Ms. Jobanputra

A few weeks ago we told you that RTP Ventures—the U.S. arm of ru-Net, the $700 million fund founded by Russian billionaire Leonid Boguslavsky—was on its way to naming "two splashy new hires" to join senior managing director Kirill Sheynkman. Although word got out early, as of this week, both hires have been officially announced, as well as the size of the U.S. fund: $120 million.

Battery Ventures alum Murat Bicer is RTP's managing director in Boston and Jalak Jobanputra, the former director of emerging market mobile investments at  Omidyar Network, will be RTP's managing director in New York, joining Mr. Sheynkman at the firm's Third Avenue office in Midtown.

"Kirill started first investing Leonid’s money on the cloud computing and infrastructure side and I joined to look at more the consumer internet," Ms. Jobanputra, who blogs at The Barefoot VC, told Betabeat earlier this week.

She has considerable experience in the category. Prior to her work with Omidyar, Ms. Jobanputra was senior vice president at the New York City Investment Fund where she invested in startups TxVia and Outside.in (the latter was acquired by AOL). At RTP, Ms. Jobanputra said she will be looking at verticals like e-commerce and ad-tech, which she finds "particularly interesting."

Ms. Jobanputra has investment experience in emerging markets like India, Turkey, and Latin America, all of which fits well with RTP's interest in cross-border deals "as Leonid looks to build out ru-Net," she said.

"It’s a very global market even at the startup level," she said, "I’ve been investing for awhile and I’ve seen more and more companies want to access overseas and learn how to acquire customers and users in some of these markets." RTP's international expertise should give them an edge. But that doesn't mean RTP won't be looking closer to home.

"New York, as we know, is a very nascent and growing tech market.  Kirill and I see tremendous opportunity and growth in this market. We’re also focusing on series A deals," she said, adding that, as opposed to the West Coast, there's more of a need to help companies scale beyond seed rounds. "In terms of the funding gap, we're geographically well-positioned."

RTP has already made a number of investments, so announcing the $120 million fund was more of a formalization of the work the firm has already been doing. The capital available to the fund through ru-Net "makes it attractive for later stage deals as our portfolio companies need more," Ms. Jobanputra said, comparing it to Union Square Ventures' Opportunity Fund.

In the near-term, she said, part of her focus will be on putting the syndicates together. Mr. Sheynkman, for example, has already co-investing with IA Ventures. As for RTP's investment philosphy, Ms. Jobanputra added,  "It’s about being entrepreneur friendly, it’s a very quick approval process, we can move very quickly, it’s not this huge hierarchical partnership."

We! Are! New York Tech! (And so are you!)

On a recent Wednesday evening, all the red plush seats in the large, two-tiered auditorium at NYU’s Skirball Center were filled, as they usually are for the monthly assembly of the New York Tech Meetup, the largest organization of Internet professionals in the city. But the twittering audience members were about to hear some bad news they probably already knew: New York is No. 2.

Scott Heiferman, the sandy-haired founder known to smash iPads on stage for dramatic effect, flipped through slides ranking cities around the world by their tech meetup ecosystems. Chicago was No. 5; Washington, D.C. was No. 4, and London was No. 3. He reached a screen labeled TOP TWO TECH TOWNS, and he stopped. “So the Bay Area and New York,” he said mischievously, as the techies giggled and agitated in their seats. “Let’s get into this right now. Leeeeet’s take a look at this.”

The next slide showed two lines, red and blue, zig-zagging in tandem—but Silicon Valley was consistently a cut above. “Isn’t it crazy that we have been neck and neck with the Bay Area for month after month after month?” Mr. Heiferman asked the audience. “I think that has to change. And I think we need to let a little aggression out. Does anyone have an iPad?”
Nobody did—or rather, nobody offered to hand one over. But it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine Mr. Heiferman sledgehammering a tablet from the Cupertino-based company to make his point.

