Maybe I’m biased about the New York Entrepreneurship scene because I’ve lived in and around New York my whole life, but the more I think about the explosion of startup activity here, the more I think that all of us who are part of this are really lucky.
If you want to launch and grow your startup, come to New York. Under30ceo covered 11 tech accelerators and incubators in New York and there may be even more programs that are based in other cities but run programs here too. For those who can’t devote the 3 months that most of these programs run, there are Entrepreneurship events going on every day and every evening. The challenge is only to figure out which ones to go to since there are so many good ones. Oh, and for those of us on a tight budge, many are free or almost free.
One of the most popular events is the NY Tech Meetup which is the largest Meetup group in the world with 23,000 members and over 800 people attending every month. New York’s universities are also packed with programs and resources for entrepreneurs, and not just their students or alumni: Columbia, NYU, Baruch, Pace and Fordham all have an array of offerings for current and aspiring startup founders. For the younger set, Stuyvesant High School has been training future entrepreneurs for years and beginning this Fall, the Academy for Software Engineering will open. Fortunately for the school, they have Fred Wilson involved.
New York (including DUMBO in Brooklyn) is No. 2 after Silicon Valley for startup communities in the country. There’s an amazing array of startups in New York in a lot of different industries. Gigom reported that New York makes sense for startups in both tech and non-tech industries, especially those with ties to finance, fashion, media, retail, advertising and data and location-based services.
A recent article in Techcrunch talked about the findings of the Startup Compass and a collaborative R&D project called Startup Genome. The goal of these projects is to analyze what makes startups successful or not, and therefore help founders make better decisions. Part of the data includes a comparison of different startup environments. One of the most interesting findings was that in the scale stage New York startups raise 27% more money that Silicon Valley. New York also has 4 times more high risk companies in the scale stage than Silicon Valley. And New York’s founding teams are almost twice as likely to be business heavy than their Silicon Valley counterparts.
I was personally thrilled that we have almost double the number of female founders compared to Silicon Valley. Betabeat brought up some interesting theories as to why. The first is that it could have something to do with New York’s more recent rise as a startup hub and the less established old boys’ network. They also cited that there’s a boom in New York’s fashion and beauty startups. It also could be related to demographics. I think it’s a combination of factors and a more diverse community of startup founders is a really good thing and ultimately benefits everyone.
What makes New York awesome for you?
Nillie Goldman MBA, MSW, LSW, Founder and Publisher WebToTheRescue.com
