Posts from New York City

Let's say you are my age, about to turn 50, and you want to make a career change. You want to get into the Internet business. But you don't know anything about programming, user experince, ad sales, community management, legal issues. What do you do?

For too long there haven't been good answers for people looking to learn this new industry. But that is changing. One of the more ambitious projects is General Assembly, at Broadway and 20th St, in NYC. While most people that know of General Assembly think of it as a coworking space, the founders think of it as a campus environment for all things Internet. I was over there yesterday and got a sampling of some of the courses you can take there. There are courses on HTML & CSS, Android Development, Internet Ad Sales, User Driven Design, The Digital Learning Market, Startup Law, and more. The current class list is here. Class prices differ but for $100 you can generally take one of these classes.

I love this idea. I have friends who find themselves at this place in their career, who are starting Internet based businesses but they don't have the background and experience to make the right choices. Classes like this can help and they don't cost that much.

I've blogged before on the value of coworking spaces. I'm a big fan. Many of them offer classes and meetups and talks from industry leaders in addition to the ability to rent a desk for the day, week, or month. I know that New Work City, the grandaddy of NYC coworking spaces also has classes, including the awesome Girl Develop It program which sometimes takes place there. I believe that the Hive at 55 also hosts classes.

I'm wondering if anyone in the NYC tech community has aggregated all of these classes into a single searchable database. If so, leave a comment and I'll update this post with a link to it. If not, someone really should do that. There's a lot of great learning opportunities out there.

I said earlier this week that in addition to spring fever in NYC, we have startup fever. There is so much good stuff happening in NYC right now.

I'm not talking about fundings and such. The financial markets come and go. Boom today bust tomorrow.

I'm talking about building a foundation that will allow the tech sector in NYC to survive these booms and busts and thrive for the long term. The foundation comes from great programs like Techstars, InSITE, HackNY, PairUp, Founder Labs, etc, etc.

Today I'd like to talk about a couple more great programs happening in NYC this spring and summer.

Last summer, SeedStart ran an accelerator program in NYC that produced a number of interesting startups. This summer, they are doing another program but it will be focused on emerging media companies. The program is called SeedStart Media and has big media companies like AOL, Hearst, News Corp, MTV, NY Times, Time Warner, and a bunch more involved as corporate partners. Here are some details from their website:

We are inviting technology companies willing to spend the summer in New York City that are concentrating on [the media industry] to apply to SeedStart. The program will give up to 10 companies $20,000, office space, and time in exchange for a small piece of equity (5%). At the end of the 12 weeks, SeedStart features an investor day where companies will have the opportunity to present to seed and early stage investors as well as potential partners and customers.

 

Info session: March 29th at 7pm, 160 Varick St. 12th floor, New York, NY.

All mentors, participating corporations, & SeedStart Media applicants are invited to attend.

Please RSVP at [email protected]

Another big problem we have in NYC tech is funneling top college graduates into the startup sector. Very few tech companies have the size and scale to run proper college recruiting programs. So the sector needs to cooperate and form recruiting efforts together. One such event is happening soon.

The second annual NYC Startup Job Fair is happening at AOL's headquarters on Friday April 8th. It will be engineers only from 1pm to 2:30pm and then everyone from 2:30pm to 5pm. We have encouraged our portfolio companies to attend and I am certain that some of them will. The list of participating companies (as of now) is here. If you are graduating from college or grad school this spring and want to join a startup, you should seriously consider showing up at AOL on Friday April 8th.

These are just two of the many great programs going on in NYC right now. We are building a fantastic ecosystem and I am so excited to see this happening.

Steve Blank says in his New Rules For The New Internet Bubble:

hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble

I'm hearing this from everyone I know in Silicon Valley. And you can see the evidence on the web.

Joshua Schachter posted this on his twitter feed yesterday. This is what a new developer gets when they show up at work at Tasty Labs.

Quora posted this on their website yesterday.

I guess the developer setup is a key part of the recruiting war in Silicon Valley. Tasty Labs earns their name with the inclusion of Dr Pepper in the standard dev setup.

But seriously, there is a war for talent, particularly developer talent, going on. Not just in Silicon Valley but also in NYC and many other places around the country.

Companies, small and large, are resorting to all sorts of creative ideas to recruit. Free lunches, free yoga, pushing code day one, cool schwag, options, RSUs, pretty much whatever it takes.

