Tuesday, September 29

Afterthoughts on Fred Wilson's presentation...

Sitting at New Work City, listening to the USTREAM of Fred's and Chris' presentation and enjoying the discussion on why New York is coming into its own.

I love Fred's topic of twelve factors that make New York a powerhouse. But I also loved the discussion of needing a "firewall" around the East Coast to maintain a place here in the region to avoid the leaps from the East Coast (read: Facebook, Cotweet, Napster, etc) to the West Coast.

NOTE: I want to focus that we are talking about software-based applications/community tools - primarily focused on media.

NY Talent/Staff Issues
There is always a knock on New York in terms of the availability of staff and/or talent - and the argument of google's second largest office is in Gotham (but their staff is for Ad Sales with an engineering staff to support them) and Microsoft's office (similar story with engineering support for their sales teams). But I think there is a problem that the path to building skilled software engineers (programmers) since the curriculum is often not geared for product development. This is why I speak of working on building a better curriculum program for building real product developers.

The real issue is that the MONEY is in the Valley - and here in NYC we have how many VCs and angel investors? I know the discussion is always about:
  • Union Square Ventures
  • DFJ Gotham
  • Ascend Ventures
  • NY Angels
  • RRE
  • FirstMark Capital
  • First Round Capital
  • Betaworks
  • Zelkova Ventures (whoops!)
and then? I know there is a lot of funds in New York, but where are they - for this community?
The refrain I hear is after the first group listed here - there is not much more to go after. Oh yes, there are others - but how to find them...

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