Posts from New York City

A number of years ago, I wrote a blog post talking about the need to teach middle school and high school students how to write software. In the comments (where the good stuff happens), a Google engineer told me to go down to Stuyvesant High School and meet a teacher named Mike Zamansky who had taught him to write code in high school. So I did that and thus begun my education into the world of computer science education in the NYC public high school system. What I learned was that other than Mike's program at Stuyvesant and a few other small programs, there wasn't much. So began my quest to see more computer science and software engineering in the NYC public school system. 

Yesterday I went up to the Morris High School in the Bronx to watch Mayor Bloomberg's State of The City Address. In a speech that was largely about the intertwined nature of education and the economy, he announced that the city is opening The Academy For Software Engineering this fall in the Union Square neighborhood of New York City. It was a proud moment for me and Mike Zamansky, who was seated next to me on the stage.

I want to personally thank the Mayor, his education team led by Dennis Walcott, and his economic development team led by Robert Steel for adopting an integrated set of technology, economic development, and education policies and then aggressively rolling them out city wide. The Academy For Software Engineering is just one part of a much bigger strategy of developing new industries and new jobs in New York City and making sure we have the education resources, both in K-12 and at the college/university level, to properly staff these new industries.

The Academy Of Software Engineering is not a "specialized school." It will be open to all students as part of the high school admissions process in NYC. The City's goal (and mine too) is to open up opportunities for many more students than the small number of specialized schools can deliver. Hopefully the curriculum that is developed and teachers that are trained at the Academy will get rolled out into high schools all over the city in the coming years.

The Gotham Gal and I have provided the initial financial support to hire a new schools team and recruit a top notch Principal. But we do not want to be front and center in this story. The team at the DOE and City Hall that has brought this school to life and the Advisory Board of educators and industry leaders (led by Evan Korth of NYU) should get way more credit for what has happened to date. And we will need more financial and industry support (as well as a fantastic Principal) to make this school a success. So if you would like to join us in this effort, please email me via the contact link at the bottom of this blog and let me know how you would like to help. This is an ambitious effort and we will need it.

I've been doing that route for 25 years. And never have I felt that these two cites/regions have been more connected at the hip than I do right now.

This past week brought the news that Facebook plans to open an engineering office in NYC. Serkan Piantino, the Facebook engineer who will lead the NYC team said:

This isn’t a satellite office. This is going to be a core part of our engineering stack.

This follows on the heels of eBay's Hunch acquisition and the news that eBay will build a team of 200 engineers in NYC. Twitter has a team of engineers in NYC now after the acquisition of Julpan this summer and Zynga has a game development team in NYC as a result of its acquisition of Area/Code almost a year ago.

For many years, Google was the sole big bay area company with a strong engineering presence in NYC. That's changing and changing quickly.

Sales offices are one thing. Tech companies have had strong sales offices in NYC forever. But adding product and engineering to the mix changes things in important ways. Most importantly for NYC, it brings talent flowing here that would not have otherwise come here. And it makes it easier for the talent to stay here through multiple job changes.

Kudos to our mayor and his team for recognizing that NYC has an important new industry developing and pouring fuel on the fire to get things going even stronger. The city's leadership is on its game right now and showing how to lead. It's great to see.

For the past two years, I have had the benefit of watching a team of serial founders build one of most exciting new companies in our portfolio. It is a company that not many people know about but they haven't been working in stealth mode. Just heads down mode.

This company is called Workmarket and they are building a marketplace for labor. They have been fully launched since the summer and they already have over 12,000 professionals working across a dozen industries in their marketplace. This kind of business scales and scales and scales. The amount of jobs, work, and payment that flows through this platform every month is already bigger than almost every one of our portfolio companies' payroll. And that is in just four or five months of being fully live.

But this post is really not about Workmarket, it is about the dev team they are building in NYC. They have a small but super strong engineering team. And they recently made a decision to "double down on java" and they are hell bent to build the best java team in NYC. If you like working in java and want to be part of such a team and build a platform that creates work and pay for people, then you should drop into their office smack in the middle of the Flatiron district and talk to them.

Best way to do that is drop me an email and I'll connect you with them.

Andy Weissman is a name that is surely familiar to many of you. He co-founded Betaworks, one of the crown jewels of the NYC startup scene. And his writing, his coaching, and his insights have been valuable to so many entrepreneurs in NYC and around the world.

Today Andy is announing his arrival at Union Square Ventures on the USV blog (where else?). Go give it a read and give Andy a big welcome in the comments.

Of all the many terrific programs in the NYC startup sector, the one that excites me the most is HackNY. Started by Evan Korth of NYU and Chris Wiggins of Columbia, HackNY brings the top students from the top CS programs around the country to NYC for the summer to work (and play) in the NYC startup community. You might say "yet another internship program" and you would be wrong about that. HackNY is an internship program, it is a series of hackathons, it is a marketing program for NYC's tech scene, and it is becoming a community of young talented software engineers who want to live and work in NYC.

