This scares me, too.  Kids are too into Paris Hilton and not into science.  We prevent people with technical skills from coming into this country b/c our immigration policy is FAIL. 

"Ms. Estrins book is the latest call to action during the last several years by scientists, technologists and political leaders worried about the countrys future competitiveness in technology. In 2005, the National Academies published Rising Above the Gathering Storm, a report requested by Congress, which found that federal financing of research in the physical sciences was 45 percent less in 2004 than in 1976 and that 93 percent of students in grades five through eight learn science from teachers who do not hold degrees or certifications in the topics. In 2007, the book Innovation Nation by John Kao, a business consultant, revived the debate."

Another Voice Warns of an Innovation Slowdown - NYTimes.com

Let me make this clear:  There's no shortage of money in NYC. 

A lot of deals get funded by random groups of angels, hedge fund managers, and other out of the way pockets of cash. 

There is, however, a shortage of experienced, local venture capital firms actively putting money to work here.  I'm sure people will disagree about the value that a VC can bring to a deal, but in my mind, they bring significant value to the community.

I was talking with a banker today about it, and there's definitely something to the "Silicon Valley VC mafia" phenomenon--that they all know each other and do deals together.  What they also do, which is incredibly valuable, is work with local universities, tech counsels, entrepreneur groups, etc., and actively participate in the community.  Their deals get huge press at funding time.  Their reputation of success is the community's reputation. 

By being consistantly active, they draw startups closer to them geographically.  That doesn't happen when a random hedge fund guy and his buddies put two million in a startup here in New York, because only that startup knows them.  That money builds a company, not a community.  Sure, money is nice, but VC's provide glue for the community in terms of the networks formed among deals they've invested in and support of the local community. 

Unfortuately, we don't have much of that in NYC.  If you're an early stage technology company, you're going to Union Square Ventures, Greycroft, Venrock, DFJGotham, SAVP, RRE, Softbank...and...  and who else?  These are good firms, but they don't represent enough of a critical mass--a mafia, if you will--to attract companies and talent here from the outside the way VC firms in the Valley do.  To be honest, USV and Greycroft haven't even been around for that long, even though their partners have.  RRE, which is a good firm with a successful record, says they generally invest between $5-10 million on their site, although they did less than that in drop.io.  I do hear they're looking to go earlier and smaller, so that's good.  Plus, I suppose Bessemer is in Larchmont and Canaan is in Connecticut.  These are clearly top tier firms, but if you can't go to the Shake Shack for lunch on a regular basis, are you really in the middle of this community? 

Comparatively, I'm going out to the Valley for VC meetings in mid-September, and I've got meetings with a dozen firms in three days--basically within blocks of each other in SF and then two days in similar proximity down in the Valley.  I know there are just a ton more firms out there, but it shouldn't be that there's such a difference in experience for an entrepreneur.

One major difference is community presence.  A lot of NYC-area entrepreneurs can't name more than a handful of NYC area funds and have never met a VC in person at a startup event.  I think a lot of NYC-area VCs could stand to be a lot more visable--attracting more deal flow by participation the way Union Square Ventures does.  Two or three NYC firms blogging and being transparent they way they are would count like 8 more firms doing deals here.

In terms of other firms, there's one firm not listed here that you might not realize that has done 10 technology deals right here in NYC since October of 2005. 

Take a guess.

Figured it out yet?

It's Spark Capital.  Ten out of their twenty-two deals have been done right here in the Big Apple--the most they've done in any city.   Spark has invested in 10 New York companies: 5min, AdMeld, Bug Labs, Covester, iminlikewithyou, Inform, KickApps, Next New Networks, Tumblr, and Clear.  Perhaps Spark should open an office here.  I, for one, would welcome another firm with a presense right here in the city.   Frankly, it surprises me that there aren't more, given the number of deals that get done here.  Even if you didn't plan on making all your investments in NYC, it's pretty centrally located on the east coast to do deals in DC, Boston, even Toronto. 

And it's not like deals aren't getting done here--but by out of town firms.  Redpoint did Right Media.  Accel put a bunch of cash into Etsy.  Emergence Capital just invested in Lotame.  Again, this helps the individual companies, but doesn't really help the community at large as would more early stage players doing similar kinds of tech deals with each other.

So who here is actually doing deals here in the New York Metro area?   I went into Thompson's VentureXpert database and ran some numbers on which firms have done "Early Stage", "Information Technology" deals in the last 5 years.  I'm sure some of the numbers are off (like Spark's number, which would seem to make it the 2nd most prolific NYC investor), but here's a list below of all the firms that had done two or more deals.  I don't have much more to say about the topic... hopefully you guys have some interesting takes on the situation...

