Tonight I will be on Brian Lehrer’s TV show, together with Chris Dixon and Henry Blodget, to talk about what’s in store for NYC tech startups over the next decade. At least that is the putative topic, although I would not be surprised if the conversation goes elsewhere. Here are some points I am planning to make:
It has never been easier to hire top tech talent for NYC startups. And that’s not just because folks no longer want to work (as much) in finance. It is because people want to live and work in NYC. Google has done a lot to promote this, which I have in the past called Google’s gift to NYC.
Seed and angel funding, which I believe are the critical missing link and have been in (relative) undersupply in NYC are looking up also. FRC now has a NYC office. Founder Collective announced its fund. Individual angels are also back following the rebound in the stock market.
All the top VC firms are now investing in NYC. Boston-based firms have been doing that for some time but have really stepped up the pace (for instance, Bijan from Spark Capital seems to be in NYC more than in Boston). It used to be that West Coast firms would not venture past Silicon Valley (they barely invested in San Francisco), but now they are here all the time. Just as three examples, Accel, Redpoint and Kleiner all have significant investments in NYC.
NYC now has all the key ingredients of a startup ecosystem, including (in addition to the above) service providers focused on startups (lawyers, recruiters, etc.) and a growing number of serial entrepreneurs.
As important as any of the above are the shifts that are taking place in where startup opportunities exist. Silicon Valley and Route 128 (anyone remember that?) completely dominated the infrastructure space. But a lot more opportunities these days exist at the application and content layers. Graphic and social design are becoming as (if not more) important than technical design. These are areas that NYC has traditionally excelled in.
Finally, a whole new generation of entrepreneurs are “net native,” meaning they have grown up with the Internet. They are not only too young to remember the dominance of Silicon Valley and Route 128 but more importantly they have internalized the Internet’s global reach and place less emphasis on geography for their startups.
All told, I believe this will be a terrific decade for tech startups in NYC. I look forward to tonight (7:30pm) and am eager to hear any other points folks think worth mentioning.
