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Our friend Amit Gupta, founder of Photojojo, has been diagnosed with leukemia and needs to find a bone marrow donor ASAP. He’s of South Asian descent, so finding marrow is particularly difficult (1 in 20,000 people are a match). We’ll be matching Seth Godin’s offer to donate $10,000 to charity on behalf of the successful donor, alongside Jake Lodwick and others. Let’s get swabbing, people!
Two weeks ago I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why.
He was brief: “Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia. You need to enter treatment right away.”
I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that if it hadn’t been caught, I’d have died within weeks.
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I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. As Jay and Tony describe below, minorities are severely underrepresented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.
A few ways to help:
- If you’re South Asian, get a free test by mail. You rub your cheeks with a cotton swab and mail it back. It’s easy.
- If you’re in NYC, you can go to this event my friends are putting on.
- If you know any South Asians (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, or Sri Lanka), please point ‘em to the links above.
*UPDATE 1* Organize a donor drive near you (the most helpful thing you could possibly do!) email 100kcheeks@gmail.com. They’ll send you kits, flyers, tell you what to say, and make the whole process easy cheesy.
*UPDATE 2* Want to get a free test, but not in the US. Here’s a list of international donor registries that are globally searchable.
My friend Amit Gupta founded my favorite photography site Photojojo. A few weeks ago, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Amit is one of the nicest, most genuine, most creative people you could ever meet. Prior to founding the awesome Photojojo, he also co-founded Jelly in 2006 in NYC, a coworking community, that’s now spread to 60 cities across the world and helped spark the coworking revolution. It looks like Amit will need a bone marrow transplant quite soon. We can help him with that.
Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.
This is where we come in. We’re going to destroy those odds.
How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.
Tests are easy– a simple swab of the cheek. If you’re a match, the donation involves an outpatient procedure. It’s not fun, but it’s not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.
We are encouraging anyone of South Asian descent to take a test to see if you’re a match.
You can get a free test by mail, or, if you’re in New York, you can join us Friday, October 14th for a special party to rally support.
We’ll have test kits on hand at the party, as well as music, booze, and maybe even a photo booth. It will, for the first time, combine a House 2.0-style party with a New Work City-style party, and if you’ve ever been to either, you know they are always something special.
Please spread the word and please do everything you can to help Amit beat leukemia. He’s a superstar.
Much thanks to Tony and pals for organizing this event, and EVERYONE who’s been tweeting and reblogging.
Please help get the word out any way you can. My life quite literally depends on it.
We’ve just released a whole series of new features for our task management app, Flow. Until today, drag and drop features within the app were quite limited— among other things, you couldn’t mass delegate, or mass re-assign deadlines. Not only can you now do both, but just about everything within the app is draggable. We’ve also allowed you to share list orders with your collaborators so that everyone on your team is clear about what the top priorities are. For a full write-up on what’s new over at Flow, check out the Flow blog.
We’re tremendously proud to release two new premium Tumblr themes, Leica and Stockholm. With these two new additions to our line-up, we’ve tried to stress the beauty of simple typography, using subtle patterns to set off a washed out colour palette. Sister themes, both Leica and Stockholm share a similar style but differ drastically in functionality: Leica is designed as a photographer’s portfolio and Stockholm is meant as a personal theme. Photographer’s will be delighted by Leica’s lightboxing and high-resolution images while more eclectic bloggers will find Stockholm’s versatility a refreshing alternative to its somewhat simplified counterpart.
We’re tremendously happy with these two, so head on over to Pixel Union to pick up one of our tumblr themes.
Introducing Pixel Union 2.0
About a year ago, we teamed up with 45royale to create Pixel Union, a premium Tumblr theme marketplace showcasing designs by some of the world’s best designers. It’s been immensely successful. What began as four themes dedicated to better showcasing photographs and videos has rapidly turned into a library of nearly twenty, multipurpose themes.
It’s with a whole lot of pride that we announce today the launch of Pixel Union 2.0. We’ve redesigned the site, we’ve packed it full of new themes and, over the next two months, we’re going to be releasing one new theme each week. Check out the new site and stay tuned by following Pixel Union on Twitter.
