Ex-Harvard President Meets a Former Student, and Intellectual Sparks Fly. Big Think - “a YouTube for ideas”
January 7, 2008
In June 2006, Peter Hopkins, a civic-minded and idealistic 2004 Harvard graduate, trekked up to his alma mater from New York for a meeting with Lawrence H. Summers, the economist and former Treasury secretary. Mr. Hopkins, who finagled the appointment through his friendship with Mr. Summers’s assistant, had a business idea: a Web site that could do for intellectuals what YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, did for bulldogs on skateboards.
The pitch — “a YouTube for ideas” Big Think http://www.bigthink.com — appealed to Mr. Summers. “Larry, to his credit, is open to new ideas,” Mr. Hopkins recalled recently. “He grilled me for two hours.” In the age of user-generated content, Mr. Summers did have one worry: “Let’s say someone puts up a porn video next to my macroeconomic speech?”
By TIM ARANGO
Full Story: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/07/technology/07summers.html?_r=1&ex=1357448400&en=d509ade7fcc90cac&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin