By Nitasha Tiku 9/06/12 11:05am

The Media Elite

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The Rise and Fall of New York Founders on Vanity Fair’s ‘New Establishment’ List

Annie Leibovitz’s Silicon Alley photo shoot has finally made its way into print, as part of Vanity Fair’s annual “New Establishment” list. As we’d hoped, the magazine opted to pose Arianna Huffington in the sidecar of David Karp’s vintage motorcycle. (Guest appearance by Mr. Karp’s “French-English bulldog,” Clark.) Only in the version that made the October issue, Dennis Crowley is depicted emerging from a manhole, avec le swag. As before, the annual list is chockablock with tech types, but just like last year, Silicon Valley dominates.

Peter Thiel comes in at no. 37, repping for libertarian utopias between Tyler Perry and Ryan Seacrest. Elon Musk is no. 9 on the list, two rungs higher than Adele, but one spot below a new entrant: Pinterest’s Ben Silberman, no. 8. Despite Square’s caffeine-fueled growth, Jack Dorsey stayed at the no. 5 spot, but finally got the fashion props he’s been waiting for. “It’s a Prada suit; for everyday wear, it’s denim from Scott Morrison’s Earnest Sewn line, which was the first brand to use Twitter.”

Scattered among the elite are a handful of New York techies, present and accounted for. By and large, it’s the same group of people as last October, although it’s interesting to note how Vanity Fair assesses their power ranking, year-over-year. Read More

By Jessica Roy 8/23/12 8:10am

Linkages

(Photo: Noobpreneur.com)

Booting Up: Everyone Now Hates Twitter Edition

Here’s an interesting take on why Twitter is suddenly giving the finger to API devs: “I suspect the reason that Twitter is cutting off apps from using its ‘friend finder’ feature is because most people do not create content in Twitter and therefore have no incentive to use Twitter outside of the value of its graph.” [Dustin Curtis]

Fred Wilson thinks venture capital funds have grown too big and has some ideas on how to fix them. [Technology Review]

There are fewer and fewer women in Google’s inner circle, so the GOOG engineers dealt with it the only way they know how: by building a predictive algorithm to help them recruit and retain more female employees. [New York Times]

Turns out the freemium model is not exactly free for businesses. [Wall Street Journal]

Here’s why the FTC let Facebook buy Instagram. (Hint: ’cuz Facebook Camera sucks.) [TechCrunch]

By Nitasha Tiku 8/14/12 5:55pm

Teach Me How to Startup

Mr. Karnjanaprakorn

What to Expect From the New-and-Improved Skillshare? Learning By Doing in a ‘Hybrid’ Classroom

Last week, Skillshare, the disruptive teaching platform backed by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, announced a big expansion: incorporating an online element into its classes. Rather than relying on its popular in-person workshops, which Betabeat has personally employed to brush up on our coding and financial modeling skills, the startup opened its doors around the globe with “Hybrid” classes that combine those in-person workshops with “project-based online learning.”

Skillshare cofounder Michael Karnjanaprakorn came up with the idea for this hybrid approach when he was teaching his own class, “Launch Your Startup Idea for Less than $5000.″ Instead of just lecturing at students, he began asking them to present their ideas at the end of class and the results dramatically improved, leading to the creation of actual startups like RentHackr and Hashpix. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 7/31/12 12:10pm

Visiting Dignitaries

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Cover Boys! Annie Leibovitz Shoots Fred Wilson, Dennis Crowley, David Karp & More for Vanity Fair

It appears New York’s tech scene will finally have its own calling card–a glossy, cinematic affair shot by Annie Leibovitz. The celebrated photographer cordoned off the cobblestone streets of Soho yesterday to direct a photo shoot for an upcoming issue of Vanity Fair.

Let Silicon Valley have its tacky tiger-monkeyblowouts, we’ll take the Conde Nast’s version of Social Register, thank you very much. Read More

By Gary Sharma 6/18/12 4:30pm

No FOMO

F.ounders NY 2012

Gary Sharma’s Highlights from F.ounders NY 2012, the Michael Jordan of Tech Events

Ringing the closing bell at NASDAQ at the F.ounders NY 2012

This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), Founder & CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary@garysguide.com.