The rivalry between the coastal tech hubs is not entirely friendly. “The NYC tech scene is exploding,” investor and entrepreneur Chris Dixon wrote in February 2010, an early instance of the now-common trope of pairing the words “New York City tech” with the word “exploding” (alternatively, “blowing up”; also “killing it,” “crushing it”). “Am I the only person in NYC rolling their eyes at this continual barrage of ‘IN NYC IT RAINS MANNA FROM THE SKY!’?” one commenter wrote. Fans of the East or West Coast volleyed in the comments. New York was accused of being frivolous, blustery, and “startup suicide.” California was called out for being a monoculture.

Over the last few years, the rhetoric in Silicon Alley has started to sound like a Bring It On sequel. The rhetoric is dominated by two themes: boostery New York exceptionalism—in September 2009, the high-profile investor Fred Wilson gave a talk called “NYC’s Startup Scene: What makes it special?”—and the David and Goliath narrative, with Silicon Valley as the reigning champion versus New York as the cool, scrappy young challenger.

Even City Hall is on the squad. “My ultimate goal is reclaiming our title as the world capital of technological innovation,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said back in July. When a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News called to say he was “planning a column on the budding rivalry between our two regions,” the receptionist answered: “What rivalry? We’re winning!”

Rachel Sterne, whose appointment as the city’s first “chief digital officer” last year immediately started trending on Twitter within New York, is probably New York’s head tech cheerleader, trumpeting startup minutiae to her 29,490 followers.

Given that the three-year-old debate really hasn’t changed much, some feel it’s time to stop the pep rally and get to the game.

“The West Coast can claim it won round one of whatever ridiculous battle this is all about, but it really depends on when you start the ‘fight,’” said Aaron Price, an entrepreneur in residence at DFJ Gotham Ventures and founder of the New Jersey Tech Meetup. “Do they want talk pharmaceutical or telephony? I didn’t think so. It’s all pointless and self-serving. Let’s just all get back to work and build awesome companies that can have offices employing people all throughout the country and the globe.”

In May, the Brooklyn-based tech blogger Courtney Boyd Myers wrote a blog post for The Next Web called “Why New York City’s Tech Scene is Thriving.” It was very well-received. “Should Rachel Sterne stop talking about how New York City is ready to be the social media and technology center of the world? Absolutely not,” she wrote in an email. “That would be like forcing a father to stop telling his daughter she’s brilliant, beautiful and capable of saving the world.”

But, she acknowledged, “We need to stop comparing ourselves to Silicon Valley. We should be celebrating our differences and figuring out innovative ways to collaborate, not fighting for VC money or attention in the press. It is the World Wide Web after all.”

Rachel Sklar, a Canadian lawyer-turned-tech and media consultant and founder of Change the Ratio, got into the tech scene around the time the cheerleading started really ramping up. Since then, she’s become adept at baton twirling for New York tech. She’s done publicity for several New York startups, formally and informally. Last year, when many New Yorkers traveled to the South by Southwest Interactive tradeshow for the first time, Ms. Sklar managed a Twitter account called @NYxSW. (Sample tweet: “Congrats on an awesome SXSW, folks! Tweet at us and tell us how you crushed it, so we can RT and give you your due. #NYCrushingIt.”) Recently, Ms. Sklar roped in dozens of local founders, engineers and investors to lipsync lyrics about New York tech—New York underdogs / We can make it here, make it here—in a music video played at a benefit for HackNY, a nonprofit initiative that pits New York tech against another behemoth, Wall Street. “Every NY Tech Person And Their Dog Made A Cameo In This Music Video,” wrote Business Insider blogger Allyson Shontell, who also appeared in the video.

Most of the cheerleading and nyah-nyahs plays out in blog fights, however.

“I feel like the Valley started it,” said Ms. Sklar, who said she doesn’t “have a dog in this fight” despite her efforts to market New York tech. “I remember reading some long ranty article.”

