I think we're about to see an explosion of content, and be empowered to affect that content on a week-to-week or day-to-day basis.

I think we're about to see an explosion of content, and be empowered to affect that content on a week-to-week or day-to-day basis.

I'd like to see another tech super hub form up, but even more than that, I'd love to see a distribution of startups globally. Businesses sprouting up that are geographically diverse and have a smallish/limited size (no massive thousand + employee campuses).

Big revenue generating businesses no longer need to have massive size. That's old GM thinking. The new economy will be driven by a massive increase in small and agile distributed businesses that work together in dynamic service creation pipelines.

APIs in software/web based tech companies are a perfect example of this new power in networking economy.

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Longtime SFer, new NYer.
On a cultural / environmental level I think one reason web 2.0 couldn't have happened in NY is the general mindset here that everything in life must be paid for and paid for dearly. I'm exaggerating a bit to make the point, of course, and also referring to early users much more than VCs or founders.

The energy around early use of flickr/upcoming etc included serving people ready and willing to share a lot and put a lot of themselves out there first as its own reward. That's not the traditional NY mindset. (eg. networking events here cost, most in the Bay Area don't)

But, I think you're analysis about what is setting up the environment here for a lot of start-up growth is on the money. My fave new start-up is based here; Kickstarter. But I also think that web 2.0 helped shift the culture enough that now some NY media people get that they'll have to “give stuff away” and focus on community elements that they wouldn't have understood as easily before.

There's amazing talent in NY, and fantastic commitment to execution. That's for certain. But the hardest human lesson the web pushes (I think) is the benefit of giving up total control and the benefit of allowing money and a business model to follow not lead. Those things are psychologically harder to grok if you're used to an environment rich in VIP room, “special treatment,” dress codes and private drives.

I'm not saying these are things serious entrepreneurs are drawn to in NY but it is the very real cultural environment they're working in.

Here are some more thoughts if you're interested.
http://www.kmf.net/blog/2009/09/geographic-shif…

When O Lord will Internet ventures mature to the point that players can participate from the locale of their choice – out in the sticks, Texas even – without wasting time and money commuting to or living in the expensive claustrophobia of a New York or San Francisco?

Just saying…

When O Lord will Internet venutures mature to the point where I can stay where I like – out in the sticks, Texas, even – and still participate, instead of being stuck in the expensive claustrophobia of New York or San Francisco.

Some huge things NYC's tech community has quietly pushed forward as a result of two forces, the financial services industry, yes, and also co-location services of some kind since NYC is still the international telecommunications cross-roads for bandwidth (major PITA during 9/11, still not fixed):

- The use of GPU cores for computational advancement was first, as usual, a cool Open Source project. Wall St. took it and made it a business for NVidia and others. This fundamentally changed computing thought and pushed things away from using AMD & Intel general-purpose CPU's for everything, which led to reduced power-consumption, cooling savings and other green technology blossoming in the data center since it was tied to creating profit.

- Need disaster recovery / resiliency for your infrastructure? You want to hire a NY'er who's “been there and done that”. Between 9/11 & the 2003 black-out, we wrote the book here – some of the most bullet-proofed no-cut-corners data center designs around. The next step is making bullet-proof = green, and there's projects now making that happen here.

You may ask, “OK, but what did that have to do with Web 2.0?”. The resilient infrastructure is obvious, but GPU's? The kit behind the Web 2.0 evolution now enjoys content acceleration, filtration, security, all kinds of additional processing and servicing more cheaply, green-ly, and powerfully because the CPU -> GPU push on Wall St. showed that you didn't need a general purpose CPU for every compute problem, even though Intel & AMD would love you to think so. That quiet little revolution showed everyone by trickle-down to vendors all wanting to market something to Wall St. that purpose-built would work in the marketplace.

Remember the rails when running the railroad. That new passenger car has a shiny inside, but it only goes 200mph on good infrastructure.

Fred had a blog post about Zynga hiring product managers and they found former analysts from wall street/consulting firms are doing very well. It is probably not the background/experience, but rather it acts as a filter for talent (which is not to say there isn't talent elsewhere, but it is easier when somebody already did the screening) and timing is right – many people graduating from those programs are looking at start ups vs. hedge fund/PE opportunities. Opportunity cost is lower, so might as well pursue dreams that they might not otherwise… Everlater is another example – founders used to work in finance in NYC, learned to program and built Everlater, although they started the company in Boulder

Long winded way to say that I agree with you and we are already seeing it happening.

I'd just thought I'd make a few people laugh with that. It's interesting to me to see that Chicago is always absent from startup city lists, especially when companies like Orbitz (IPO'ed 2x), Feedburner (acquired by Google), TicketsNow (acquired by TicketMaster) 37Signals, SkinnyCorp (threadless.com), CrowdSpring, Parlano (acquired by Microsoft) are/were from here.

I think you're right about New York.

I like that you added Boulder. Toss in Tulsa, Laramie, Little Rock and several dozen others and there's no shortage of talent that are executing the next MONSTER big idea. Just wish the early stage VC would broaden their horizons a bit as the central US has super talent, low cost of living (ie, longer runway) and we're getting it done.

All that said, NYC is definitely on the upswing. The transformation of media and advertising into digital forces is right in NYC's sweet spot, which is why we're so bullish on the region, as you point out.

First Growth Venture Network (http://www.firstgrowthvn.com) is an initiative that reflects this teeming entrepreneurial energy in NYC.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/kayak

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/09/the-ny-startup-…

and i love the addition of disqus!

I would be pretty skeptical of relying solely on those databases, especially with respect to the East Coast. Right Media was NYC and bought by Yahoo for $850. Other (near or more) billion dollar companies that I just know from personal experience are Gerson Lehrman Group and Flarion.