HackNY has grown up fast. It started with a dozen interns a few summers ago and this summer 35 interns are completing the program and heading back to school. Next year will likely be bigger. Evan and Chris have full time jobs teaching at NYU and Columbia and they need some help. So they are hiring a GM.

This is one of those jobs, like running the NYC Tech Meetup, or running Techstars NYC, that can put someone on the map. It is a job, like the ones I mentioned, that is at the epicenter of everything that makes the NYC startup community work. This is not a job for someone looking to make a lot of money. This is a job for someone looking to make a lot of great things happen.

If that describes you, if you are comfortable with hackers and working with the professors and students of top CS schools, and most of all, if you are organized and a "can do" person, then you should apply for this job. You can do so here.

If there was ever any confusion about why I blog, maybe this story will be illuminating.

Six weeks ago, I wrote a blog post called Teaching. It was about a dream I had about teaching in front of a live classroom and it went on to talk about the value of in person teaching and learning.

Later that day an entrepreneur in NYC we know pretty well forwarded that post to my partner Albert with the news that he was about to sign a term sheet with another VC firm and that he was drawn to our firm's vision of teaching as outlined in the blog post.

That led to a frantic weekend of phone calls, a monday meeting, and a decision to invest alongside the other VC firm.

That entrepreneur is Michael Karnjanaprakorn, the company is Skillshare, the other VC firm is our good friends at Spark Capital, and today Skillshare is announcing that our two firms have teamed up to finance this vision:

transform every community into a campus, every address into a classroom, and every neighbor into a teacher and student

That's a compelling vision and Michael and his partner Malcolm have built an equally compelling product through which anyone with a class to teach can offer it to willing students. 

If you go back to my Teaching post, you'll recall that I ended it musing about where to take MBA Mondays next:

I've been thinking about the ideal model that combines all of the above. A freely available curriculum on the web that grows and evolves over time. A physical space where people can come and take classes that are recorded and broadcast live and also available for viewing after the fact. Some version of that seems ideal. Should it happen in connection with an existing education institution (an engineering school or a business school), or should it be its own educational institution? Not sure.

I've answered my own question. Sometime this fall, MBA Mondays classes will be offered via Skillshare. I will teach them in the USV event space on Monday evenings at 6pm. Classes will be one hour. They will be streamed live and recorded for posterity. The live stream and the video will be free. The classes will have an attendance fee which will be given to charity, most likely Donors Choose.

I'm still working out the schedule, how many classes a year, whether I go back and start teaching from the first post, or whether I teach the post of the day. I'm working out how to select the students for each class (first come, first serve?, something else?). I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and also on Skillshare. Here's my partner Albert's post on the USV blog about our investment in Skillshare.

A few weeks ago Jason Calacanis stopped by our new offices and recorded an episode of This Week In Startups. It was a fun chat, almost an hour long. My audio is not as good as the audio on Jason so it's a bit hard to hear me unless you want to hear Jason shouting.

If you want to fast forward through the sponsorship message, go to 6:30 and start there.

If you want to fast forward through parts of the discussion, here is the breakdown:

0:00-1:00 Welcome to TWiST from NYC in the Union Square Ventures' offices.
1:00-2:00 Thank you to iStockphoto for sponsoring the show.
2:00-6:30 Demonstration of how easy it is to purchase high-quality photos within iStockphoto.
6:30-8:00 Welcome to Fred Wilson, principal at Union Square Ventures.
8:00-8:30 Jason: The biggest mistake of my career was not listening to [Fred’s] wife when she advised me to go national with Silicon Alley Reporter.
8:30-9:30 How much of being a VC is being a therapist to the entrepreneurs?
9:30-10:30 You’ve worked with Mark Pincus, what was that like?
10:30-11:45 You invested in all four of Mark’s companies, yes?
11:45-14:00 When Mark came to you for the fourth time with Zynga, what did you say?
14:00-15:15 The same sort of situation happened with Twitter, didn’t it?
15:15-16:30 If a VC flies out to see you–the entrepreneur–you know there’s serious intent.
17:45-19:15 So speed is the big difference between web 1.0 and now?
19:15-20:15 Have you ever spoken for your companies too much on your blog?
20:15-20:45 Your blog has really made you into one of the most well-known east coast VCs around today.
20:45-22:30 How much of your success this time around has been because of the blog?
22:30-23:30 Did you enable too much transparency and lose some of your power?
23:30-24:30 If money’s not an issue, why go to a VC?
24:30-25:00 Are there funds that are now following Union Square Ventures?
25:00-26:00 Thank you to MailChimp for sponsoring the show.
26:00-29:30 Demonstration of how you can segment your lists to target your emails using MailChimp.
29:30-30:00 Fred explains why he would like to see entrepreneurs work backwards and think about who they would like to invest in them.
30:00-32:15 How do you reconcile this, the new golden era of Internet companies, with the scars you have from past fund failures?
32:15-33:00 When do founders start thinking, “I should start a new company?”
33:00-35:15 Let’s talk about entrepreneurs. What are you looking to see in the eyes of an entrepreneur?
35:15-37:00 So you’re looking for a persuasiveness that is so strong, people can’t help but follow that person?
37:00-38:15 Do you find that this new generation of founders has an entitlement issue, thinking that they’re owed success?
38:15-39:15 Does that make that person impossible to manage?
39:15-42:15 Are you on the secondary markets? What’s your take on that?
42:15-43:45 Fred: Are Mahalo shares being traded?
43:45-45:30 Are limited partners stoked about the secondary market?
45:30-46:15 Why does a venture firm put money into a single established company and not into several startups?
46:15-48:30 What does an opportunity fund mean?
48:30-49:00 Fred: In the private equity business, you buy one and you’re done. In the venture business, you make multiple investments and the risks are mitigated.
49:00-50:40 What’s your advice for a young entrepreneur who wants your money?
50:40-51:15 Fred, it’s been great to watch you rise over the years. Thank you so much.
51:15-51:45 Thank you again to our sponsors. We appreciate all of your support!