Was it “Face It: NYC Is Not The Best Place For A Startup,” authored by former New Yorker Matt Mireles in February 2010?

“It wasn’t Matt Mireles,” she said. She’s had other blog fights with Mr. Mireles. “It was this guy, Antonio something. It was obnoxious.”

That blog post was titled, “New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what Chris Dixon or Ron Conway or Paul Graham say.” It was written in August 2010 by Antonio Garcia-Martinez, the founder of a startup that was later acquired by Twitter, and it ended with a challenge: “I promise to wear one of those ridiculous ‘I NY’ shirts you buy for $3 from the Nigerians in Times Square for an entire month if the total amount of New York–based startup funding, as reported in Crunchbase, exceeds that of Bay Area-based startups in any financial quarter during the next five years.”

He concluded, “So…bring it, New York. ‘Cause I say the hippies from California will continue to eat your lox.”

Perhaps that jeering bet is what’s kept the bicoastal battle alive even after the city surpassed Boston in venture capital invested in Internet companies in 2011. New York now has a stable of plausibly successful companies, including Foursquare, Etsy and Tumblr; and with both a Facebook engineering headquarters and the Cornell-Technion tech campus on the way, one would be hard-pressed to deny the city its tech cred. California dreamer Paul Graham, who finds New York intolerable, especially when the humidity causes sweat to bead above his upper lip, encourages the startups at his incubator, Y Combinator, to stay in the Bay Area. But even Mr. Graham acknowledged on a recent visit that “New York is definitely now solidly in the No. 2 spot.” By this and many metrics, the city seems to have arrived. So why the persistent Valley-baiting?

Kirill Sheynkman, a former Silicon Valley resident who heads up the New York branch of RTP Ventures, a $750 $700 million fund based in Russia, likes to compare the New York tech scene to a football player stammering through a history report and then blurting out, “San Dimas High School football rules!” in a panic, a scene from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

“There’s a lot of talk about Silicon Valley in New York City, a lot of comparison. I think it’s the underdog syndrome,” Mr. Sheynkmann said, though he added that the “star quality” of New York startups, which tend to be highly visible and impeccably-branded, might have something to do with the messaging.

“I don’t see a need to compete,” he said. “The two cities are different! They focus on different areas of tech. Tech is vast. It’s like science. Science is a broad concept.”

New York talks about itself for two reasons, he said. First: it’s in the city’s nature. Second: there is pressure to tell a compelling story in order to attract talent and capital.

Still, as much as New York tech loves itself, some are wary of talking too much talk.

“I just think it’s a little bit of a wasted effort,” said Kyle Bragger, who recently returned from a session at Mountain View's 500 Startups for his startup Forrst. “Is it really productive to have yet another blog post debate about the latest ‘New York is better or worse than other city,’ or ‘City A is better or worse than City B’?”

Maybe the persistent marketing served a purpose when New York was getting on its feet. But at this point the local tech scene is at least toddling, if not walking. “We call it the flywheel effect,” said Lucas Nelson, an associate at DFJ Gotham Ventures. “Is the flywheel going? Can it sustain itself, or do you still need to put energy in it?”

New York needs big exits and role models more than it needs savvy marketing, he said. “I think the underdog thing is getting pretty old pretty quickly,” he said. “I don’t want to dissuade anyone who is cheerleading in New York. But in the end, no amount of cheerleading will take the place of smart, experienced angels, or smart experienced anything.”

Others pointed out that the marketing for New York tech tends to get competitive mostly because talent and capital are scarce. “We need to keep investing in the ecosystem and evangelizing what is going on here,” Mr. Wilson wrote in an email. “Students still leave the CS programs at Columbia, Princeton, and NYU and go to Silicon Valley. That means we still need to market NYC.”

A survey of local tech professionals suggested that the boosterism is likely to continue. “NY tech talking NY tech is fine,” Alex Taub, head of business development at Aviary, said in an email. “I don’t think it’s an insecurity thing—I think it’s just topical because NY tech is really thriving. Real businesses are being built and scaling here.”

