This is why DAVID goes to NYC
Silicon Alley" Is Dead
Alyson Shontell, On Monday April 25, 2011, 1:11 pm EDT
Calling New York's tech community "Silicon Alley," a pun on "Silicon Valley," is over.
New York isn't some kind of wannabe anymore.
The tech community is too pervasive in New York now to describe it as some sort of segregated community.
This is just New York.
Startups like Etsy and Gilt Groupe are popping up in every borough. Companies that didn't exist last year are raising gobs of money and hiring rapidly.
NYC startups, like GroupMe and Foursquare, have been the talk of SXSW.
Every major tech company, like Google, Apple, and Facebook, now has an office in New York City.
Incubators are everywhere too, from WeWork Labs and DogPatch Labs, to New Work City and General Assembly.
Venture capitalist David Pakman said he realized a change had permanently come to New York when he attended the Techstars NYC event last week.
"There were more than 500 investors there. I didn't know there were 500 in all of New York!"
The amount of funding in New York has been steadily rising too. Owen Davis, managing director of NYC Seed, says seed rounds are up "50 percent from where they were a couple of years ago, and that valuations are up as much as 30 percent over the last year."
Silicon Valley has decades of tech startups under its belt, starting with the early days of Intel and Apple. It's a mature, older sibling to the eager east coast.
New York City is in its awkward adolescence; in the next few years, it could grow up to become something unfathomably awesome. But not just in Silicon Alley -- startups are taking over all of New York.