 Welcome to Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV for Thursday, November 1st, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. In 2005, Hurricane Wilma blew through the South Florida region, leaving millions of citizens and thousands of startups without electricity for over a month. As the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy is being publicly discussed by the NYC startup community, we turned to SiliconANGLE founding editor Mark Risen-Hopkins to discuss his experiences as a startup founder in the aftermath of Wilma. Welcome, Mark. Howdy. Kara Swisher from All Things D sat down with four-square founder Dennis Crowley, Tuesday night in Manhattan, to discuss the effect of the hurricane on the NYC tech and startup scene. As someone who's seen a startup suffer its fate at the hands of a hurricane, what comments and thoughts do you have on what Crowley said? So, you know, Crowley's in the thick of it right now and probably just a little bit shell-shocked, I would say, just because of the way that, I mean, that's how a hurricane affects you. I, like you said, went through Hurricane Wilma after just, you know, just walking out my front door. I spent probably, like, two, three hours just kind of day-in-a-day walking around, just like before I kind of snapped to and was like, okay, you know, let's get some stuff done. So, he's probably experiencing a little bit of that. But the comments that he said were very tactical and almost reporter-like. He was talking about a lot of the things that were, you know, they were doing preparation before the hurricane and kind of in reaction to the hurricane. I don't think New York in general knew what to expect because Irene, previous hurricane that affected the area in recent years, did almost no damage whatsoever. This damage, this hurricane of course killed 16 people in the whole region and, you know, billions of property damage, the powers out, the trains aren't running, taxis aren't running, taxis are, you know, under three feet of water. So there's just a lot of logistical issues that he is having to deal with and that's what he spoke to a lot in a lot of ways. And he spoke to a lot of the collaboration that is going on between a lot of the startups in the community, which I thought was something that was unique to the New York scene. It might have been in a few regions in America, but maybe Palo Alto, if a hurricane ever could possibly hit Palo Alto or San Francisco, but or some other natural disaster. But in New York, they have the benefit of having a burgeoning and therefore somewhat close knit startup scene and he was talking a little about that. As of yesterday, 1.6 million were out of power in the areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. How does this compare to your experiences in affected hurricane areas? So I was in, like I said, I was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 2005. Hurricane Wilma came through and I literally thought there was going to be, you know, no problem that we'd already had like seven other hurricanes that year and no substantial amount of damage. It's also the year Hurricane Katrina had come through just a month earlier, of course, devastated the New Orleans area, but did very little damage to Florida. And I think most of us in the area were feeling pretty cocky about, you know, we just throw another hurricane, we can take it. And much to my surprise and most of the other people surprised it knocked out power for almost the entire region from Boca Raton down to South Beach, even into some of the keys. Power gone for three and a half weeks. And you learn very quickly how a barter economy works because you can't access your money. You can't gas up your vehicles. You can't make reliable phone calls, cell networks are down. I mean, just it's turning back the clock 100 years very quickly. And so I don't think, you know, conversely, Hurricane Sandy, only 1.6 million people being affected out of, you know, tens of millions in the whole region. So not to diminish the pain they're going through because there's very real pain and very real economic damage to the area, but it's not quite to the level of some of the worst disasters America has seen recently. If a startup made effective usage of the cloud and technology enabled cloud like tools, how much damage could they save themselves? Would that be a startup saving grace? It very well could be. So of course, AWS, Rackspace Cloud, these public clouds did not exist back when my startup was there at the time. This is back when John Furrier or other founder was running a pod tech. I was running a company called Blip Media. Blip Media had three quarters of the world's podcast creators were using our servers at the time and as their broadcast medium, and we didn't have a real cloud solution. We had a backup solution at the planet which saved the data, but the servers that actually ran all the scripts that made podcasting through your phone possible or podcasting, just uploading your podcast to a website possible, were run out of servers there in South Florida. And as a consequence, were under about two and a half feet of water and so did not work. If we had had a good strategy, a better backup strategy for not just the storage but the compute or if Amazon web server had existed, we would have had a better chance of surviving that, at least coming out with something we could have saved the company on the other side, just other than just the raw data. The other thing that is very important to note is that just because your digital operations and your data is safe, code requires constant maintenance and that was certainly the case with what we did. Code had to be tweaked on a daily basis and I was the primary contributor to the code base and I had no electricity. I had no way to check in on my code and see what scripts were broken