New York may not be insecure, but there seems to be plenty of demand for self-validation. Two entrepreneurs have organized New York Tech Day, a “science fair for startups” to “celebrate New York’s awesome startup ecosystem” in April. More concretely, it’s going to be a gigantic one-day expo at the block-sized Lexington Ave. Armory, with 200 startup booths, more sponsor and vendor booths, and a few thousand attendees rotating through.

It will followed by an awards show.

A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of February 20, 2012.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said Rachel Sklar moved to New York two years ago; that is incorrect. She has been in the city for 13 years. Betabeat regrets the error.

(flickr.com/usnationalarchives)

Underlit bars and blaring techno set the scene at the Park Avenue Armory earlier this month, when a who’s who of New York’s tech scene gathered in the cavernous block-length building for the sort of startup event that bore little resemblance to the usual beer, pizza and Powerpoint office gathering. No, this was a fashion show; a nerdy fashion show, to be sure, but one with glamour and theatrics. Raise Cache, a fundraiser for the apprentice developer program HackNY, tapped local tech personalities to walk the runway outfitted in glasses from local e-prescriber Warby Parker, slacks from e-tailor Bonobos and accessories from e-jeweler Bauble Bar. Larger-than-life cartoon avatars lorded over the crowd from the DJ booth as amateur DJs spun tracks using Union Square-based streaming music startup Turntable.fm. Founders and VCs milled about in gowns, coattails, pinstriped vests, glittery tights and cowboy hats. A recording of Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has been pumping his pom-poms for the New York tech scene of late, boomed out at the close of the show: “Now more than ever, [New York] is the place for to be for tech soirees!”

That seems to be the consensus among a contingent of New York founders who made the pilgramge to the tech mecca of Silicon Valley but have returned to be part of an up-and-coming scene, as well as for the nightlife, the restaurants, and the higher baseline average peer attractiveness. “There's a lot more good-looking people in New York,” one founder told Betabeat. “Don't quote me about that, but if it's something you want to work that into the story, there's definitely something there.”

In the past, incubator programs in Silicon Valley contributed to a techie brain drain from East to West. Paul Graham, the architect of the prestigious startup accelerator Y Combinator, insists Silicon Valley is the best place to start a company, and often counsels his startup acolytes to set up shop nearby. The vast majority of the Y Combinator alumni network is in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Mountain View and San Francisco. Tales of New York-based founders like Matt Mireles, a Columbia graduate and uber-hustler founder of a video transcription startup, shipped out to the Valley when they found themselves struggling in New York are common. “But if you're a schmoe like me and you've got a big, world-changing dream, NYC is not the best place for you,” Mr. Mireles wrote in a heavy-hearted blog post about the move in February 2010. “The odds are already stacked against you. Being outside the Valley just stacks them higher.”

Whatever the reason, a passel of companies have recently boomeranged back to the city after a season on the far shore. The longtime tech mantra of ‘go West, young founder” is being revised for the simple reason that New York’s tech scene is up-and-coming, more social and more fun. Recent Y Combinator grads Codecademy, The Fridge, MessageParty, Hirehive and Tutorspree all moved back the New York within the past 18 months. Sam Rosen, plucked from Flatiron’s General Assembly for the Mountain View accelerator 500 Startups by superangel Dave McClure, returned after the program ended.  “My friends in New York City—one would be in marketing, my good friend was a producer at MTV, other friends are lawyers. Whereas in the Valley you go to the party and everyone is in tech,” he told Betabeat in January. “It’s not like I’m tired of talking about my company, but it’s all we talk about.” Josh Weinstein, founder of the Facebook competitor CollegeOnly who later pivoted to interactive web television with a startup called YouAre.TV, ventured out to the Valley to work with a cofounder and be closer to investor Peter Thiel. In September, he returned—mostly because the cofounder bailed on him, but partly because he felt “isolated,” he said.

