I spent this evening participating in NextNY’s NycHub event that took place this evening in Midtown, in the shadow’s of this past week’s Silicon Alley 2.0 event (we didn’t mean for it to happen this way). There was a fantastic turn-out - lots of entrepreneurs came out to show their enthusiasm in the New York scene as we debated topics such as why New York doesn’t have a great tech scene, what we can do collectively or individually to help build an entrepreneurial culture here, what the early stage landscape is like, and learned about co-working and Cafe Bricolage in depth.

I feel that this conversation is a never ending debate about why NY should be like San Francisco. I have been extremely vocal in the sense that NY should never become San Francisco as our market is totally different, and we should stop trying to become that type of scene. We have amazing assets here in NY - Madison Avenue, the publishing industry, fashion, finance, textiles, and many other fine industries. These industries are very different than they are out in SF - and because of that, the culture is different, thus affecting early stage startups in terms of technology enabling startups.

As mentioned above, one of the topics was how people can collectively or individually help create an entrepreneurial scene, and I talked about getting into the youth of America and educating them about entrepreneurship. Today’s youth are tomorrow’s leaders. It’s not just a cliche, but it’s true. I have spent many evenings and afternoons lecturing and guest speaking at the National Federation of Teaching Entrepreneurship, Junior Achievement, and many public highschools and colleges across America. What I have found is that in the classroom of highschools, guest speakers tend to be from corporate America. There is no problem with this in terms of providing fantastic speaker resources, but students never really learn what startups and entrepreneurship is all about. I have tried to get out to schools and let students in on our secret called “entrepreneurship.” Eventually, this will not be a secret anymore, and we’ll have a thriving community here in New York of entrepreneurs.

I met some wonderful people this evening and will be reaching out to the folks who were gracious enough to give me their business cards.