But back in the day, those first 23 companies were all the rage. Like shiny new toys, they were exciting and fascinating. There was even a reality television show about them. So even though their three-month, highly-competitive startup accelerator program has ended, these companies are still around. They didn’t just vanish into thin air. (Well, some of them did).

But all of this begs the question, where are these companies now? How have they fared in the big, bad world? Did they flop? Or surpass expectations?

We didn’t know, so we decided to find out. And it turns out that we weren’t the only ones who were curious about what these companies have been up to.

“When we launched, everything was a concern,” managing director David Tisch told Betabeat in an email. “We were new, a startup.” New York City, he said, brought a unique set of challenges and advantages to these first two classes, but you never how things might turn out. So, Mr. Tisch, what’s the verdict? Have the first 23 New York City companies done TechStars proud?

“The progress shown so far is very promising,” Mr. Tisch said, “and I expect a few very big companies to emerge. There are some early standouts who have shown progress on the product side, revenue side, and team side.”

In the last year, about half of the companies raised over a million dollars in funding from investors (in addition to TechStars's initial $18,000 in each company) and only two companies failed. A third company, FriendsList, also failed, but its two cofounders shifted gears and transformed into another company, Timehop, a popular app that has since raised $1.1 million.

“I think the quality of the people we funded stands out to me,” Mr. Tisch added. “[And] as I look back at the companies from our first two classes at TechStars NYC, I am confident we have funded some amazing teams who are building big businesses.” -Jess Schiewe

You'd be hard pressed to find an aspiring banker or model or writer or actor who would need much convincing to move to New York City. Not so with tech folks. In the face of competition from the Valley and giants like Facebook and Twitter, suddenly in our midst, seven startups have banded together for a campaign called Come Work in New York that promises to ply talented developers, designers, and "business people" with $5,000 to help them move to the city if they're hired.

The list of participating companies, includes some of New York's most high-profile startups: Bit.ly, Yipit, Aviary, Ordr.in, Tutorspree, ChatID, and Dispatch. But just because they're willing to pay up doesn't make them humble. In bold lettering, the website declares, "NEW YORK IS THE GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD," and then proceeds to list reasons it is "Better" and "Awesomerer" than whenever you're living now:

TRUTH: We have the smartest and best looking people in the world, including Scarlett Johansson.

TRUTH: We have the world's best and most diverse restaurant scene. There are 23,499 here. You can eat at a different restaurant every night for the next 64.38 years.

TRUTH: Our public transit system is better than yours. Six hundred and sixty miles of tracks running 24 hours a day.

TRUTH: Speaking of tracks, you may have heard this little ditty Jay-Z and Alicia Keys wrote about us a few years ago?

You gotta give them credit. Given the desperation for devs we've been hearing about, $5,000 seems like a small-ish signing bonus. But a splashy landing page, some community spirit, and bada bing: new hiring strategy.

Have you identified which cloud the perps are in?

Our personal favorite among this recent crop of TechStars NY startups was Dispatch, mostly because we can relate to the pain point they are trying to solve.  The company gives users a single login and interface for managing their files across all their different cloud hosting services. So I can, for example, bring together all the different music I have on Dropbox, Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music.

The service raised its seed round from a host of New York names, as reported by TechCrunch. The round was led by Thrive Capital with SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, the GroupMe founders, David Tisch, Kal Vepuri and Zelkova Ventures.

Dispatch CEO Jesse Lamb had previously been working as an attorney because, as he told Betabeat, "I got hit by a car." During the aftermath Mr. Lamb came to know and like his lawyer, and ended up taking that career path for a while. But the startup life, she is a siren.

Disclosure.