Amanda Peyton, MIT business school graduate and proud owner of a 212 cell phone number, moved out to Menlo Park in the summer of 2010 to participate in Y Combinator with her cofounders of the mobile blogging platform MessageParty. “It reminded me of Westchester, where I grew up,” she told Betabeat. “We had a lot of space where we lived, and the grocery store was really big and nice and things like that.” At the end of the summer, she and her roommates found out they had been living in the three-bedroom house that Lisa Brennan Jobs, Steve Jobs’s daughter, grew up in. The house was also next to Sand Hill Road, where all the big VC firms are, but there were only two places to eat within walking distance: Safeway, and a well-loved bar called the Dutch Goose.

At the end of the program, Ms. Peyton started talking to friends and colleagues about where to go next. “I had two arguments for going back to New York,” she said. “One was more of a macro trends argument about how there's so many industries in New York that are going through truly fundamental shifts... but then I was talking to one guy, and he was like, why don't you just admit that the reason you want to move back to New York is because you want to live in New York? And I was like: you're totally right. I just want to.”

Ms. Peyton and her team are now ensconced in the former Williamsburg coworking space The Makery (currently transforming into the office of conversation-logger Bnter). “There's just more stuff to do in New York,” she said. “There's more places to eat, more people to hang out with. I just learned how to work smarter. Yeah I have cut down the hours a little bit, but I don't feel like I'm any less productive. I just don't feel like I'm only working.”

Same Same, but Different! 15 Parallels Between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley [SLIDESHOW] >>

Beyond the pizza and the social scene, New York’s startup support network is booming. There are more tech companies starting, more investors scouting for tech companies, more rockstar startups—Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter, Tumblr, to name a few—and more developers teaching themselves the lightweight coding skills that power much of the consumer internet. There have also been some high-profile exits, including GroupMe’s $85 million sale to Skype and Hunch’s $80 million acquisition by eBay, both in the last six months.

New York also embodies a camaraderie and enthusiasm that derives from being a relatively unproven startup hub still forging an identity.

RRE Ventures principal Tom Loverro, who recently moved back to New York after four years at a startup in Silicon Valley and a stint in Chicago, was impressed by the Raise Cache techie fashion show. “The New York Tech Scene has not only arrived, but it is different and it is defining its own trajectory,” he wrote in a blog post. “It is characteristically and unabashedly New York. The event itself was a fashion show. It was young and full of 21-35 year old urbanites.”

Kirill Sheynkman, who heads up the U.S. arm of RTP Ventures, a $750 $700 million fund based in Russia, was more cynical. “It’s great to have that attitude, but it’s [like] a high school football team,” he said. “What was the line from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? ‘San Dimas High School football rules!’”

Mr. Sheynkman spent most of his career in Silicon Valley as a former entrepreneur in residence at Sequoia Capital and venture partner at Greycroft before he moved to New York and became enamored of the city.

Traditionally there have been three reasons for starting a company in the Valley, he said. “For a long time the VCs in the Valley would only invest in local companies. That has changed,” he said. ”The old saying of, ‘I'm not going to invest anything unless I can drive to the board meeting’ … was in the days before we had Skype and iChat and Go To Meeting. Now you have weekly status meetings on video and they're just as great as being there. It was a little bit of an attitude. ‘You have to come to us and not us come to you.’”

The second argument is that when a company gets started, the top priority is hiring the right people. While there is more techie talent in Silicon Valley, he said, there is also a higher concentration of startups and significantly more established tech companies to suck that talent up. “Prices are higher in the Valley than they are in New York,” he said. “Although New York isn't cheap in terms of hiring people.”

The third argument is that there is a more active tech scene in the Valley, he said. “In terms of meeting people and hanging out, New York is much better. It's in the nature of the city to go out there and network and be social.” He pointed to Meetup.com, a ten-year-old New York-based startup that serves up tech rendezvous on every topic from Javascript to Hadoop to Twitter etiquette. “It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous,” he said. “There's a meeting every night somewhere.”

