Is this you, Ted?

View from the Office. I met up with Mercan Topkara, CEO and founder of the startup Hashtag In Real Life, at the Clock Coffee Shop. She had a jasmine pearls tea. Since I arrived over-caffeinated, I abstained. Clock Coffee Shop is a sprawling, multi-level place in the second floor lobby of 22 Vanderbilt. It’s my go to for midtown meetings near Grand Central. There’s great wifi, coffee, drinks and couches. Mercan got her PhD in computer science before joining IBM as a research scientist. She left to build machine learning products for JW Player’s video creator network, then joined Teachers Pay Teachers to build and lead recommendations and personalized search for an edtech marketplace. Her next step was to move to lead machine learning at the podcasting company Luminary before co-founding Podnods. Sounder acquired the company and brought her on as Chief AI Officer. Her years of working on podcasts have left her with some strong views, including: –Podcasts are hard to monetize, but a great source of leads –People prefer ads to paying memberships –Quality production & content pays off Now, she’s launched her own startup called Hashtag In Real Life. The mission is to address the modern scourge of isolation, especially for teenagers and older adults. Mercan grew up near the beach in Turkey and remembers spending most of the time outside surrounded by people with a lot of unstructured time. Modern life is more efficient but we’ve lost spontaneity and it is unhealthy being glued to our screens. Her company uses AI to generate personalized activity recommendations. They also connect users with local experts who create curated guides. The aim is to make it easier for people to find fun things to do offline. She’s bootstrapping it while she works out product market fit. You can connect with Mercan on Linkedin or DM me for a warm intro. @mercantopkara