What Makes The New York Web Startup Sector Special?

On September 29th in the evening I am giving a talk about the NY web startup sector. It's part of our portfolio company Clickable's monthly "cultural event series". They asked me to give the talk I did last fall on the history of NYC's web industry. But that didn't seem like the right idea to me. As I thought about it, I decided to focus not on the past, but on the present and the future of the NY web startup sector.

A few weeks ago, Chris Dixon wrote a post suggesting that the NY startup scene was "poised for a revival" and I linked to that post with more thoughts on the topic. I agree with Chris' sentiment that web startup activity in the NY area is on the rise and there are a lot of really interesting things going on here.

I want to talk about that and I also want to examine why exactly that is. It is my view that each startup center of scale, and there are at least a half dozen of them, brings something special to the table. Silicon Valley is the largest and most important of these startup hubs and it's strengths are pretty well understood. But that is not so true of the secondary markets which are important and becoming more so.

I am not particularly qualified to talk about Seattle, Boston, Boulder, So Cal, etc, but I have been studying the NY startup ecosystem for a long time and I've gained an appreciation for the things that makes it special. I am going to talk about those things and I am going to talk about where they are going to take us.

Like I did with the Web 2.0 keynote talk, I've put together a wiki where anyone can leave ideas for me to include in this talk. I've seeded the wiki with some data but it is very much in the nascent stage right now. I plan to work on this talk over the next few weeks and hope that anyone interested in this topic will stop by the wiki and contribute your thoughts.

It appears that the talk is sold out but I will make sure it is recorded so that everyone can check it out. If it turns out well, I'll make sure to deliver it more than once.