There is a lot of excitement about what’s going on in NYC these days.
Many of us working and investing in the city discovered this for some time now so I’m happy to see NYC getting the attention it rightfully deserves.
NYC is an amazing place for startups and entrepreneurs. I’m delighted that we are investors in 11 startups in NYC and we are working on a bunch of new ones that I can’t wait to talk about(!).
It’s also a great place to work with smart co-investors. We are proud to have coinvested with NYC firms like USV & Bessemer as well as angels like Betaworks, Roger Ehrenberg (congrats on the new fund), Ron Conway and Chris Dixon.
Plus, NY is home to the world champion New York Yankees (my favorite team on the planet) so that’s another plus :) (i’m going to get a lot of smack for this comment I know).
Clearly with all of this positive energy, innovation and progress, we are still in the early days and NYC needs some huge breakout companies. But I’m confident that will change.
I’ll end this post with Fred take on this topic yesterday in Chris’ blog post:
i have thought a lot about this question. i think it mostly has to do with role models (or the lack of them) and somewhat to do with the wall street trader mentality that pervades NYC. to build a truly huge company, it often takes a decade or more. and along the way you get a number of bids for the company. here in NYC, we’ve been way to willing to hit those bids. there haven’t been many role models (other than our mayor mike bloomberg) who have built large billion dollar tech companies here. contrast that with silicon valley that is full of those kinds of role models. doubleclick is the closest thing we’ve had in the past decade and look at what Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman are up to with Gilt Group and a number of other startups. they can be the kind of role models we need. i feel a change underfoot, maybe not yet an explosion, but i am pretty optimistic that half way through our second decade we are going to get some big companies soon
Couldn’t agree more.
(n.b. the title of my post comes from “Empire State of Mind” but you knew that already)