This morning I got yet another email from a local entrepreneur looking to add someone to their team. Despite global and National economic conditions, its clear that NY tech companies are hiring.

Below are a few of the jobs I've heard about. If something sounds interesting to you, contact me and I'll be pleased to put you in touch with the right people.

• Drop.io is hiring designers, developers, hackers and business people to work on one of the coolest projects in NYC
• GetGlue.com is hiring a Product Manager
• Meetup.com is hiring developers and community people
• A very cool publishing startup I know of is looking for an MBA to help with modeling
• World Science Foundation will be looking for a web strategist / product manager (I'm helping
• A slew of hiring going on at the NY Tech Meetup Jobs Board

I know there are more folks hiring out there. Feel free to link to any job descriptions in my comments.

NYConvergence ORIGINAL

Since Verizon is in the process of improving its 3G network in the NYC area, we thought that we would provide our readers with a summary of our experiences using the Motorola Droid, which we have been using for the past month.

First, there's the design.  For users accustomed to the Apple iPhone's touch-screen keyboard, the Droid's keyboard seems superfluous.  But, if you're transitioning from a RIM Blackberry or other such device, the keyboard will probably be useful for you.

Next, we took a look at the apps available.  While there may be more than 10,000 apps in the Android Market, Google's version of iTunes for apps, many which iPhone users would be familiar with aren't there, including a New York Times app or a Wall Street Journal app.  However, there are apps useful for NY-area residents such as mobile social-networking service Foursquare, allowing users to keep their friends updated on their location, or OpenTable, allowing users to reserve seats at an area restaurant. 

The Droid's GPS also functions rather differently.  To get it to work, we have found that a user should be outside or in a moving vehicle or the Droid takes a few minutes to or simply can't find you.  It is unfortunate, especially since iPhone users have been accustomed to using their phones indoors to plot the shortest route to their next destination via Google Maps.  On the other hand, the Droid's turn-by-turn navigation certainly comes in handy when a user is in a taxi and isn't exactly of their destination.

Our readers, by now, are also probably very familiar with Verizon's "There's a Map for That" campaign, touting how much more extensive their 3G network is than AT&T's, especially in the NY-area.  Based on our use of the device, we have found that the Droid is able to surf the Internet at higher speeds in more locations than the iPhone and we have only experienced one dropped call so far.  Interestingly, the Droid, unlike the iPhone will not connect to the Internet unless the 3G network is present.  So, in those few instances where we have been in a dead zone, our Droid has only been usable for calls and text messages.  

Overall, NYConvergence has found that the Droid performs better than the iPhone, but if you're looking to switch or upgrade, you may want to wait until the next-generation Droid is available for access to more apps and for tweaks to be made to its design.

[Editor's Note: NYConvergence received a complimentary Droid at a promotional event hosted by Cake Group on behalf of Motorola.]

Previous:
> Motorola Debuts Droid, Cliq at Morimoto Bash

Last week I testified on entrepreneurship, for the third year in a row, in front of the NYC Council Technology Committee.  For my testimony, I responded to what some others had said during their testimony and basically said some of this and I’ll add more:

New York City is a *thriving* innovation community right now.  It is unquestionably the best place to build a web technology or digital media company on the east coast.  There are more and more experienced entrepreneurs launching their second and third companies, coming back as angel investors, and mentoring young startups.  Everyday and every night there are opportunities to network, collaborate, and learn from other startups—not just to party but to build lasting connections that drive real business value.  There is also more venture capital activity than their ever has been—and the amount of venture funding this year, in terms of companies funded, will wind up being nearly half that of the Valley.  That is, relatively, the best we have ever been.  Given the size of our startup community, utterly amazing.  In addition, Boston VCs are flocking to NYC in a big way (Polaris hiring Steinberg, Flybridge hiring Westheimer, Beim moving to NYC in March, etc).  There is a growing and tightly knit community—one that is, unlike the Valley, open and encouraging.  No one will ever look down on you for not having worked at Facebook, Google, or PayPal, and if you get venture funding, we don’t raise an eyebrow if it’s not from the right VC. 

What’s even more amazing is that we’ve gotten here largely in the absence of any kind of top-down, institutional support.  There’s no school here pumping out startup professionals en masse (ITP is relatively small).  There’s no city program we all came out of.  We built this ourselves, as a community, organically. 

After testifying, I then tried to put myself in the shoes of the average council member and digest what I heard from others, and what I would think of the NYC tech community if this was my vantage point.  Most of what people talked about was money and desks.  That’s when I realized that the city is getting *horriffically* bad data on what’s really going on with the NYC tech community and what it needs.  By failing to participate in this innovation community, the city and its affiliated entities lack firsthand knowledge of what’s going on, and instead depend on the often random, misguided hearsay of those who aren’t really in the trenches of the Big Apple’s recent success. 