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more animals

Zoe got cookied...  I welcome cookies and other forms of culinary schwag on this blog.  An entrepreneur's gotta eat...

"She connected to me through someone I know. Check.

She wrote an honest, friendly and personal email. Check.

She didnt pretend to be a long time reader of my blog. Check.

And there are no obligations as to what I have to write. Check.

Oh...and I get free cookies that are probably going to be delicious! Check!"

Free Cookies from New Moon Kitchen | medium & the message

Don't be shy.  We know you're out there reading, even though you just lurk.

Almost everyday, a recruiter calls our office number, even though we ask people not to on our site.  I'll let you all in on a secret--that number is not a real phone that rings.  It goes straight to PhoneTag and dumps into my e-mail in a transcription, so you're actually better off just e-mailing me.

The truth of the matter is, you all just kind of seem the same to us startup folk. 

You're selling us people...and we're a pretty hyperconnected group.  You'd be hard pressed to convince me that you can find anyone that I couldn't find on my own by just putting in some hours on LinkedIn or e-mailing various usergroups.  When I look up a recruiters name and they have 123 LinkedIn connections and I have 982, I think "What are the chances of them finding someone in NYC before I will?"

You're not selling screening--well, at least most of you seem like you're not, because the profiles I've been sent from recruiters so far are never really that good of a fit--and my CTO will still have to screen them thoroughly anyway.  Plus, so much of screening is about personality and fit, especially for an early stage company, and since the recruiters I talk to don't seem to have much interest in getting to know me as a person, I'm not sure how they could match me with a co-worker personality-wise.

But you know what... I could be totally wrong... and some of you are, in fact, really good at what you do.  The trouble is, I hear from all of you in the same way, leaving random messages on voicemail, or responding to my job posts, so you seem like a dime a dozen.  Where are you actively differentiating yourselves through branding?  Marketing?  Perhaps a little transparency in the process so that I could actually see why I could never accomplish what you could would go a long way--because this Web 2.0 world is all about transparency and we don't trust black boxes.

Good startups try and differentiate themselves by blogging--getting their name attached to good thoughtwork and getting into conversations around ideas.  Where are the really good NYC technical recruiting blogs?  Heck, if a NYC-area recruiter started a blog about hiring in this market, I think we'd all flock to it--and if you were really that good, we'd realize that recruiting is a helluva lot harder than we thought.  You could even post candidate profiles.  Give us your best tips on finding people, because, at the end of the day, most of your clients simply don't have the time or savvy to do what you do anyway, so you wouldn't be losing business by blogging, you'd be gaining it.

Not only that, why aren't you participating more in the community? 

I've met lots of random folks from the nextNY list and the range of people that actively participate here is pretty wide--from venture people to developers, business people, marketers, lawyers, etc...  but I can't think of a tech recruiter actively contributing here.   I don't mean self-marketing... I mean participating in the dialog.  That's partly why entrepreneurs really don't think highly of a lot of recruiters.  You act more like outsiders and salespeople, and less like one of us.

Are their NYC area tech recruiters on Twitter?  (And not just twittering their open positions or people for hire...)  Feel free to follow me at @ceonyc and send me a note!

This community needs strong recruiters, though...   not just recruiting people out of banks, but from out of state. 

Recruiters can be great evangelists for the NYC tech scene--I just don't really see them participating much in it.  
If you're a recruiter, and you're really interested in participating more in the tech community here, maybe this could help elevate your name from the noise in my voicemail.  nextNY will have a special event which I'll announce as soon as I sign the paperwork on it that needs some sponsorship.  E-mail me at charlie dot odonnell at gmail for details.

Given that you could probably cover the cost of sponsorship a couple of times over with just a single hire, and that there will be 200-300 tech folks at this event, I'd think the math would work out for you to take part, no?   I think it would be a really great opportunity to differentiate yourself and to open up a discussion about what you can do for startups, live and in person, not on phonemail.

You all really need to clear your calendars for 9/16 from 6-8PM.  Trust me.  :)  Details soon.

What if I wrote a blog post... 

I've been reading all the right ones, following all the memes.  I've been thinking...about data portability, Facebook, the iPhone, monetization, being an entrepreneur, platforms, VCs, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis. 

I have a good theory... err... Top 10 List... that ties them all together.  It's funny, too--even has some lolcats in it.  Yup...  Everyone will be talking about "meme platforms", because that's the new Web 2.0 catch phrase I created for this post.

