Name: This Is What’s Missing from New York’s Tech Scene
Uploaded: 2016-06-09
Duration: 4 min
Description: According to one venture capitalist.

Almost all my investing has been outside New York, not for lack of trying, and I've made some investments here in New York. But I would get regular questions from reporters about the New York tech scene and it's going so fast, and it's so important. And I would inevitably say, again, this is maybe four or five years ago, name the five most interesting, exciting, successful private venture backed companies in New York. And by the way, if you ask that question of someone about California, your brain immediately fills with so many companies that you run out of fingers and toes to count them on. But in New York people would engage in the conversation, they'd say, Gilt Groupe, Fab. [ SOUND ] Etsy. [ COUGH ] Tumblr. And then Foursquare. And then they would quickly. And these were media darlings and also very successful companies. And then they'd sort of run out. And if you think about what's happened to those companies, for the most. Etsy is a very successful company. It's not too far away from here. It's public. And it has about $ 1 billion market cap. Tumblr was acquired for about $ 1 billion, and the others have hit on much harder times. And so, of the five most successful, only two made it ultimately. And there's not an obvious set of Five or ten coming up behind it. And so the way I describe the New York Tech scene is that it was on an index scale something like a one and it grew to a two. And in percentage terms it's amazing growth and the community is so much larger and more robust than it was before but if you want to compare that to California, California is about a hundred. And so relative importance, it's still not there. But in terms of momentum and potential, maybe, but it's gonna take another decade to play out So it took us a full decade to grow 1 %, or add one percentage point. It's not so much a percentage point, but it's doubling, it's just a tiny doubling relative to the size and scope of things on the west coast. Yeah, and that's a complaint that I here a lot. It's like stop comparing us to Silicon Valley. So to compare us to Silicon Valley, what do we need to accelerate that growth? What does the New York tech scene missing? A few things, but I think two that are solvable, the first is just successes. So so many of the great West coast entrepreneurs started off as, many of them were just entrepreneurs since they fell out of bed, or the womb, but many of them started their careers early inside someone else's company, and some of the most powerful entrepreneurs are those who have made a little bit of money, and tasted what it would be like to not have to work for anyone again, but are relatively early in their careers. And therefore have the ambition and enthusiasm to actually go build a company on their own. And that community hardly exists here. Because there have been so few great successes where somebody who grew up in a company for the first five or 10 years of their career saw enough and experienced enough to have the sort of skills and experiences to build their own company. So part of it is success. And then the second thing is As I like to. A lot people ask me, why do you live in New York and not California given [ CROSSTALK ]. That was my next question. I beat you to the punch. And so my answer is twofold. One, I love New York. It's by far the greatest city. It's the most interesting city that one could possibly live in. And secondly, in California if someone says to me at a cocktail party or a dinner party what do you do for a living and I say I work in venture capital, they're immediately going to like what companies have you invested in and this and like immediately you're right into an industry conversation. Whereas in New York if I'm invited to somebody's house, a parent of one of my kids friends or something like that, and they say what do you do for a living And I say I work in venture capital, they say, is that like a hedge fund? [ LAUGH ] They have no idea what it is. Really? Even now? I feel like it's pretty in vogue to be a venture capitalist. You're in the small little community of tech where it's understood, but outside the sort of bigger, New York, I mean of course, some people do, I mean of course, some people do, I mean of course