Recap of NYC Council Committee on Technology Public Hearing

Yesterday I attended the NYC Council Committee on Technology at City Hall in NYC. It was my first time at an event regarding how the government can help technology startups and boost the sector. The discussion was lead by Council Member Gale A. Brewer. It’s great to see that the city wants to try to help technology startups.

I will have an additional post with my comments soon. Below are my notes from the event — I don’t know all of the names, if you have any of the names, leave them in the comments and I will update the post. I can also add links to any of the testimony.

The videos from the event are available on Livestream.

The first hour was spent with the New York Economic Development Corp. (EDC). If I had to sum up the hour in one word it would be “incubators”. It seemed like the only thing the woman said for an hour was “we have 2 incubators running now and we are opening more”. Apparently the city is going to start a seed-based investment fund in 2010 which will match private investments.

Mrs. Brewer did an excellent job grilling the EDC about specifics and action plans although it seemed like the only two responses were “we don’t know, have to come back to you” and “incubators”. It seems there will be a NYC media lab setup to bring together the university and private sector.

The two incubators that are running currently are The Hive at 55 which is setup for 1,800 freelancers annually and 160 Varick which can house 42 companies (only setup for 33 currently). There’s a waiting list of about 80 companies – wish I would have known about this as I’d love to get my startup into an incubator space.

Mrs. Brewer asked about whether any of the companies in the incubator had hired other persons and if the companies were generating any revenue. EDC had no answer.

Council Member Diana Reyna asked the EDC if there was anything else they need to be offering tech startups in NYC. EDC response was “not currently”. This made me realize that the EDC is clearly not setup to help tech startups. I had 10 discussions with a diverse group of startups post-event and there is plenty the city can do for us. I am going to work on a list for publication shortly. Mrs. Brewer made some good points about the differences between traditional brick-and-mortar startups and technology-based startups.

There’s a plan to launch more incubators across the 5 boroughs in 2010 although no locations were named as of yet. Council Member Letitia James noted that there is plenty of space in downtown Brooklyn.

Next up was a woman from the NYC Seed Fund. She discussed four components that are needed for NYC to attract and retain technology startups:

1. technology and industry talent
2. funding – she noted that they are seeing many more venture funds in NYC
3. venture networks – this is one of the reasons Silicon Valley is so successful
4. trained workforce

Nate Westhimer from the NY Tech Meetup presented next – you can read his testimony here. He believes that the city should incentivize non-NYC workers to move here. Nate also seemed to indicate that all of the meetups that have started recently are because of the tech meetup noting that the meetup is a platform. (his time to speak was limited as was all following persons so please read his full transcript)

Next up (I believe) was a man from a venture fund in NYC who basically said there is no actual tech community here.

Charlie O’Donnell from First Round Capital and nextNY spoke next. His commentary was interesting because he basically countered everything the previous man said and I could see that Charlie was getting ready to jump down the guy’s throat when he said there is no community here.

Charlie believes that there is a thriving community in NYC and pointed to a party thrown by FourSquare the previous evening as proof. Later in the day via a Twitter conversation, the previous speaker and Charlie had a conversation on Twitter regarding the party-community comment.

Charlie continued that NYC is the best place to run a startup on the East coast. He noted that it’s a better place than Philly or Boston and he wouldn’t compare NYC to the valley because they “have 30 years on us”. He concluded by noting that the junior people in the city council should be getting out to more events around the city.

I left the hearing at this point.

Additional testimony:

• Jalak K. Jobanputra, Senior Vice President – New York City Investment Fund
• Hermann Mazard, CEO , HomeShop Technologies