Indeed, the number of recurring tech events on Meetup.com has wildly accelerated: Startup Lunch, 193 members; Dumbo Tech Breakfast, 783 members; UWS Startup Meetup, 240 members; the New York Technology Bathhouse Meetup, 31 members; the Wall Street to Startups Meetup, 98 members.

And yet, “there's still a lot of learning that I think New York has to do,” Mr. Sheynkman said.  “A lot of the companies are in love with doing a startup for the sake of doing a startup. They're MBAs that think instead of a career at Goldman, we're going to do a startup company!” We imagined him rolling his eyes on the other end of the line. “You know, you actually might want to do your thing at Goldman Sachs, it might actually be better for you.”

By way of disclaimer, he added: “I'm a New Yorker, I'm never leaving Manhattan. I love the city. Let’s make sure we mention that.“

“I get the impression that there tend to be proportionally more folks in New York that are trying to start companies but have no fucking clue what they're doing,” Fitocracy CEO Brian Wang told Betabeat by Gchat. He and his cofounder, Dick Talens, are subletting their apartment in Clinton Hill while they complete a session at 500 Startups. “Granted, I don't think I have a fucking clue either.”

At any rate, he plans to head back east when the program is over. “We're pretty set on returning to New York,” he said. “Both Dick and I enjoy New York City as a place to live immensely. Honestly, that's 95 percent of the reason. The other five percent for me, is probably the hope and expectation that the New York City scene will continue to grow and mature and that we can call ourselves an important part of that.”

Same Same, but Different! 15 Parallels Between Silicon Alley and Silicon Valley [SLIDESHOW] >>

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article identified Tom Loverro as a partner at RRE Ventures; that is incorrect. He is a principal. Betabeat regrets the error.

MAMRAM? I'll have to call you back. Mark Pincus on line 2.

Recently Betabeat told you about Kirill Sheynkman, the Silicon Valley veteran who was investing big bucks for Russia's number two tech titan. Last night at the TechStars NY after party, we met Ron Rofe, the point man for Vaizra Seed Fund, which was sponsoring the party.

"We've been making investments here for a while, but now we are doing business here full time," Mr. Rofe, dressed in a slick silver suit with a white pocket square, told Betabeat. "Increasingly the talent from the financial sector is being unlocked, and we think a lot of young tech companies here are poised to capture that."

Mr. Rofe has an interesting backround, according to his Crunchbase. He was an officer in the Israeli Defense Force, where he headed MAMRAM, the top technology unit in the IDF. This summer, we wrote about how elite IDF programming units like MAMRAM and 8200 function as feeders for Israeli startups, some of whom are bypassing the Valley to head for New York. After that Mr. Rofe founded Plarium.com, Russia and Eastern Europe’s biggest Social Gaming company.

So a hi-tech warrior who co-founded the Russian equivalent of Zynga. Not your average track for a VC.

The Vaizra Seed Fund is the early stage arm of Vaizra investments. The founder at Vaizra is a gentleman named Yitzchak Mirilashvili, who, according to his Crunchbase: "Founded VK.com, the biggest social network in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, with over 135 million users; recently sold a 7.5% stake to DST for $1.5 billion; remains the largest individual shareholder of vk.com."

So either we've got some fascinating new players in the New York scene or these guys are really good at writing their own Crunchbase profiles. Betabeat hopes to reach out to Mr. Rofe this afternoon and learn more.

RTP Ventures' Kirill Sheynkman

Everyone in the tech world knows Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire and Facebook investor with a $100 million Silicon Valley mansion. Fewer Americans are are familiar with Leonid Boguslavsky, who ranks right behind Mr. Milner at no. 2 on Forbes list of powerful figures in the Russian tech establishment.

