Upcoming.org founder promises that he won’t sell out again

The Kickstarter campaign to fund the relaunch of Upcoming.org, the collaborative events calendar first started in 2003, has ended, raising more than three times its original goal. Andy Baio, the site’s founder, was hoping to attract $30,000 to fund the site’s relaunch; he met that goal in 90 minutes. When the campaign closed Friday, it had raised more than $100,000.  “I’m going into this with a more experimental mindset and I hope the backers are too,” Baio told Mashable. “I really want to bring them along every step of the way and they can help shape the direction everything goes, which is exactly the way I built Upcoming in the first place.” Baio launched the events site with two cofounders in 2003, at a time when Myspace was one month old and Friendster was the biggest social network around. “The problem Upcoming solved was that it was public and it was social and it didn’t make an attempt to be comprehensive so it ended up being really high quality, ” Baio said.