New York Startup Movement | Hacker News Reader

New York Startup Movement

mikekarnj.com

34 pointsspencerfry22 comments

Just to clarify, I did NOT write this post as a "East Coast versus West Coast" thought-piece. I wanted to give a 50,000 feet view from what is happening in New York City to document the momentum of the ecosystem that's being created as we speak. I'm a huge supporter of entrepreneurship in every city, and this is a model that should be shared and replicated in every community. If we take what works in NYC, Boston, SF, Seattle, New Orleans, etc -- we just might be able to get somewhere.

I wonder how much of this has to do with the financial collapse. There is no denying that the financial firms sucked up a ton of great talent during their boom years. Are those people (and the potentials) now turning to startups now that the finance firms are taking a breather with their high-salary and mind-numbing jobs?

I think the financial collapse has a role in what's happening in New York City. You're seeing a huge shift from people "thinking" about starting something to "doing" it. When you see most of your friends getting laid off from jobs, you realize nothing is guaranteed, so you might as well swing for the fences. This has a ripple effect through the community.

Yeah, thats what I'm thinking too. I think its so great, society as a whole will fare better with these people swinging for the fences, instead of being in a soulless job.

I agree. The financial collapse was the worst and best thing that could ever happen.

NYC is the most innovative place on the planet right now if you measure by new value being created from scratch.

What are you basing this on?

On how well the new hedge funds are doing, of course: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126135805328299533.html?mod=...

IMHO Finance is far from dead in NYC and the recent startup activity is mostly smoke from a small fire.

“Greenwich Village 60s … Venice Beach 70s … London 80s … Silicon Valley 90s … Blogosphere 00s … NYC now…”

“Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections." - Mark Zuckerberg, 6/07

These guys need to tone down the mellowdrama. I'm sure their 10th grade English teachers loved the parallel structure. But now that they are grown up, they ought to add sound reasoning as well.

But does NYC have the startup culture like the valley? Isn't more startup-like tech in Boston than NYC?

What is startup culture? Free sodas? Working 90-hour weeks and thinking you're awesome? I guess I never really understood what people refer to as startup culture and more importantly how it relates to geography, and I really want to know.

1. # of startups 2. # of startup conferences 3. # of VCs

I think Silicon Valley leads in all 3 of those categories?

What about quality over quantity?

How do you measure that?

profit.

(Obviously that's rather hard to measure as an outsider of privately held companies, but profit is surely the yardstick)

#3 seems to assume that the end-goal of every startup is to get funded by a VC, and that just doesn't jive with me.

#2 I'm not sure if San Fran even hosts that many startup conferences. More importantly, the whole model for conferences is broken. Which sane startup can consciously blow $1000+/person on a conference? I think over time, with the advent of conferences publishing the keynotes online anyway, and with more and more meetup groups, conferences will be a non-factor.

#1 - I think its cool to be in a place where there are a lot of startups -- but if you really step back and take a look, I wonder how much collaboration (in real life) is actually happening even in NorCal. This is something we need to improve, and is certainly not something that is jiving even in Silicon Valley. I'd dare say that HN is having more real collaboration than San Fran iteself.

Have you read "Why to Move to a Startup Hub"?

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

A few months back I went to a VC meet up where one guy said the biggest distinction between NY startups and Valley startups, is that the latter talk more openly about their ideas.

Us NY startups, he said, play our cards more guardedly. Not sure if he wasn't just fishing for ideas :-)

Thats probably because there are so many NY startups working on a Twitter or Facebook extension instead of a real core idea that can stand on its own.

it's not like there is a drought of shysters and wankers in California though.

Well it's a different startup culture here in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

We have the benefit of being a global hub for culture, with all the diversity that comes along with that. We also have lots of very different types of industries here, so when all these people come together from different backgrounds and industries to combine ideas, our startups end up looking very different than in the valley.

Take that and combine it with less VC firms that are willing to just throw money at any random idea, and it forces us as entrepreneurs to really think about what can be a profitable business.

So we end up with startups in fashion, music, finance, Internet, tech, etc, and not just 100 companies trying to build the next great twitter app (oversimplification, obviously).

It's just a totally different thing here, and a really exciting time to be in this amazing city.

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