Catching up on the road trip also known as my life…

A couple days ago on Twitter I compared 2007’s road trip to my current road trip:

I’ve been a little dark lately on the Drive-By Consulting / Non-Consulting cross-country road trip, but rest assured I am still on the road, still meeting the entrepreneurs, investors, creatives and change agents of our new economy.

Between Mountain View, CA and San Francisco, CA over the past couple weeks, I’ve met, seen, talked to:

• Gautam Gandhi, who gave me a great tour of the Google offices, a chance to sample the fabled Google cafeterias and introduced me to fellower Googler Preeti Uberoy. Great times as always.
• Very briefly, Megan Smith, Bill Maris and Mickey Kim of Google.
• Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures (thanks to Gautam for the introduction).
• Co-Founders Christopher Golda and Mike Montano of Backtype, who have created a great site for making sense of the disaggregated conversations and connections in the comments throughout the web.
• David Cohen of TechStars, prompting this post “Don’t prop them up”.
• Sean Tario (@eurotario), an “Evangelist of Transformative Technologies, All Things Entrepreneurial, and Building Authentic Communities” based out of Santa Cruz, CA. Sean’s passion, energy and authenticity made going to this SXSW party in San Francisco one of the best choices I’ve made on this trip.
• John Griffin, CEO of Cutcaster, an innovative photography and vector stock image agency that has created a bidding mechanism to create a more flexible market between buyers and sellers (thanks to Lee Torrens for originally pointing Cutcaster out to me via Twitter).
• Yossi Goldlust, a seriously talented and knowledgeable entrepreneur in online advertising.
• Entrepreneur Brad Wiemerslage of Stormpulse, a fantastic site for tracking hurricanes and extreme weather events.

What’s Next?
Good question. Besides a return trip to Los Angeles, and a trip to Austin to “speak” at SXSW on March 15th, I’m not entirely sure of my plans.

Right now I’m trying to figure how to cash in social capital for couches and lives to crash. *

If you have ideas on places to go or people to meet between San Francisco, Vancouver and Austin, drop me a line in the comments below, by email or Twitter.

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* Seriously.