But that may change quickly with the opening of RTP Ventures, the U.S. arm of a $750 $700 million fund. RTP's U.S. arm is based in New York and managed by Kirill Sheynkman, a former EIR at Sequoia, venture partner at Greycroft, and a well-established veteran of Silicon Valley. "I've lived most of my career in Silicon Valley and that is where I founded my companies, but I fell in love with New York. I'm a city person and this is the best place for me to run this new venture," Mr Sheynkman told Betabeat by phone.

RTP Ventures has a unique complexion for a VC fund. "Because Leonid is basically the GP and the LP, we didn't have to form a thesis and go out to pitch investors. This is money he made investing in tech, not coal or oil."

Mr. Boguslavsky has backed firms like Yandex, the largest search engine in Russia. "Of course people here know Yandex because it is a public company on NASDAQ, but Leonid also backed Ozone, for example, which is the largest online retailer in Russia, kind of like our Amazon," said Mr. Sheynkman. "He was looking to diversify his investments and to find someone who understood both the Russian and US markets."

So far, says Mr. Sheynkman, RST has made two investments, with four or five more planned before the end of the year. These first two fundings were based in  Silicon Valley, where Mr. Sheynkman attended Stanford and worked at Oracle. He also founded two companies there, Plumtree Software in the 1990s and Elastra Corporation, where he worked from 2007 to March of 2010.

Mr. Sheynkman considers Roger Ehrenberg a friend, and says what Mr. Ehrenberg has done with IA Ventures is a good model. "You hear people in New York say, 'Oh, you've got big data, you should talk to Roger." He hopes that RTP will find a similar niche in Silicon Alley. "There are companies here I like. MongoDB brings a smile to my face. Bit.ly on the scientific side or Enterproid. But these are the exceptions you can count on your fingers."

Nonetheless, while the type of companies he invests in--IT, SaaS and cloud computing--are typically based on the West Coast, some of their biggest customers are right here on Wall Street. "Being in New York helps you to get the perspective of that consumer as well."

In fact, the lack of hardcore, hi-tech venture in New York might be his biggest opportunity. "In New York I am a strange animal. Most investors here do consumer web, media and advertising. They look for a startup with some traction and customers to invest. I want to find companies whose market won't exist until five years from now. That is not something you can put into a spreadsheet. It's taking a big bet on the future of technology."

Former Greycroft venture partner, Mr. Sheynkman

Two new funds have emerged with plenty of rations to get you through the coming startup winter, and they're both led by some familiar names. Fortune.com's Dan Primack reports that a new firm called Tribeca Venture Partners, targeting local seed stage and early stage startups, might close its first $100 million fund as soon as today.

Meanwhile Betabeat has been hearing some buzz around RTP Ventures, whose whopping $750 $700 million fund "focusing on technology, internet, SaaS, and cloud computing" will be headquartered in New York, but invest around the world.

In both cases, the funds' leaders come with a notable pedigree.

The principals for Tribeca Partners, which is located on Park near 50th for now, include Brian Hirsch, a partner with the early stage firm GSA Venture Partners and New York-based Chip Meakem, a partner with Boston's Kodiak Venture Partners. In fact, Mr. Primack reports, "At the same time, GSA Venture Partners is effectively shutting down. The investment period for its current fund, a $102 million vehicle raised in 2006, ends today. Once that happens, it will be rolled into the Tribeca platform – where it will be known as Tribeca Venture Partners I."

In RTP's case, Kirill Sheynkman will serve as managing director. Mr. Sheynkman, who appears to have a soft spot for Yeats, based on the name of his Tumblr, used to be a venture partner for the prestigious Greycroft.

"Too many people think we need a reboot in NYC when all we really need is a VC investment,” Fred Wilson told Betabeat this week in regards to plans to recreate Silicon Valley on Roosevelt Island. "Don't take it literally," Mr. Wilson cautioned, when we wanted to know if more investment alone could help New York rival the West Coast. Looks like we weren't the only ones wondering about that.