Here’s an example.  Baruch College measured that the average city has about 19% of its population that identify as entrepreneurs.  NYC is down at 15%, so they conclude that we’re 4% behind.* 

This makes no sense whatsoever.  There’s no “steady state” for entrepreneurship—no systematic reason why that number is anything other than randomness—and it doesn’t apply here.  Every city is a unique mix of people and jobs, mostly due to underlying demographics, geography, and maybe even culture.  Is Kansas short on investment bankers because they don’t have 3% like the rest of the country?  Is NYC overweight people in the tourism and hospitality industry?  Guaranteed we have more people in that sector than other cities—simply because we take on more visitors.

Misguided statistical analysis without real world, in person feedback is why folks from the city keep asking “Why are we so behind other cities?”

The feedback they most often get is that we lack startup capital.  Probably 9 out of 10 entrepreneurs in this city say that access to capital is a problem.  Funny enough, 9 out of 10 startups don’t get outside financing at all—and that’s across the board.  Why?  Because most startups just aren’t based on great, well thought-out ideas.  In fact, many entrepreneurs that start out who fail to get access to funding are often forced to iterate on their models—usually revamping the entire idea.  Many folks would agree that their first iterations would not have worked out as equity investments and that they were better off going to market to try and generate revenues when they couldn’t get financing. 

Other startup ideas simply don’t have capable founders.  It’s not that they aren’t dedicated, but they may not have the right skillset or experience to lead a company. 

Think about it this way:  Would you put your own personal savings into any more than 1 out of 10 of all the ideas you’ve ever heard people come up with in your life?   I certainly wouldn’t—and I definitely don’t want the city moving that ratio up significantly either. 

Outside equity capital simply isn’t appropriate for most startups—sometimes because of their model, sometimes because of their expected size, and other times because of the lifestyle priorities of the entrepreneur.  If you don’t have the intention or capability of building at least a $50 million business, then equity capital is probably not for you.

I’ve said before we could use more smart, dedicated capital—and we’re getting that with the addition of a First Round Capital office in NYC.  No doubt other venture funds will follow.  The last thing we want to do is to compete with the city’s capital, raising the price of deals and distracting the market. 

So, if you work for the city, beware any entrepreneur who tells you they can’t raise money in NYC and that funding is a problem.  For every 9 of those people, there’s one who had no problem raising money from experienced investors because they had a big vision, exemplary skills, and a great execution plan—if not a great product already.  Many raise money from relatively unsophisticated investors—because NYC is full of money and it’s really not that hard to find someone with an extra few grand to put to work in what might sound like a promising idea to be the next big thing.

There’s another real downside to an increased percentage of startups getting funded.  There is, in fact, a limited supply of good talent—not just in NYC, but everywhere.  Great people are hard to come by in life, simple as that.  It’s hard here, it’s hard in the Valley and it’s hard in Boise, Idaho.  When ideas get funded that otherwise wouldn’t, those lower potential companies pull talent out of the market and get them working on less promising ideas—ideas less promising than those that already have customer and financing traction.  When less savvy money funds a company, you effectively raise the price of talent and distribute it inefficiently. 

But, if you’re sitting on the New York City Council, how would you know?  All you hear in these testimonies is how hard it is to raise money.  It’s the same with office space and how expensive it is.  Meanwhile, I spent the day last Tuesday going around to Sunshine Suites and TechSpace and found huge communities of growing companies—probably over 2500 people working at startups in total across these places.  We’ll be visting them during the First Round Startup Trek on January 5th.  They’re loving life there and I don’t hear a single complaint that the rent is too high.  I mean, sure, if asked, would I love my rent to be lower?  Of course.  Do I still live here?  Yes.  The fact is, if you have the revenues or the investment capital to pay someone, you undoubtedly have the extra cash to put them in a desk somewhere.  People costs are always much higher than rent in a tech business. 

The problem is that when all these folks come to testify, you have policymakers that use these hearings as their sole source of information.  They have no way to vet the perspective of any of these entrepreneurs either.  I had a guy after me testify from the NY Tech Council.  Sounds pretty impressive, only…  who appointed them New York’s tech council?  Who do they represent?  Anyone can ask a law firm or a big company for a few sponsorship bucks these days, slap a few logos on your site, and make it seem like you speak for a mass audience.  Most of the work in the community these days is being done by people who aren’t asking for money, titles or any kind of recognition.  Not surprisingly, this person’s testimony about how NYC has failed to build an innovation community couldn’t have been further off the mark.  I wondered where he had been for the last five years and nearly fell out of my chair when he said it.

