Tech Community 3.0 - My Thoughts…

 Richie Hecker Nov 29, 2008

So a lot has been said lately about what the next revision of Silicon Alley should look like.

Silicon Alley 1.0: The first Silicon Alley can best be characterized by ritzy parties and Jason Calacanis and Alley Reporter. (Props go out to Alan Brody, Courtney Pulitzer, Alan Meckler, Jonathan Sarno etc…) … the end of Alley 1.0 can best be seen by the demise of NYMNA.

Silicon Alley 2.0: The second generation of Silicon Alley has been a grassroots resurgence and a relative flight of capital which can be summarized through the guise of Scott Heiferman and Tech Meetup. A lot less money going around the community and a lot more grass roots organizations and events.

Silicon Alley 3.0 So now that Tech Meetup is about to change hands and take on potentially a new identity, we need to ask ourselves, what is NYC really missing?

I think we should look at the parallels of the internet industry as a whole as a guide for what our community should look like. I started talking about this a month back at the Web 3.0 Conference that I co-produced for Jupiter Media and what my opinion of the internet is that Web 1.0 was the creation of the tools to push content, Web 2.0 brought community around content and Web 3.0 will be about understanding what we’ve already created - the synthesis of Web 1.0 & Web 2.0.

For our community what does it mean? We already have all the primary resources we need to take our community a step forward.

We have plenty of people. The meetup has 7500 people and I would say there is an additional 7,500 people spread out across all the other groups. The mass firings from the financials will only add to the pool of people willing to jump into a startup.

We have capital. Despite, the markets crash and VC belt tightening, there is capital. Yes, It’s not easy to tap into but there is capital out there. I am part of a new Angel Network that is launching and will be actively engaging with the community to finance the latest slate of great ideas. However, we need the venture community to step up as a whole and make themselves accessible to entrepreneurs and provide feedback. I suggested previously setting up neutral grounds and allowing VC’s to host open office hours with anyone who wants to come in, either to pitch a few at a time or one fund and get some real in your face feedback. This will hopefully help focus entrepreneurs early on.

I would suggest starting another event: What’s your idea? Where we allow people 2 minutes to pitch an idea to a panel for 5 minutes of rapid fire feedback. The goal is to help focus on entrepreneurs before they’ve spent their life savings. The Hatchery’s last event was a great start.

We have community. We have 30 or so organizations that produce community events. We have Garys Guide providing event listings.

We have successful entrepreneurs. We have a lot of entrepreneurs and successful entrepreneurs. We have a number of finance guys that have been around the block as well. Most people don’t need a lot of advice. They really need an hour every few weeks for someone to tell them how full of shit they are and to force them to focus and execute. Advice coming from successful people give advice credibility. Advice on specific topics such as marketing, legal etc… is really another issue.

What are we missing?

1. A funnel so people know where to go for what
2. Access to advice.
3. Openness

What can we fix?

Meetup is the default starting place for most people in the community but it’s unclear where to go from there. My premise is to make the path from Meetup to the rest of the community clear, turning it into a funnel and formal central resource. None of what I list below requires much more additional resources that what is already being spent in the community right now. It’s a matter of organization it.

a. Organization. Create a directory of people and service providers and allow anyone to leave comments and ratings on them. (Perhaps simply referring people to Garys Guide to solve this)

b. Intimacy. Using half of meetup time to encourage people to meet in small groups where everyone can say “What they have to offer” and “what they need” - i have used this format successfully many times and it gets people to open up and try to help each other - to try to make the large meetup a little smaller. Also, bring back announcements and allow people to make 30 second announcements.

c. Access. Encourage the creation of new meetups, integration of existing meetups or partner with NYSIA, SIIA and existing groups so that we have focused OFFICIAL listservs and groups where people can come looking for developers, cofounders, capital, legal advice, marketing advice etc… - in theory there are meetups that so all of this - it needs to be organized into a process so people can come to the site and know to go to this place or that and promote the subgroups at the main one so people who add value can easily join and help people and get engaged.

d. Openness. The community needs to be more open and connected with the rest of nyc and make it easier for entrepreneurs to provide access to capital. VC’s should be more open, provide more feedback and engage the community a lot closer. Perhaps it is partnering with VIANY, NYCVC and the litany of angel groups in the area and making it easier for people to know who to talk to for what. We also need to make in roads with the ad industry and also the corporate community to bring monetization (advertising & enterprise) and exit (corp development) to the table. This could simply be offering promotion and making sure there is an open relationship between various parties so information and connections flow.

e. Community Support. We need to engage the City of New York to get them involved in the community. One small grant can pay for a small staff to oversee turning our ad-hoc community into an organized force creating even more jobs in NYC. It would also be about organizing political lobbying trips to push the agenda forward. We have people doing this already but its’ not necessarily representative of the entire ecosystem.

