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On a frosty Friday night in Manhattan, a line of enthusiastic party-goers wound around the lobby of a small office building and out on the block, waiting to get into the hottest tech gathering of the new year (This reporter, obviously, is blocked by new parenthood, but I received dispatches from some brave Fortune attendees.) their coats among a one-in-one-out policy, with organizers ultimately issuing refunds.
The event was not hosted by new tech royalty such as TBPN boysbut instead of New York’s old guard: legendary figures including AlleyCorp’s Kevin Ryan and Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, who in the 1990s sought to build New York’s answer to Silicon Valley. Now, three decades later, they are celebrating the 30th anniversary of Silicon Alley, named for the first startups in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, such as Ryan’s DoubleClick (an ad tech pioneer who Google acquired in 2007 for $3.1 billion).
“The money follows the entrepreneurs, not the other way around,” Ryan told me, recounting the difficult early days, when West Coast investors were reluctant to fund the nascent ecosystem. (All of them, of course, since the establishment of offices in New York.) That began to change before the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000, with DoubleClick’s 1998 IPO of $60 million, at the time, seemed like a huge number. Ryan remembers hosting a Willy Wonka-themed party the following year with a ballooning guest list that rivaled Friday’s, filled with a dance floor with candy under it.
New York survived the bubble burst, as well as other disasters: the great financial crisis, the rise and fall of the consumer tech wave (KickstarterFoursquare), the retreat from the Covid fintech boom. For Laurel Touby, a Silicon Alley pillar who founded the community website Mediabistro before starting her own venture shop, New York may not have the trillion-dollar behemoths of Silicon Valley, but it does have a crop of strong startups like MongoDB and Datadog which hovers in the $50 billion range. “What we missed in terms of size, we made up for in terms of profitability and staying power,” he told me, pointing out that Mediabistro has been profitable from the start and has stayed alive despite being sold four times.
While thanks to the AI boom, San Francisco has undeniably regained its crown after many declared its premature death during the pandemic, New York’s advantage is the constant intersection of industry, from Wall Street to healthcare to the arts, baptizing startups like Ramp, Oscar, and Runway. “We’re not building a different version of the Valley,” says Julie Samuels, founder and CEO of Tech:NYC. “We’re building New York tech.”
As Ryan says, money follows entrepreneurs, and that’s what New York has — at least, when people start funneling into technology. “We have talent in the man,” he said. The downside, of course, is that the ever-snowballing community makes it difficult to get into a party.
One more thing…Although Fieldguide is not based in New York, its lead investor, Goldman Sachs, is. The AI-native accounting platform announced a $75 million Series C, valuing the company at $700 million, as founder Jin Chang seeks to stem the growing CPA extinction crisis. You can read the exclusive here.
Leo Schwartz
X: @leomschwartz
Email: [email protected]
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