and very quickly the whole thing stopped and all ground to a halt because I couldn't bug fix and I didn't have any other coders in non-affected areas that could do applied bug fixes. So even if your cloud keeps your operations safe, you have to make sure your people operations are fully redundant and geographically redundant. Is there much benefit to having a maturing ecosystem of citizen journalism if there's no electricity around to access all of those resources? Yeah, that's a fair point because this is the other thing that most of us have noticed and I think you guys have talked about in the last few days on the program here is all the citizen journalism. I think one of the founders of Twitter, I can't remember which one tweeted out yesterday to a lot of fanfare. I'm so proud of Twitter right now and doing that citizen journalism thing. But in a situation where New York is, there's enough people with still like New York City and the whole Northeast region, there's enough people with power that citizen journalism is of significant benefit right now. If you turn back the clock in 2005, apply today's technology ecosystem to 2005 and say, okay Hurricane Wilma, do yourself some citizen journalism, who cares? It's not going to work. I don't have a thing to anything to charge my phone with. So I'm not going to be logging on to Twitter to check the headlines or anything or see if it's all word of mouth and that's what I experience is that our best, we weren't even getting regular newspaper deliveries. We got a newspaper once every three weeks because the newspaper wanted to save the gas that it had for important deliveries. So it went through once every three days, twice a week, maybe three times a week, we got a newspaper. So all our news was citizen journalism. It was me talking to my neighbors saying, hey, did you hear about that thing down the road? In a situation where mid and long-term survival is not a question, how can a tech startup come out ahead in the wake of a natural disaster? So personally, this was the biggest lesson of going through a situation like this, is that you have to think like a hustler and what was very well suited for startup communities. If you've got a situation like what New York City is in right now, providing valuable data to people in your community, whether that be people that are geographically situated very close to you or socially situated close to you in a startup community that could spread over an entire region, but you know people from all parts of the Metroplex or something like this. Being a valuable conduit for data or valuable conduit for services or help or assistance or any of these things will endear you and endear your organization to others. And you'll come out ahead as an organization or as an individual, as someone that not, I mean your true colors show through in a disaster situation, just as a general rule about humanity. And if you can position your organization culturally to be of value to those around you, people remember that and people will remember your organization and the people in your organization for the good that they do in a natural disaster. In a worst case scenario, like the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma, an entire region of the country can see their power down for the better part of a month. At what point do the stakeholders in the startups stop thinking about the company and start thinking about more pressing matters? So I was, I've reacted relatively quickly, personally. I was, you know, of course, one of the founders of mine of two companies at the time, actually. And so I had probably about 20, 30 employees to be concerned about, about, about 15 of which were actually within walking that lived within walking distance of where I lived. So I think whenever you hear the reports and that power or critical services for your region in New York City that would even extend to a mass transit are going to be down in excess of four to five days, that's when you need to start thinking about less about company needs and more about individual needs. Because four or five days is kind of the breaking point for society. You know, there's a saying in New York, we're only about three meals away from total anarchy in any society in any country. And that's true. If you don't know where your meal is next meal is coming from, you know, paying rent on the servers is not going to pee yet. It's not going to be a big concern, right? So my personal strategy was to look into ways that I could, you know, apply help my employees apply for government assistance, FEMA assistance, or what the name for was disaster unemployment relief, because I knew our operation being being in technology, both the operations being technology based operations, we're not going to function not going to be able to provide a paycheck if we couldn't have access to the internet as a company for more than five or six days. So I, you know, immediately snapped into action, pulling together what resources I could to help my employees apply for disaster relief, because, you know, when most employees, you know, can't go, most employees can't go a couple months without a paycheck, you know, and disaster or not, you know, the landlord still wants his rent money. So you got to take care, you got to take care of your employees, you got to take care of your people resources first. And I say the demarcation point is about four or five days to really, to really double down on those types of efforts. Well, Mark, thank you so much for sharing your personal experience with us today. Sure. And, you know, we send our thoughts and our prayers out to those on the East Coast who are continuing to live this crisis. Absolutely. And remember, you can follow the news of the day and get the latest breaking analysis here at Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV.