{Ed. Note -The Greenhorn Connect team is growing! We're pleased to announce that Pardees Safizadeh is our new Director of Social Media. She'll be helping us improve and grow our communication and outreach so we can more effectively interact with and help the Boston entrepreneur community. So please give a warm welcome to @Pardees.
We are always interested in how we can help young people get integrated in the community, so we asked Pardees to share her story of getting into the community, getting excited and finding Greenhorn Connect!}
Rewind life back two months—it’s June, and I have no interest in joining the start up community. To be fair, I had no idea a start up community existed in Boston. I had no idea there were so many start up companies in Boston, and frankly, I didn’t care. I was interning in Boston and enjoying my life like a normal person. I wasn’t a business major in college and I didn’t intend on starting anything now.
So right now you’re probably thinking why am I (the reader) reading this? Why do I (the reader) care about this random girl and her lack of involvement in the start up community? Why? Because I did get involved.
2010 was an amazing year for the Boston startup community. Many new initiatives took off, old ones got new life and the community as a whole grew much larger. Here at Greenhorn Connect, we've been lucky enough to be a part of this new wave of entrepreneurship around here and so we'd like to share some of the key trends we noticed over the past year. (Note: Next week, we'll be making predictions for the ecosystem in 2011). Read on...
For someone trying to achieve something big, there's a tricky balance to strike: time spent with one's community and time spent getting your hands dirty and doing the real, honest labor. 
Time flies and everything moves quickly. Those are the two biggest lessons I've learned in what has been an awesome first year of Greenhorn Connect's life. It was one year ago today, in the middle of Entrepreneurship week, that 
The Boston community has come a long way since last year, but there is still plenty of discussion about our problems and new challenges. This is most recently reflected by 
There's been ongoing discussion the past few weeks about what's working and what's not in our ecosystem as well as plenty of "Valley envy." But for all the fuss, I think we forget about how far we've come in the last year and more importantly, the people that are making many of the greatest things in our community possible through their efforts. Below, you'll find ten people/groups that you need to know because they're the people behind making things happen. {Please add anyone you think we missed in the comments.}
All too often I hear people mutter, “It’s just so tough to get funding here,” or “Our startup is doing well, but people just don’t ‘get it’ here,” or “We’re going to have to move to Silicon Valley if we want to ever make it.” Most of the time, they’re wrong. Here is my un-scholarly perspective from my experience after seeing over 400 new startup ventures launched in over 40 cities. 
