Leland Cheung

Leland Cheung on the Cover of the Boston Business Journal(0)

I’m excited to have made the cover of the Boston Business Journal to talk about supporting entrepreneurial communities – like that prevalent at MIT Sloan – to keep the jobs they create here in Cambridge.  Check it out at:

http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2009/11/23/story1.html

Via Boston Business Journal:

Leland Cheung has been an entrepreneur, venture capitalist and a D.C. technocrat, striving to grow the tech community from the inside.

Now, at age 31, he’s taking those efforts to City Hall.

After spending the summer sifting through young cleantech ventures applying for U.S. Department of Energy grants, Cheung was elected to Cambridge City Council this month on a platform to keep young startups from leaving the city for the suburbs or the West Coast. His planned method of constituent service: hanging out at the techie hangouts, including “squatting” at Betahouse — a co-working space for tech entrepreneurs in Central Square — until his inauguration.

“Community does matter to a lot of people when they’re making their decision about where to grow their companies,” he said. “I think I’m the only person on the council that knows about a lot of these events.”

Cheung is one of a growing number of young entrepreneurs taking on the mission of growing the next crop of tech ventures in Massachusetts by advocating for and to their own generation. Part of a hyper-connected and collaborative generation, they are passionate about building up their own personal networks but also helping out their friends’ ventures in a no-pressure, “chill” environment. Members of the old-line tech community are seeing the value of these 20- and 30-something rainmakers as seeds for industry-wide and public initiatives, even looking at how they can leverage their youth internally.

(more…)

At the MassDotDev Conference(0)

Just heard a fascinating presentation by Robin Chase (founder of ZipCar) after getting to meet her at the Mass DOT Developers Conference.  The crux of her presentation: If ZipCar was to traditional car ownership what hotels are to the guest rooms in our homes; what is to ZipCar what couchsurfing.com is to hotels?

Programmers like OpenMBTA are providing free apps (instead of charging) because the incremental improvement made possible by the applications has a direct impact on the environment.

Exciting announcment by Chris Dempsey – trial of real time bus information just became available to developers on select routes.

What Next?(0)

I want to express a heartfelt thanks again to all my supporters.  I couldn’t have done it without you and I look forward to advocating on your behalf when I officially join Cambridge City Council in January.
In the meantime I wanted to let you know that I’m putting together a new webpage to replace this [...]

We made history!(0)

Dear Friends,
I’m excited to share with you that I’ve been elected to the Cambridge City Council! (Read more here: http://bit.ly/3ROylq)
Thank you for your support, encouragement, and generous contributions.  I look forward to working with the other City Councilors and serving the residents of Cambridge.
Thank you so much,
Leland

What Leland Cheung will bring to Cambridge City Council(0)

Overall, Cambridge is a fantastic place to live.  While other cities are cutting back services, Cambridge is building a new library and high school for its residents.  But even though Cambridge as a whole has it good, there are a lot of people in our city who are struggling to make ends meet.  We’ve seen [...]