People from the city government and its related entities don’t know that because they simply DO NOT PARTICIPATE in the innovation community.  We’ve been inviting city council members to the NY Tech Meetup for years, same with nextNY.  At the hearing, they asked the NYCEDC who helps entrepreneurs with business and tech questions and got little in the wake of answers.  Meanwhile, Nate and I are smacking our heads in the crowd because we know where those questions are going—to us and the other visible entrepreneurs in the community.  The answers are on Twitter, and blogs, and listservs and events.   

As one attendee to the City Council’s talk put it, listening to all this random testimony—and also to other governmental orgs who couldn’t quite get all the data that was asked for or wasn’t at liberty to share—was like seeing through a cheesecloth.  I wondered if I was living in the same city as everyone else was.  Companies talked of the lack of places to ask about healthcare, compensation, technology issues… apparently they’ve never been on the nextNY listserv before. 

Here’s a sample of just a few recent questions asked about startups on the nextNY listserv:

Pre-Alpha Release Best Practices?

Best Bank for Startup Checking, Finances, etc?

S corp or LLC

Need Web dev shop experienced with Spanish mirror sites

 

So before the city goes and commits millions of dollars to reinventing the wheel for the startup community, maybe they would be better served pointing to all of the existing resources out there that some of the newbie entrepreneurs they talk to just can’t be bothered to find.

Over the next few years, the city is planning on running events, opening incubators, connecting professionals, and injecting more capital into the system just as the community and private enterprise is doing the exact same thing—and they’re doing so without the basic relationships, experience, and context to do this successfully.  For once, I’d like to see the city support the proven, existing efforts, rather than recreate the wheel:

>> They should give tax breaks and subsidies to Sunshine Suites and TechSpace rather than get into the real estate market themselves. 

>> They should be getting venues and focusing their PR efforts for nextNY and NY Tech Meetup events, rather than competing against us for the mindshare of the community. 

>> They should encourage public participation of key stakeholders in social media (and lead by example), getting local academics on blogs and Twitter, before spending money to build a big research database no one will ever use.

But they won’t do that, because they need to own everything and get credit for it come election time.  One of the city council folks wanted to hear about the next incubator to enter her district—and she didn’t care about the new one opening in Queens.  One NYCEDC rep told me that it was “off topic” when I brought up the EDC’s lack of participation in existing community activities during a small group breakout about their planned slate of events.  That’s so far from the norms of the great NYC innovation community already being built that it will prevent the city from gaining much traction in their efforts. 

In the end, does it really matter?  Regardless of the city’s activities, the startup community will continue to grow.  Dominos are falling and it’s doubtful that anyone can stop the chain reaction now.  Can they help?  Maybe the city can help existing efforts as it does seem to be good at getting PR for itself—but if all it does is listen without participating, reinventing wheels, and duplicating community and private sector efforts, I’m not particularly bullish on what it’s up to.

 

 

*I had mistakenly attributed this stat to the Center for Urban Future prior.”

NYConvergence ORIGINAL

Bootup, an organization that seeks to reinvent the pitch process by putting entrepreneurs in front of startups for analysis and critique, and Girls in Tech, have teamed up to offer two such events, or "Bootups," in 2010, one on January 18, and one on February 16.  More information will be posted about each as it becomes available, but information about past Bootups is available here.

Related:

> Ultra Light Startups Talks VC Funding and Bootstrapping

One of the best things anyone can ever do to encourage the dissemination of ideas, collaboration, and innovation is to put all the relevant stakeholders in a room, provide some focus, and just get them talking.

A topical, relevant group discussion is a simple, but enormously effective tool when done right.  It’s something we’ve been doing with nextNY for nearly four years now and I want to ramp it up significantly in 2010.  We have over 2500 up and coming digital media entrepreneurs, designers, business people, investors—a great mix of up and comers that have come together to build a really inclusive and innovative community. 

At the same time, I know firsthand that various big companies, schools, professional organizations, and service providers want to connect with this community and get some mindshare on a lot of these topics.  I was just talking to someone last week about how a lot of big companies have great event spaces that basically go unused most of the time—and yet a lot of community groups struggle to find places to hold their events.

Therefore, I’m holding an “Event Space Drive”.  I’d like to connect to as many companies willing to commit to donating event space for 50-100 people as possible.  My goal is three spaces after work a month, each month for 2010.  This way, if I book the dates ahead of time, I can guarantee the best speakers, the most well thought out topics and the right amount of planning and prep ahead of time.

So if you have space to donate to the NYC innovation community and you’d like to host a discussion or networking event, even if you can just give away a couple of dates, or one every other month, please get in touch with me at charlie.odonnell@gmail.com.

2010 is right around the corner, leaving me wondering, "What will next year bring for NY's technology sector?"

No group of people is better equipped to answer this question than NY Tech Meetup members and members of the broader NY tech community, and so, as I blogged on the NYTM Blog, I've set up a place (with Magnify.net's help) for you to submit your predictions on video.