We are watching this anxiously. It is likely to get worse before it gets better. But we are not just sitting around biting our nails. We are working with our portfolio companies to help in lots of ways. And I think it is making a difference. If you want to work in the USV portfolio, here is the USV portfolio jobs page. And if you want to drink Dr Pepper and write code with Joshua Schachter, here is how to do that.

Last night I attended a meeting/dinner of many leaders in the NYC tech sector with the folks in city hall who work on economic development. We listened to a bunch of reports. One of the most telling was from Larry Lenihan of Firstmark who is managing an early stage venture fund focused on NYC tech companies. Larry explained that many of the best opportunities that come to them don't get funding because of the lack of a technical co-founder.

NYC has a wealth of business people with domain experience in many important sectors. But they seem to be having a hard time of pairing up with technical talent to form great startup teams.

Enter Pair Up. Pair Up NYC is an effort from InSITE, a group of grad students at NYU and Columbia who help startups. They've noticed the same issue and are doing something about it. Pair Up is a matching program between people who want to do startups.

I've tweeted out the link to Pair Up a few times, but I am writing this post to let everyone know that the deadline to apply for the first Pair Up program is tomorrow, March 18th. If you are looking for a cofounder and want some help, here's where you can apply.

When people ask me what the city and state government can do to help the technology driven startup community in NYC, I tell them two things.

First, there is not one tech ecosystem. There is the software, internet, digital media sector which is thriving and on a tremendous growth spurt. And then there are the biotech, bioengineering, materials science, and energy sectors. These sectors are languishing in NYC with very little commercial activity given how much research and science goes on in the city.

I don't work every day in the latter category and I don't have much advice for how to stimulate these sectors commercially, but I do know that much must be done.

I do work every day in the former category and I have some advice for how to continue to stimulate the sectors that are working. I would focus on two areas; talent and bandwidth.

NYC has a tremendous workforce advantage over most any other city in the world. With one exception. There is a dearth of well educated engineers coming into the workforce every year in NYC. We have a large exisiting workforce of engineers, but they are in high demand and there are scarcities in NYC like those that exist in the bay area. Talented engineers are expensive and are always being recruited away from companies.

So the obvious answer is to develop ways to bring engineers right out of school into the local workforce. One way to do that is to develop strong engineering programs here in the city. The Bloomberg administration has announced an initiative to do that. I am very supportive of that effort. But that will not be enough. We also need to support our existing educational institutions, like NYU, Columbia, Fordham, CUNY, etc, etc.

And we need to start recruiting newly minted engineering grads to come to NYC to start their career. If you are a 22 year old man or woman just starting out in life, would you rather live in suburbia and work on a campus or would you rather live in Williamsburg and work in Flatiron? I think the answer to that is obvious. We just aren't making that case to the best and brightest engineering grads. There are emerging programs, like HackNY, that need our support, both financial and emotional, to do this work. It is critical. Charlie O'Donnell has put forth a challenge to bring 250 new software developers this year to NYC. I think that's a good start but I'd like to see a bolder number, like 1000 a year, or even more.

The other area is bandwidth. I mean data bandwidth. I mean fiber to every school, institution, business and home in the five boroughs. Other localities have built community owned fiber networks. A good example is Lafayette Louisiana. NYC needs to do this and it needs to do this now. The fiber plant should be owned by us, the citizens of NYC, not some company that will charge us a fortune for using the network and potentially restrict what we can do on the network.

There is a company I know of that is one of the most exciting new startups in NYC. They are locating their new office in the emerging area in Brooklyn between DUMBO, Fort Greene, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This is a cool new neighborhood that could be home to a lot of startups looking for great workspaces at low rents. But there is no commercial grade Internet service in this neighborhood. TIme Warner Cable wants this young startup to guarantee them $80,000 in revenues so they can afford to dig up the street and lay the cables.

That is nuts. We need to wire up this city from Staten Island to the Bronx, from Harlem to Rockaway Beach. And we need to own this fiber plant and we need it to be the best in the world.

These two moves will do it. We have everything else we need. We have the capital to fund startups. We have the real estate to house them. We have the legal, accounting, marketing, and other service providers. We've got it all. We just need talent and bandwidth to keep it going. Bring it on.

It's Christmas Eve, Friday Prayers, and Shabbat all on a single day today in Jerusalem. And I'm here with our family to soak it all in. We spent the day in and around the Old City and it was a special experience.