I'll write it from my blog publishing software, and use Zemanta to suggest links, tags, metatags, keywords, related videos, suggested articles, other books you might want to buy, people you may know, lovers you have had before, fantasy baseball free agents on the upswing, and an appropriate chardonnay to go with this post.  I will not, however, check spelling.

I won't linkbait, but I can't help but quote smart folks like Robert Scoble, Fred Wilson, Om Malik, Henry Blodget, and MacRumors.

But first, I need to tell everyone I know about it--and right away.  This is too important to wait for them to read it in their Google Reader.  I'll post it to Twitter, and Hacker News, because... well..  I'm sure there are some people I know there, too.  I suppose while I'm at it, I'll tag it in del.icio.us, Digg it, StumbleUpon it, Sphere it, Reddit... it... (allow myself to introduce... myself), Newsvine it, Share it from Google Reader, since I of course read my own feed in my feedreader, you know... just to see what the feed looks like and that it's still working, Mixx it, Furl it, Ma.gnolia it, Slap it, Flip it, Rub it down, oh no!! 

And for a few close personal friends, I may IM it to them, too, just in case they didn't get my public DiggBeg.

And then...   I'll wait.

I'll wait for the inbound links and the traffic and all the blog love... and the haters, too.  That's ok.  I'm sure some troll will comment on my Friendfeed about how I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Flame war!  Everyone will start talking about it...  The Disqus comment notification e-mails start pouring in.  I respond and respond... and sometimes I respond to my own responses, creating a small tear in the space-time continuum.  I like words that have two u's in them in a row.  Am I talking in a vacuum? 

All of the sudden... BAM.  There it is... barely perceptible in small font all the way at the bottom, but it's definitely there. 

I'm on Techmeme.

Do I post a call for more links to push it up the list?  Naa... that would be pushing it.  I can't watch.  It's too much.   I need to go do something else.  I'll go monitor the del.cio.us/popular list.  OMG I'm already #3! 

Dammit...  

Stuck behind "100 CSS Hacks for people who still can't get shit to work in IE" and "50 incredible photos of children getting struck by lightning".

I'll never get past those.  Oh well...  3's pretty good I guess.

The real question is how many more RSS readers am I going to tack on?  I need to get to that next psychologically satisfying number...  the big 3000.   Of course, it's really just 1000 people who have inserted my feed into three different readers at one time or another but still... it's a nice looking number, no? 

Hmm... that gives me another idea.  Yes, that's it!  Tomorrow's post!

"Monetizing Meme Platforms...  ...in Second Life!"

The most recent tracks I've been listening to on last.fm:

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Should this guy get run over by a Mustang, please forget you read this here...

A Coney Island businessman is suing the city for damaging the Bentley he was driving when he killed a Brooklyn dad in a hit-and-run accident. Harry Shasho, who pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, says the NYPD failed to safeguard the battered black 2005 Bentley GT luxury sedan that was impounded as evidence of the fatal crash. He's asking for at least $190,000

Hit-and-run driver claims city didn't take care of his Bentley after crash

My subway car this morning, originally uploaded by ceonyc.

Last week in August... Not too crowded. The woman in the white shirt and blue jeans on the right is reading a bio of Eric Claption.

Alex and I were talking about our recruiting strategy over the weekend, which obviously will only happen if we raise our next round of financing.  He sent me these two e-mails...

"I'm thinking longer term though, we're going to raise this money, it's not an option or a question, this company is too good to not continue, I will do whatever it fucking takes."

Then...

"heh, got a little worked up there. ahem. I am prepared to assist, sir, to ensure that this company remains viable, by whatever means necessary, as I believe in it strongly  ;) "

This is why I think it's a bit silly when people post on message boards looking for a partner without much information at all.  You gotta get someone totally psyched about what you're up to, and to me, that means a lot of transparency.  Without insight into why what you're doing is so special, how is anyone going to get this crazy psyched about the company?

In Alex's case, he's psyched because not only is the company just as much mine financially as it is his, but so's the product.  I didn't come to him after all the wireframes were done and say, "Here, build this."  He joined when all I knew I wanted to do was help people figure out what they wanted to do--to solve one of the biggest problems people have in life.  We whiteboarded and explored and built the feature set together, collaboratively. 

Don't expect someone else to get really psyched about building your product.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

After Obama's selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, the AP ran with this:

"Analysis: Biden pick shows lack of confidence"

"The picks say something profound about Obama: For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn't beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack."