Related Entries:

Email This Email This

One Response to “Tech Community 3.0 - My Thoughts…”

  1. James from FaceySpacey.com Says:
    November 30th, 2008 at 12:34 am

    Rich, I particularly like “D.” I think a lot of what must happen is we need to get to a point where other related industries take our community seriously, and firstly know about it. They need to look up to us for our “tech advice” and know there is a super community to help them pave the way internally within their companies in terms of what we both can call “social media” (but really know is just a wave of tools, technologies and trends that really can benefit them).

    I think “D” is really the path. There are so many companies trying to dibble dabble in Web 2.87 viral self-marketing widgets/applications/etc, but are failing. Often it’s because they are doing just that: dibble dabbling! I’ve helped all sorts of clients implement social widgets and applications to varying degrees of success, and the ones that succeeded were the ones that went all the way, and invested the extra 33% or whatever to develop a product that wasn’t just a bunch of thrown together generic social features without a core product concept that was envisioned from a marketing perspective.

    Basically, we need to go to the media companies (and really any company with an online presence that they want to grow), and bring our best to their aid. I’m not sure exactly how it will pan out, but I see them injecting a whole bunch of fuel back into our community as a result.

    So to finish my little comment here off, I’d like to suggest an idea: we have some community event where we assess big NYC media companies and offer, invent and GIVE social-media-2.0-whatever-u-want-to-call-it ideas and advice to these companies. It might sound grandiose, but if we were able to bring 5-10 (maybe 10-20) of these companies to one event just for them where we show them what the whole organic social media web 2.0 thing is all about, it would have a lot of positive side-effects…Doing this sort of thing is exactly what the whole social media thing is all about. It’s what good marketing has always been about. I don’t know if you’re an SEO expert, but my favorite SEO tactic that works better than anything is writing link-bait articles that essentially upsell other bloggers and websites and give them a sort of kudos with links to them. You already know what I’m talking about, either way.

    So the question is just whether they are willing to accept this gift, and whether they care. I think if some of the top guys in the Meetup group and in our community can get the big companies they work with to do this, we could make it happen.

    …So what am I really talking about doing here? Here’s how it would look:

    1) a bunch of companies signup, and we all know who they are a month ahead of time.
    2) we build a sort of idea board for people to post ideas of how to utilize the latest technologies to benefit their businesses
    3) we pick out the best ideas–maybe like 10 ideas per company. And we kind of award the idea submitter for coming up with the ideas.
    4) those 10 people each get to present their idea to the company there ideas was for, with help from the rest of our community. In other words, we’ll make sure to really develop the idea with them (even if it just ends up being 2 people like me and u really taking 100 ideas home in the last 3 days, if u know what I mean). Either way, we make sure to make the ideas presentable (e.g. powerpoints, videos, etc), and then we let the idea creator present it with our aid.
    5) maybe we do a Q&A from regular people (i.e. people not in the company).
    6) and we let representatives from each company have maybe their own Q&A or some time for them to share, without putting too much pressure on them. Maybe they simply rate each idea/presentation, and it comes some sort of contest and the companies give out the awards after all the companies have received their ideas.
    7) and then we setup some sort of panel to help them develop the idea, probably based on volunteers. I know the idea is to eventually be injecting money into the community from these guys, but I think if we give, it will be returned 10-fold. So basically, people like you and I would have to become volunteer product managers. But we would have other people signup to do this. The only thing is that many of them might not be nearly qualified enough, and end up being more of a destructive resource (no offense to anybody). We’d just need to have some sort of mechanism for quality control, which really doesn’t matter if I get lambasted for coming up with a totally impossible idea…

    …So that’s my idea. In general, these sort of corporate companies take forever to execute these sort of campaigns, and when they do, they make an “elf yourself” style customizable e-card widget and think they’re really pushing the envelope, but end up disappointed when their ROI sucks. The result is: “fuck that social media shit.” On that note, real quick, to me it’s just about being a first mover with innovative technology (or inventor), and has nothing to do with “social media.” And that’s the sort of aid and guidance we can bring to these companies. The way most of these companies start on this route is generally with a 20 something year old that just learns about social media and then after 8 months convinces the CEO to do some half backed social application clone…What I’m saying is: THEY NEED THIS SORT OF GUIDANCE! Basically, a lot of these companies don’t have the right talent in-house (I won’t go in to why they don’t).

    Anyway, what do you think of the plausibility of such an event?

Leave a Reply