Familiar Faces
When you start going to events you start seeing a lot of people over and over again. Considering how small our nyc startup community is, you really can’t afford to screw around unless you are a hermit. If you’re social, everyone gets to know you so far. I mean, come on, how many people are really in this community? Not many. My benchmark is the 5000 on the tech meetup list but most people there are enthusiasts not startuppers or investors. Let’s crunch some numbers.
There is maybe 15 vc funds in nyc, average fund has 6 employees = 90 investors, add in ibankers and other related people that focus on seed stage and maybe we’re at 200, now add in professional angels and we’re at maybe 500 investors. Maybe there is 300 tech companies in nyc, each with 2 founders and 300 people that are top execs so we’re up to 1400 people. Let’s add in random other top tier people and we’re up to 2000. now split that in half as half the people on there are anti-social so we’re left with maybe 1000 people. Now divide that by 10 networking groups and the average has an event once a month, the average person goes to one event a month and 50 people show at the average event, we keep running into each other.
I have good feelings for the community here as a number of organizations are sprouting up and being supported. YVCS.org relaunched and is doing very well. The Hatchery launched a few months ago and is doing very well. My little group is taking off. Tri State Ventures just relaunched. All these groups are thriving. for years there was almost nothing going on and a lot of the original groups are gone - the long standing one being ibreakfast but the guard and tides are changing in a very positive way.