“First time at F.ounders?”
“Yeah, how about you?”
“I attended the one in Dublin last year.”
“Nice! Did you guys really hang out with Bono?”
“Yeah man, it was crazy!”
“I heard Obama might show up tonight.”
“No kidding. Really?”
“That’s what I heard.”
The two young twenty-something multi-millionaire startup founders looked expectantly towards the stage, wondering when POTUS would make an appearance.

Ok, so Obama was not on the agenda. But the fact that folks believed there was even a possibility speaks volumes for the quality and reputation of the event that Paddy Cosgrave, a charming 29-year-old from Ireland, had put together. Now in its third year, F.ounders is a must-attend, invite-only, ultra-exclusive annual event bringing together 150 (yup, there’s that dunbar number again) startup founder rockstars, along with a medley of top-tier investors, journalists and executives.

Bloomberg calls it Davos for Geeks. The Next Web calls it the Rolls Royce of conferences. And Mashable calls it the best event they’ve ever been to. I love basketball so I’m-a-gonna call this the “Michael Jordan of Tech Events!” Because it simply doesn’t get any better than this.

We were informed that, “Given that the CEOs and founders of over quarter of a trillion worth of ‘start-ups’ will be in Times Square on Friday, security is going to be very tight.” A quarter of a trillion. Yup, that number has a nice ring to it. Read More

By Jessica Roy 6/05/12 7:51am

Linkages

Mr. Graham (flickr.com/pragdave)

Booting Up: VCs Waxing Philosophic Edition

Startup soothsayer Paul Graham penned a letter to Y Combinator’s portfolio companies about withstanding the fallout from Facebook’s poorly-performing IPO. [Business Insider, Hacker News]

Fred Wilson wants to put Mr. Graham’s musings in perspective. [A VC]

Apple will yank Google Maps from iPhones later this year, which is just another reason why we’re quite happy with our Galaxy Nexus, thankyouverymuch. [Wall Street Journal]

GigaOm rounds up what we know about Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker’s video startup, Airtime, set to launch at a press event this morning. [GigaOm]

Oh good, there is an Instagram for animated GIFs. [Wired]

By Nitasha Tiku 5/23/12 9:00am

Silicon Alley U

Mr. Pass

Former Twitter CTO Greg Pass Tapped as Founding Entrepreneurial Officer for Cornell Tech Campus

CornellNYC Tech, the applied sciences campus slated for Roosevelt Island, isn’t wasting anytime establishing its ties to the tech industry. On Monday, Larry Page shlepped out to Chelsea (sans Google glasses, sadly) to announce that Google would gift the campus with 22,000 square feet of office space. And today the school named Greg Pass, Twitter’s first-ever CTO, founding entrepreneurial officer. It’s a much more heavyweight hire than your run-of-the-mill entrepreneur-in-residence.

Former Twitter board member Fred Wilson, for example, has lauded Mr. Pass’ considerable virtues as a technological leader, architect, and recruiter. A serial entrepreneur, Mr. Pass was also cofounder and CTO at Summize before it was acquired by Twitter and started serving as an advisory board member at Obvious Corp after stepping down from Twitter last year. Before playing a pivotal role in scaling Twitter, he spent years as a system architect and software engineer at AOL. Read More

By Rick Webb 5/10/12 1:30pm

Caught In The Webb

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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Why We’re Definitely in a Bubble

Bubbles bubbles bubbles! The talk continues. Last week the anti-bubble camp was in the ascendency. First we had a massive bubble debate on Branch.com (disclosure: I am an investor in Branch), featuring some of the best minds on the internet: Anil Dash, Dave McClure, Paul Kedrosky, Chris Sacca, Michael Arrington, MG Seigler and more. The rough consensus? No bubble.

In wrapping up the Branch debate, Seigler pointed to First Round Capital’s Josh Kopelman, and his hilarious bubble post – from 2007, no less – mocking those who continuously cry bubble, and failing to grasp the transformational power of the internet. A fair point.

Next we had Business Insider Henry Blodget’s presentation State of Startups 2012 presentation, subtitled “No, it’s not a bubble.” Many charts, graphs and points followed laying out why the bubble doesn’t exist.

I must confess, however, I’m in the pro-bubble camp, and while reading the Branch debate, I found myself jumping up and down with counter arguments on why we actually are in a bubble. And, since I’ve taken a two week vacation from this column, I figured I’d come back with a vengeance, and cogently lay out all the arguments and counter arguments. Read More