I believe this is Aaron's first nonprofit, but he has accumulated a distinguished record in a variety of Internet enterprises. He wrote the "RSS" standard which is what newsfeeds are based on.
He was also a founder of Reddit, a popular social networking site that was sold to Conde Naste. And, perhaps most importantly, he's been the technical smarts behind a lot of impressive operations for Internet veterans such as Brewster Kahle and Lawrence Lessig (a name you may remember from your recent Harry Potter suit. :)
Watchdog has some funding, but because they are early stage they are definitely not flush, so I know Aaron would appreciate any reduced fees or perhaps even pro bono representation for the initial C(4) application. If it is helpful, I am happy to provide advice during the process, but this is Aaron's gig and I'm not directly involved.
I'll let you two arrange a phone call with each other and you can decide if this is worth taking the next step. 

Best regards,

Carl

P.S. Aaron ... Rhett's URL, which you no doubt found already, is 
http://web.omm.com/rhettmillsapsii/