Musings of a VC in NYC

What's Wrong With Sensationalist Media

Check out this email I got from a major media company this past week:

I was just talking to my boss about New York's tech scene and the types of stories I should go after. He wants me to get a little personal like digging into how founders and investors are actually using all this money flowing into the city. But beyond the typical, there must be some stories that have gone unreported or overlooked. Like maybe there's a new Brookly luxury bulding where 10 startup founders all bought homes, or there's a restaurant that all the tech geeks in the city go to to close their deals. Or there is a tailor from France who makes all the suits for the city's tech entrepreneurs. I am not saying any of these are THE story, but it's just the type of story I would love to tell.

Not interested in The Academy For Software Engineering, HackNY, TechStars NYC, or Angel List, which is where the money seems to be flowing (ie back into the startup ecosystem) but instead interested in suits for tech entrepreneurs.

Ugghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

The Teen Art Gallery

This is the kind of thing that happens in the age of the Internet and Kickstarter. My daughter Emily told me one of her friends was involved in opening an art gallery and they are using Kickstarter to raise the funds to make it happen.

In their own words, the "Teen Art Gallery is an organization run for teens by teens that features young artists, ages 12-19, in New York City galleries."

If you go about 2mins into this video below, you will see that the teenagers have built an entire organization, filled with themselves, to run this business. Entrepreneurship in action!

They are raising $10,000 to fund two gallery shows this spring in NYC. They've raised almost $4000 so far and have 25 days left. So it's crunch time. The Gotham Gal and I have funded this project and I thought some of you out there might want to join us.

It's youth, art & entrepreneurship all wrapped up into one. And that's a good thing.

Developer Conferences in NYC

I love attending developer conferences. That's where I meet the most interesting entrepreneurs. I'd rather go to PyCon, RailsConf, or Node Summit than TED, Davos, or SXSW. In fact, I've never been to TED, Davos, or SXSW and don't have any plans to go to them. But developer conferences are a different story.

Just last week the Node Summit folks reached out to me on Twitter and I replied back.

@sechrest @NodeSummit someone should send me an email with the detials

— Fred Wilson (@fredwilson) January 5, 2012

 

Node Summit is next week in San Francisco and I've got board meetings both days in NYC so I can't attend. Bummer. I'm certain that there are a ton of amazing things going on in the Node.js world that I'd love to learn about.

Which leads me to the point of this post. Why aren't there any developer conferences in NYC? Why are they always in the Bay Area, Austin, New Orleans, Atlanta, Orlando, or some other location? NYC is an amazing place to visit. There are great nightlife opportunities for post conference networking and fun. There's a huge web/tech community here. And plenty of people who could help make up a great program for developers.

I know that City Hall has a program to put together hotel deals and venue deals to bring conferences to NYC. I'm going to work with a group of folks I know to help change this. If you think it's a good idea and can help, please contact me. I'm fed up with saying no to the conferences I do want to attend.

The Academy For Software Engineering

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.

JFK to SFO and back

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.

eBay Comes To NYC

A lot of the coverage of eBay's acquisition of Hunch has focused on the possibility of much better recommendations on eBay. And I'm sure we will see that. Think about login with Twitter and get personalized recommendations on eBay. Hunch's technology can do that kind of magic and a lot more.

But I'm most excited about eBay's decision to build an office in NYC. According to Mike Arrington,

That New York office will eventually grow to some 200 employees, I’m told, who’ll focus on recommendations. But the team will also analyze lots of Ebay data, and perhaps productize some of it or otherwise release it.

My parter Albert calls Google's fortress on 8th Avenue "the gift that Google gave New York." That's because Google has well over 1000 engineers here in NYC and continues to build that team. Those engineers are exactly the kind of talent that web startups need. Some of Google's talent bleeds out into the startup world. But also having that kind of ballast anchoring the engineering talent pool makes it such that young software engineers are more confident to come to NYC and build their careers here.

And now we will have eBay with a team of 200 engineers. And with Twitter's acquisition of Julpan a few months ago, we have Twitter building an engineering team in NYC. Surely Facebook will come to town and start building an engineering team here too.

In the short term, this may put a further squeeze on the super tight market for software engineers in NYC. But if we invest in efforts to bring more engineers to NYC, as we are actively doing, then we can build the market together. And having some awesome large engineering teams working for big tech companies is super healthy for the NYC market long term.

So I'm pumped about this news. And congratulations to Chris and the team at Hunch on a great exit.

NYU Poly Speech

A few weeks ago I hopped on the subway and headed out to downtown Brooklyn to NYU Poly, the engineering school that recently merged with NYU. I got there a bit early, went to Starbucks and wrote down some thoughts. Then I got up on stage at NYU Poly and explained why I had recently become a Trustee of both NYU and Poly. Here's what I had to say (15 mins):

Building The Best Java Team In NYC

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.

Raise Cache

On the evening of November 17th, the NY tech community is going to throw a party to raise $100k for HackNY. It is called Raise Cache and it should be a lot of fun.

At 8:30pm there is going to be a fashion show featuring members of the tech industry on the runway. I have a terrible feeling that I may be one of them. If so, I apologize in advance for embarassing myself, particularly to my wife and children.

At 9:30pm there is a party with open bar and a "in real life" turntable.fm DJ set. There has already been trash talking between the DJs who are listed here.

There is also a pre-show mixer if you can't wait to start partying.

All of this action goes down at the Armory on Lex and 25th in NYC. There are all sorts of ticket combinations and student discounts. You can see all of them here. The early bird sales close sometime on thursday so if you want to get a discount (other than student discount), get your tickets now.

HackNY is an amazing program and it deserves all of our support. This is a great way to show that support and also have some fun.

If you don't know what HackNY is, it's a summer program to bring top CS students from schools all around the country to NYC to work in our top tech startups. Here's a video that explains it well.

Remembering 9/11

Every year I write about 9/11 on the anniversary. It's my way of remembering that day.

I like what Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan University, has to say about the value of remembering:

But on this 10th anniversary of 9/11 let us also simply acknowledge the claim that our painful memories still have on us. Let us recognize with piety that we still carry the traces of those traumatic events with us, and that we acknowledge their importance to us without trying to use them.

I'm watching the television coverage of the 9/11 services at the World Trade Memorial as I write this. Seeing the young men and women talking about the parents they lost that day reminds me that a decade is a long time. Like them, our kids were children on 9/11 and they are young adults now. The Gotham Gal wrote this today:

Going on the subway the day after the towers came down because I thought it was important that we didn't let this event change the way we live in our city.  There were tons of cops down there.  Josh went up to one of them and asked if they caught the bad guys yet.  He answered, not yet son but we will, we will.

Josh was five then. He's fifteen now. And the policeman in the subway was right. We did "catch the bad guys." For me, that fact is a bit of necessary closure.

And the beautiful memorial at ground zero is also a bit of necessary closure. The hole in the ground lasted a decade. And now it is filled and will be a memorial forever more.

I'm feeling less pain and a more closure this day. Time heals all wounds it seems. But it should not fade the memories and remembering is one way to make sure it doesn't.