Stowe Boyd

More on NYC Tech Scene

Chris Dixon quotes Ron Conway on the exploding NY Tech scene, and then enumerates the VCs here or who have moved here:

The pace of innovation in the New York area is very impressive right now. Some of the top entrepenuers in the country are building and scaling companies in the NY ecosystem - Ron Conway, yesterday in an email to me (published with his permission)

The NYC tech scene is exploding. There are tons of interesting startups. I’m an investor in a bunch and started one (Hunch) so won’t even try to enumerate them as any list will be extremely biased (other people have tried). I will say that one interesting thing happening is the types of startups are diversifying beyond media (HuffPo, Gawker) to more “California-style” startups (Foursquare, Boxee, Hunch).

In terms of investors, NYC now has a number of seed investors / micro-VCs:  IA Capital Partners, Betaworks, and Founder Collective (FC – which I am part of – has made 7 seed investments in NYC since we started last year).  The god of seed investing, Ron Conway, who I quote up top, has recently decided to become extremely active in NYC. One of the nice things about having small funds is we don’t need to invest millions of dollar per round so we all frequently invest together.

I heard Conway speak in the late fall at a Betaworks brown bag lunch (I am on the train right now, en route to another). He said that by that point in 2009, 25 or the 37 investments he had made in the year were in NYC-based companies. The previous year he had made one. And none in preceding years: all of his earlier investments were West Coast.