I was passing by Cooper Union the other day and was struck by the words on the front facade of its iconic building on Astor Place.

This phrase "to science and art" has been stuck in my mind since. I've been thinking about what happens at the intersection of science and art, how science impacts art, and how art impacts science, how New York City has been blessed to be at the intersection of science and art for at least two centuries, and how much of what is interesting to me in the technology revolution of the moment, the Internet, is at the intersection of science and art.

Peter Cooper, the founder of Cooper Union, was an inventor, industrialist, and NYC resident in the 19th century. He designed and built the first steam powered train in the US. He was the "Tim Berners-Lee" of the railroad technological revolution in the US. Cooper went on to become a very wealthy industrialist and businessman and was behind the company that laid the first cross atlantic telegraph cable. He was all about technology, science, innovation, and business. And yet, when he created and endowed a free institution of higher education, he understood that it had to be for both science and art.

Science and art are seen as two very distinct endeavors and I suppose they are. But I see science and art as the yin yang of creative culture and innovation. To quote from Wikipedia, science and art are seemingly contrary forces that are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and they give rise to each other in turn.

I was talking to a longtime reader of this blog, Chris Dorr, last night. Chris has been working in the film industry for a long time and blogs at the Tribeca Film Festival Blog. We were talking about changes in the film business and Chris blurted out that "filmakers and software developers need to start sleeping together and it is starting to happen." Filmmaking is art, particularly great filmmaking. But the art of filmmaking has always been based on a number of fundamental scientific inventions. And Chris' point is that the art of filmmaking will continue to be impacted by scientific inventions that are happening in real time.

And science is equally inspired by art. Just check out the music playing at the all nighter coding sessions that go on at New Work City or the number of listeners in the coding room on turntable.fm and you'll see that coding computers benefits from musical stimulation.

When I look at our portfolio, I see companies like Tumblr, Etsy, Canvas, Shapeways, SoundCloud, Boxee, Kickstarter, and GetGlue that exist somewhere in the overlap between technology and art. Most of these companies are based in NYC and the ones that aren't have a strong footing here.

I was at a meeting yesterday with an economic development group in NYC. We were talking about 3D Printing, an important new technology that was "science" a decade ago. The economic development types were explaining to me why 3D Printing technology is so important to NYC. They explained that our artist and design communities need 3D Printing technology because it allows these artists to turn their ideas into objects rapidly and at lower cost. It is a game changer for artists, designers, and architects. Our portfolio company Shapeways and other innovators like MakerBot are doing just that right here in NYC.

Peter Cooper understood the importance of science and art back in the mid 19th century when he created Cooper Union. He put the two words on the facade of his building. And they remain the twin towers of innovation in NYC and all over the world two centuries later.

College students from around the country have been hacking away for about 18 hours now. At noon today at NYU's Courant Institute, the results will be demo'd. I will be there to see all the cool projects that have come to life in 24 hours of hacking.

This is the hackNY Hackathon which happens once a semester in NYC. Leading NYC companies send developer evangelists to the hackathon to explain how their APIs work. Then after all the APIs are explained, the students get busy and start building cool stuff on top of the APIs.

Regular readers know that hackNY is one of my favorite talent development efforts in NYC. hackNY runs a summer jobs program for talented college CS students from around the country to live and work in NYC with one of the many great startups we have here.

hackNY's summer program is run like a top college, you apply to participate and the top students are accepted. Participating in the hackNY hackathon is a great way to improve your chances of being accepted to the summer program.

If you want to find out more about hackNY and how to get involved, you can go here. If you want to follow the hackathon on twitter go here. And if you want to see some great projects demo'd, you can join me at Courant at noon today.