I'm not much for organized religion. I was raised a Catholic and we have raised our family Jewish. I'm not a believer but I do have an appreciation for the practice of religion. I've witnessed the joy and solace that my mom's faith gives her every day. And I've experienced the pride of watching my three children reading from the torah on their bar and bat mitzvahs. And I've seen the comfort that rabbis and priests have given to greiving families in their moments of pain and suffering. I understand and appreciate the role of religion in the world and am thankful for all the good it does for so many. I also abhor all the bad it does in so many places.

We got a tour of the Old City last night from a wonderful guide who was deeply spritual and he said this about religion, "it is the practice that counts, not how they practice." I buy into that line of thinking and am still trying to figure out how I practice. Writing every day is certainly part of my practice. But not all of it.

Although Jerusalem is certainly the place that comes to mind when one thinks of a religious melting pot, living in New York City has done a lot to introduce me to many forms of religion. The Muslims we met in Egypt and Jordan and their culture and dress and food are familiar to me because of their brethren in NYC. The orthodox Jews that are all over Jerusalem and their culture and dress and food are familiar to me because of their brethren in NYC. And we also get to experience all that Hinduism offers to the world in NYC.

I enjoy swimming in the cross currents of religion. I don't buy into any one orthodoxy. In fact I think ortohodoxy is dangerous. But I have taken particular note of certain aspects of each of the religions I have come into contact with and appreciate them and maybe even practice them from time to time.

So I found today in Jerusalem very moving and enjoyed it very much.

Merry Christmas to everyone who will be celebrating Christmas tonight and tomorrow, including my mom, dad, and brothers and their family.

Last year NYC ran a mobile and web app developer contest called NYC Big Apps. I posted about it and was one of a number of judges. The city and the participating developers thought it was a successful effort and so NYC Big Apps is back for a second time.

Software developers will compete for $20,000 in cash prizes. The details are here. The application deadline is a month away on January 26th.

I'm hoping to see more mobile apps and especially more android apps. I'd also love to see mobile developers build apps that combine public data from the NYC.gov datamine and commercial APIs like those from our portfolio companies Foursquare, Outside.in, and Twilio (and many others in and out of our portfolio like this one from Hunch).

In the past year, we've seen a lot happen in mobile apps and the open government movement. It will be interesting to see how all of these developments impact the apps that are submitted for judging next month. I'll post about this again once I see all the apps.

I met Scott Kurnit in the mid 90s when I had just started Flatiron Partners with Jerry. He pitched me on the Mining Company. I passed on it. We stayed friends and have both regretted that decision for the past fifteen years. Mining Company went on to become About.com which went public, was sold not once but twice, and has produced many amazing entrepreneurs and manager alums in the NYC tech scene.

It’s fun to think back to those days in 1995 and 1996 when there were so few people working in NYC tech and we had an inkling of what was going to happen. It did happen and NYC is a different place as a result.

This morning at 8:20am eastern I am going to talk to Scott for about 40 minutes at the Paley Center and it will be broadcast live on this URL.

Just think about that last bit “broadcasting live from the Paley Center on this URL.” That says it all. I hope you can log on and join us. It should be fun.

UPDATE:

It was fun. Here’s the video. Also, William provided some cliff notes in the comments.

Imagine if there was a blog that wrote about one person who works in NY Tech every day and over time built the seminal database (like Crunchbase) of everyone working in NY tech. How cool would that be?

Don't imagine it. Just head on over to We Are NY Tech and witness it in action. You can also follow We Are NY Tech on Twitter.

Unlike silly lists like the Business Insider "Coolest 100 People" which is bullshit and I hate it and wish they would stop putting out nonsense like that, We Are NY Tech is democratic, wonderful to look at and read, and is exactly the kind of service we need in NYC to identify who is who and who is doing what and why.

We Are NY Tech was build by the team at Simande, a creative shop that builds great websites. If We Are NY Tech is a anything, its a great example of their work. I suspect this is a labor of love by the Simande team, but if I were Silicon Valley Bank, Gunderson, Cooley, Ambrose, and a host of other service providers to NYC's startup community, I'd be trying to buy sponsorships of We Are NY Tech. No better way to show the support of the community than to support a living breathing database of the community.

Well done We Are NY Tech. I'm following you and I hope the rest of the NY Tech Community is too.