Fred Wilson on New York Is For Startups

Why is New York City a good place for startups?

I think New York is a very entrepreneurial city first and foremost and I think it always has been—going back to when it was originally settled. There’s always been a trading mentality in this town, a merchant mentality in this town and it’s always been ethnically diverse. People from all over the world have settled here.

Are there particular types of startups that do better in New York than others?

Anything that touches Wall Street or Madison Avenue or the entertainment and media business, I think arguably is better centered here in New York than anywhere else in the world and that’s the kind of thing that is the historical legacy of New York. You get a lot of advertising-oriented businesses like Double Click, a lot of Wall Street-oriented businesses like Bloomberg. Everybody talks about Google and Microsoft and Cisco and companies like that, but probably one of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of the past quarter century is Bloomberg, you know, which was built as a New York-centered company and Mike Bloomberg owns almost all of it. They didn’t use venture capital—so talk about entrepreneurial success.

We’re [also] seeing a lot of other things. There’s a lot of social media in New York, there’s a lot of location-based, a bit of urban-lifestyle-based services that are coming out of New York and so, a lot of companies that are servicing the media industry and the entertainment industry are centered here in New York. There are a lot of different categories now that have some real size.

via Laura Rich, www.fastcompany.com

This interview in Fast Company makes good reading, and underlines why I am going to do a series on New York’s tech scene.