I'm sorry, but that's idiotic, and it really captures what's idiotic about poltics.  People think that if you have 35 years political experience, you're an "insider" and somehow you can't work for the good of the people--that you're so wrapped up in insider politics and that you're also partly the cause of everything that has happened.

Yet, if you don't have this kind of experience, people will say you're not qualified.  Damned if you do, damned if you don't. 

To me, having a relative newcomer to Washington paired up with a veteran is what I call BALANCE.   Picking someone who chairs Senate Foreign Relations Committee is what I call COMPLEMENTARY.

When I came up with the idea for Path 101, the first thing I did was look for a tech partner who had a skills set that I didn't.  How silly would it be, after I found Alex to be the CTO, for people to say, "What's the matter Charlie?  Are you afraid your technology skills aren't up to par?  Shouldn't you understand the technology better if you're going to do a web startup?"

Afraid?  No.  Self aware?  Definitely.  I understand enough about technology to know that pairing up with a technologist to focus on it makes us a strong team.

And of course, McCain will attack.  McCain's definitely been the one to bring the campaign down in the dirt, and it's unfortunate, because elections are an opportunity to have a great dialogue on direction.  Instead, we'll have a dialogue about rhetoric. 

How long before McCain brings out the reels of Biden saying Obama didn't have enough experience?  Hi, that's called campaigning.  Biden was running for president and experience was his trump card.  Of course he's going to say that to get the edge.  At the same time, when McCain loses, is he going to continue to campaign against Obama or is he going to actually work with him as a senator, who, in the past, had always sought comprimise and worked with the other side.

I applaud Obama's choice, because it means he's going to surround himself with people who comlement him who have experience and ability to execute.  I'm glad there's someone on the team who has 35 years of Washington experience.  I just never wanted that to be the guy in charge.  I want a visionary leader who will push those who execute to make the right decisions--and someone whose decisions are informed by experience and wisdom.  Joe Biden is an excellent choice for Vice President.

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I try to make contact and hit the ball the other way. I'm always making the turn at first looking out for even the slightest hesitation or bobble from the outfielder. I run everything out. I take big leads and extra bases. I will tag from third on a shallow fly ball. I slide in shorts, dusting off the blood and dirt.

In the field, I pencil in everyone else first to see what gap I need to fill--outfield, first, third, pitcher, even short if I have to (but I'd rather play short on turf). I won't make extra throws, but when I do rear back, get your glove up, because it will have a little extra on it. I yell "Call it!" as soon as the ball is in the air.

I eat fly balls for breakfast, but could be better at balls on the ground. I'm always positioned right, though.

As a manager, I play everyone. You show you play. I like high OBP at the top of a lineup before my boppers get up. I like teaching people to play new positions and want everyone to know where the ball is going before it comes to them. Run hard...just run your ass off every play. You don't need talent to just run as fast as you can on every play. You will hear me from the dugout whether or not I'm actually coaching the bases.

"Because he’s on the wrong side of nearly every issue that has caused the majority of the problems we have today."

- from Marco

The other day I signed up for the Web 2.0 Expo Conference Social Network (I'll be speaking at one of the workshops). It was powered by Crowdvine. I found it mildly annoying to have to retype my professional information when that already existed somewhere else on the web--namely LinkedIn. I tweeted that Crowdvine should integrate LinkedIn import, since I'd seen a few places hack it, and then very quickly got this response via Crowdvine's Twitter account:

  "@ceonyc We're just waiting for LinkedIn to release their API. So far they've just released the PR announcements."

It was true. It's been over a year since LinkedIn talked about releasing some kind of a platform and API's and we've seen very little. There were a few throwaway integrations into mainstream web publisher content, but little else.

Their initial move towards the platform and API talk came soon after Facebook grabbed the spotlight with its platform. After the buzz, particularly around the initial applications, died down though, it was obvious that the Facebook platform, in that incarnation, didn't live up to the hype. The quality of applications was really low, and everyday new measures needed to be put in to decrease friend spam. These measures, and the eventual redesign that pushed applications off to another page in your profile, left applications handcuffed and unable to spread as virally as they had in the past.

Initially, that made it seem like LinkedIn's wait and see approach might have paid off. Instead of opening up a platform, they focused on a redesign that made LinkedIn more user friendly.  They also focused on driving revenues, expected to be $100 million.  Facebook, meanwhile, went back to the platform drawing board, stubbing its toe on Beacon, but eventually coming out with Facebook Connect.  Crowdvine uses Facebook connect for me to see which of my Facebook friends are going to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. 

