Interview With GoLark CEO Harlan Stern

NY-based GoLark launched their events listing service last December. Most have called it a "Digg for events" based on the voting system that GoLark utilizes. The site utilizes an IP lookup and offers you location based events on the initial load. You can select any location you are interested in as well. Currently NYC has the largest number of listed events in the GoLark system.

To learn more about GoLark, I spoke with CEO Harlan Stern (no relation). Harlan describes GoLark as, "a really simple events sharing service." Harlan is most excited about their natural language processor for entering events into the system. This means when you enter an event you can type something like, "tuesday at 8pm" or "every monday at 2am". This can help when attemping to create complex events.

There are tons of events sites online and GoLark has no easy task. They will fight with some of the largest players in the game when it comes to event planning. GoLark seems to focus on fun and entertainment, for example they have the free coffee events listed at Dunkin Donuts and a good number of concerts as well.

The GoLark team is currently made up of three close friends. They have taken bootstrapping to a whole new level. They have rented a house on the beach in New Jersey during the winter to keep costs as low as possible.

Harlan tells me that they most likely won’t add an events crawler to index other event planning services including Upcoming and Meetup. My concern with not crawling the other services is that it will be hard to ever convince site visitors that GoLark will have all of the events in their area.

We spoke briefly about their business model and Harlan noted that it will be a combination of ads and a variety of data aggregation offerings.