Head to this link and submit a 10 second video of your prognostications for 2010. Then, at the January NY Tech Meetup, I'll show your videos to the crowd, and after the event I'll post them back on the NY Tech Meetup blog for the World to see.

Better late than never (I guess). I finally got around to writing a quick blog post on a press release that came out a few weeks ago...

I’m happy (and proud) to finally announce that Tycoon Publishing, the leading provider of premium online investor education, has acquired TickerHound.

Before I say anything else, I really have to take a moment to thank the New York technology community for all of the help, support and advice over the last few years.

Thanks to those who believed in us when we needed it. Thanks to those of you who gave us guidance when we needed it. And thanks for offering some constructive criticism when we needed to hear it.

Bringing a start-up from napkin to sale is an incredibly difficult process. Add that to the fact that I had the “brilliant” idea to start a finance-related company right before the "greatest financial crisis since the great depression," and the challenge becomes almost comical. But a large part of our success is due to the outpouring of support in the New York start-up community. So, thank you.

In particular I wanted to thank Philip James and Mark Angelillo, Rikki Tahta and Perry Blacher, Matt Milner, Brett Petersel, Jay Levy, Ari Weinberg, Justin Tsang and David Ambrose, Gary Vaynerchuk, Vin Vicanti and Jim Moran, Nate Westheimer and Jonah Keegan – thank you for all of the awesome insight, advice, referrals and support!

And for everyone else who took the time to chat with us or answer some of our questions at an event or on the nextNY Google group, THANK YOU!

I’m humbled and honored to be part of this community.

Lessons Learned

The other night some friends insisted we go out and celebrate – “How happy are YOU!?” was the question of the evening.

But what's so surprising to me is that while I'm certainly happy about this, I’m happy for different reasons than I would have ever imagined when we started the company. I thought I'd be thrilled by being able to say "my company was acquired”.

But the “funny thing” is, that's not what made me happy at all. That old cliché comes to mind:

“Success is a journey not a destination.”

What made these last few years so amazing was simply the experience itself and most importantly, the lessons I learned along the way.

While there are probably more takeaways than I can count, these have to be my top three:

1. Principles, not Methods:

I can’t think of a better way to say this myself, so I’m simply going to quote Emerson:

“As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

It’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day grind of running a start-up. But as long as you have a solid framework from which to make decisions, evaluate opportunities, etc. , you’ll be just fine.

2. Know Your Numbers:

More specifically, get your financials down cold.

Know how big your market is. Know what it costs to acquire a user. Know how much revenue you can generate from that user.

To even begin to calculate these numbers you’ll need to constantly test, measure and optimize every single step in your marketing funnel: various marketing channels, conversion rates, retention rates, landing page design, etc. Constantly testing, measuring and optimizing every step along the way is what will ultimately bring acquisition costs down and lifetime value up.

It’s something we should’ve been doing from Day 1, but like many start-ups, we probably made every mistake along the way and still managed to do “ok” in spite of ourselves ☺

Luckily, we eventually got our act together but I have to say, the sooner the better when it comes to knowing your key metrics and how they relate to your financial performance.

3. Chickens & Eggs:

One of the biggest challenges when developing a social or community-powered site is the old "chicken & egg" problem. People won’t come to your site if there’s nothing there, but if people don’t come to your site then nothing will ever be there – what’s an entrepreneur to do?

There are a few solutions to this problem, some more difficult to implement than the others. You could, of course, develop an app that is “viral” by nature, but what’s the likelihood of that happening (and working just as planned)?

You could also go for the whole “Utility->Network” model. This is where you build the first version of your app so that a single, lonely user finds it valuable. And once you have thousands of individual users, you break down the walls between them and form a “network” (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts). You’ve probably seen this on sites like Del.icio.us.

That’s obviously tough to do with a Q&A site, so what we ultimately did was inject our solution into existing communities. We white-labeled TickerHound and allowed our partners to use it as a knowledge and interaction tool within their websites. This meant we had traffic, an engaged audience and activity right away.

However, not all of our white-label initiatives were as successful as others, which I’ll go into in a separate blog post because there are some serious issues to think through with this strategy as well.

The Next Act…

I also always thought that exiting the business would be the end of the process – hence the term, “exit”. But I'm realizing that while it was the end of one process, it is the beginning of an entirely new one.

We founded TickerHound because people need answers to their questions and working on Wall Street taught me that it wasn't the place they could go to get them. I come from a "blue-collar" working class family and culture, so do my new partners at Tycoon. As opposed to the folks on Wall Street who are making 8 or 9 figures a year, we have a pretty good idea of what most Americans are going through right now.

We can relate to their fears and anxieties. We also know what it takes to make something from nothing.

Together we're hoping to change the world.

So I'm on a new mission now, I’m moving onto a new phase in my professional and personal development and I couldn’t be more grateful.