Facebook Connect allows me to bring my social graph to any application. I can see which of my Facebook friends are already using something and invite more. This gives keeping my "real network" on Facebook a direct benefit. Even Google recognizes that just because someone is in your Gmail contacts doesn't make them your friend, which is why they recently updated their address book functionality.  I think Facebook Connect is just the beginning of a second, potentially much more successful push at powering various applications by Facebook.  Lessons learned from F8 and Beacon will pay off.

In the meantime, LinkedIn remains a pretty closed place where data goes in and rarely comes out. The odd thing about Facebook's charge at being the defacto social graph for all applications is that they don't really monetize data and people--they monetize pageviews. LinkedIn is supposed to be the one that monetizes people, whether they use the site extensively or not. Recruiters pay to access LinkedIn's network of professionals.

You'd think that a site where huge revenues come from directly monetizing the presence (not even the participation) of users would be doing more to get people on it.

Facebook's value proposition to users is pretty clear: All your friends are there. Whatever functionality and applications you want to think about on top of that is gravy. You want, and dare I say at this point, need to be there because everyone else is there.

Don't get me wrong. I use LinkedIn nearly everyday, have nearly 1000 contacts, and I get a lot of value out of it. I'm in the minority, though. Most of the people I know are only on there because they got invited and do little more than accept invitations. That might bode well for the experience of being on there--most people don't get spammed--but at some point, that fails to create additional value. If you're selling people and you don't even have a quarter of the people your competitor does, you better know those people cold--and that has to come from active usage. The more I do on a site and the more that site plugs into other places that I'm active, the more data that site is going to build up on me.

That's why we're bucking the "do one thing" Web 2.0 trend at Path 101. We think that giving users a number of complimentary things to do around discovering their career interests, the better the picture of them as a potential candidate we'll be able to create--and the more people we'll capture through diverse methods.

Facebook may not have figured out how to monetize me yet, but they know me better than any other site--the data's either all there or well within reach. Perhaps Lotame, with its interesting ad platform built specifically to be powered by social network data, will be the answer.  The East Coast company, which just raised $13 million, uses user data to "target the most influential members of social networks and measure a campaign’s success as indicated by user generated content related to the brand."

I think at the end of the day, if you have a platform made of people, you've got to open up so that you can gather a much deeper understanding of who you have.  Just allowing people to connect and throwing a rather remidial free text search on top of superficial profiles has worked mostly because the alternatives--the noisey firehose of Monster and Jobs 1.0--was so bad, and the need to hire great people is so high.  Side note: What other market besides recruiting is the pain point and business criticalness of a task so high and the solution sets so bad?  To get to the next level, I believe LinkedIn will need to fully commit to a very comprehensive and even risky platform strategy--and iterate on it like Facebook has. 

Unfortunately, they might already be making too much money to bother, leaving most of it's potential on the table.

Fred posted about age today.  For a guy who's pretty cool about most things, he does have this bizarre  obsession with age--and he's worried that 47 is too close to the age where VC's start to fade.  Frankly, I think that VC's fade more because of money than because of age.  Why put in the same effort when you've got 20 million in the bank?

But Fred put this trend to bed years ago, because he made a ton of cash in the late 90's at a very early age.  By all accounts, he could have retired seven years ago--instead he's working harder than ever.  If you're not convinced, try getting on his calendar.

There are a lot of examples in my life where people don't act their age:

• My grandmother is 90.  She learned to drive in her 50's and still takes the car out all over Staten Island to go shopping and take car of errands.  She lives on her own, reads the paper everyday, and regularly cooks up a storm.
• My friend Darren has started something like 8 companies and is now the Head of Digital Media for Media Kitchen.  He's married, lives in Westchester and is now expecting his first child.  Did I mention he's only 26? 
• When I started the Fordham young alumni softball team, we had a guy sign up who listed his grad school graduation year as 1980.  I figured it was a typo, but the person who works in the alumni office handling signups said the guy was so enthusiastic that she felt too bad not to let him on.  Since then, this 52 year old guy shows up and plays harder than just about all of the 20-somethings on the field, diving for balls and steamrolling around the bases.  He calls me on the phone the day of every game to excitedly check on who's coming, what the standings are, etc.
• I originally got invited to teach about blogging at Fordham by a management professor who is nearly 70 as far as I can tell from her resume.  She had an engineering degree and worked for Lockheed as an engineer from 1960-1966.  Not only did she not fit gender stereotypes back than, but by reaching out to me to teach about social media's impact in business back in '04, she stood out from her peers on the cutting edge.

How old you are is a function of your willingness to learn new things, your ability not to let your experience close you off to new thinking, and your passion for what you do...    which pretty much makes Fred one of the youngest people I know.