How Hurricane Sandy Reminded Me Why I Love the Tech Industry

First off, great post. Although it is pretty awesome to see how the community comes together when people are in need, during the storm and aftermath I couldn't help but think about our industry vs others in rebounding efforts. While most startup founders / employees I know were eager, almost rabid to get back to work, a lot of my friends in other industries were very happy to have the few days off, no questions asked.<p>So my question (which I've been asking myself), do you think that it's an attitude thing? A certain NEED to get back to the grind that our industry has that others don't? Or do you think we are operationally that much better at coming together?

There's also the great story about Squarespace, FogCreek and Peer1 employees doing a bucket brigade of fuel up to their generators to keep things up. That's awesome commitment to their customers and business.

Whenever I read about power outages in the states and the kind of mayhem they cause I think about how different the situation here is -- Lebanon that is.<p>We haven't had enough power to run the entire country ever since the end of the civil war in '90 so there's a rationing scheme whereby you get power during certain times of the day depending on where you live. People have just gotten used to having generators that kick in automatically about a minute after the power goes out and using UPSs to bridge the gap.<p>I just bought an apartment in a Beirut suburb and one of the main advantages the owner was touting was that the building has its own generator(so you don't have to deal with a distributor as those tend to have insane prices because they know that people need the electricity anyway).<p>Our startup just moved in to a proper office a couple of days ago. One of the problems we are now dealing with is that the A/C in that office is too power-hungry to run on a generator and we're having split units installed so we don't have to work in a sauna-like environment for the ~6hrs/day when there's no power.<p>I'm actually not complaining, you get used to this stuff and it's not that much of an inconvenience once you know how to deal with it. I know this was off topic, but this is what I'm reminded off every time a story like this comes up.

Great post, and couldn't agree more. I think Bloomberg and Rachel Sterne also deserve credit for their amazing rallying and general scrappiness, which enabled alot of these companies to step up with supportive offers (AirBNB &#38; Uber stand out).

An important factor may be that in other industries generally all companies provide competing services, but in the tech(startup) industry most companies don't compete, and even provide complementary goods/services.<p>If other local tech startups succeed, it generally helps your tech startup succeed; but if other local ad agencies or pizza shops succeed, then it hurts your ad agency/pizza shop.

So true! Lallouz's comment is also so point on. In most other industries people were acting like children on a snow day. Go Tech!

Crazy stuff. That was a good recap. The tech scene is awesome.