NY Magazine: Check your facts!
October 29th
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Tonight, like most Monday evenings, I sat down to thumb though my weekly intake of New York Magazine.
There is always some sort of editorial piece about a quarter of the way into the issue.
This week they f*cked up in their reporting of the Web 2.0 big time. It really pisses me off to continually read all these doomsday reports about how the web is blowing up (for all the wrong reasons) and everyone is about to be screwed in the start-up market.
The web for sure is expanding at a lightning fast speed. Facebook is expanding by 250,000 new users each day! No wonder they recently received a valuation of $15B (albeit a very high valuation). But still, certain web properties are going to go for extravagant sums of cash. Everyone thought that $560M for Myspace was ridiculous, only to see Youtube purchased months later for $1.6B. These aren't old companies either. Facebook was valued by Yahoo at around $1B only a year ago, but Zuckerberg knew better. He knew his company was worth more and held out, because he could.
Reading the misquoting of Howard Lindzon (whom I work with through Biltmore Ventures) and Fred Wilson, whom we have done deals with (Wallstrip, AdaptiveBlue) provides me with a reality check. John Heilmann presents the New York tech scene as a sad backwater for start-up companies. The debate about Silicon Alley versus Silcon Valley has always been playful in certain aspects. However, we do not need a New York based report debasing a burgeoning moment in our tech history.
Heilemann failed to take note of Doublclick's recent buyout by Google for $3.1B. Did he fail to notice that they are headquartered out of New York? Its not just Palo Alto and Menlo Park that have multi billion dollar companies. Isn't a little company called Microsoft headquartered in ... Washington State, oh and lest we forget Big Blue our friendly upstate New York counterpart. Where were Google and Yahoo when IBM started?
More money may be pouring into the Valley, but that is not stopping the Valley from coming to the Big Apple. Google has approximately 560,000 feet of office space in NYC. At our rental rates that is a major investment, even for a company of their dearth.
Next time (and I expect more misinformed reporting soon) someone decides to deride the efforts of all the start-up companies, the entrepreneurs and investors who strive each day to make the New York tech scene vibrant and meaningful, I hope they call Scott Heiferman or participate in an online discussion on NextNY before they call a our existence inconsequential or dead.
There is always some sort of editorial piece about a quarter of the way into the issue.
This week they f*cked up in their reporting of the Web 2.0 big time. It really pisses me off to continually read all these doomsday reports about how the web is blowing up (for all the wrong reasons) and everyone is about to be screwed in the start-up market.
The web for sure is expanding at a lightning fast speed. Facebook is expanding by 250,000 new users each day! No wonder they recently received a valuation of $15B (albeit a very high valuation). But still, certain web properties are going to go for extravagant sums of cash. Everyone thought that $560M for Myspace was ridiculous, only to see Youtube purchased months later for $1.6B. These aren't old companies either. Facebook was valued by Yahoo at around $1B only a year ago, but Zuckerberg knew better. He knew his company was worth more and held out, because he could.
Reading the misquoting of Howard Lindzon (whom I work with through Biltmore Ventures) and Fred Wilson, whom we have done deals with (Wallstrip, AdaptiveBlue) provides me with a reality check. John Heilmann presents the New York tech scene as a sad backwater for start-up companies. The debate about Silicon Alley versus Silcon Valley has always been playful in certain aspects. However, we do not need a New York based report debasing a burgeoning moment in our tech history.
Heilemann failed to take note of Doublclick's recent buyout by Google for $3.1B. Did he fail to notice that they are headquartered out of New York? Its not just Palo Alto and Menlo Park that have multi billion dollar companies. Isn't a little company called Microsoft headquartered in ... Washington State, oh and lest we forget Big Blue our friendly upstate New York counterpart. Where were Google and Yahoo when IBM started?
More money may be pouring into the Valley, but that is not stopping the Valley from coming to the Big Apple. Google has approximately 560,000 feet of office space in NYC. At our rental rates that is a major investment, even for a company of their dearth.
Next time (and I expect more misinformed reporting soon) someone decides to deride the efforts of all the start-up companies, the entrepreneurs and investors who strive each day to make the New York tech scene vibrant and meaningful, I hope they call Scott Heiferman or participate in an online discussion on NextNY before they call a our existence inconsequential or dead.
And thats how the story goes...
