The company sent out the following email this afternoon:

We have decided to shut down SpeakerGram. While we are thankful for the support that our users have given us, we have changed our focus to a new product, and need to shift the balance of our energies towards that effort.

We have disabled new account signups, although existing accounts will continue to be able to receive speaking requests so long as the service is active. We have targeted a shutdown date of February 1 - while the service will not go dark on that day, we cannot promise any support after that time, and we do plan to deactivate the servers by the middle of the year. We will do our best to help existing customers transition off the platform, and if any of our users have valuable data on the platform, we are happy to extract it for them.

It has been a pleasure working with you for the past year, and we hope to soon reveal the new project that we have been working on.

We'll update with any details on what the new project is all about.

The audience in the chatroom also approved of Speakergram. "This will be bought by LinkedIn," one watcher commented.

500 Startups companies will also be demo'ing at General Assembly later this month.

CORRECTION: This post originally misstated the amount Mr. Rosen is raising; he is seeking $500,000 total, not $1 million.

The Valley is beautiful, Mr. Rosen says, and he's had more exposure and mentoring for his start-up than he ever could back home. But he doesn't plan to stay. The founder plans to defy convention by moving back to New York after incubating his start-up on the West Coast, and he's starting to think he might be part of a trend.

San Francisco and Silicon Valley still have a lock on engineering talent, patron companies and major investors in the tech world. But with its status as a media hub and the enthusiasm and attention around some New York-based companies (Etsy, Kickstarter, Foursquare and others), New York is becoming more attractive as a place to headquarter a web-based tech company.

"I was driving home and I remember thinking, don’t be such a fucking idiot, just call this guy and tell him to get his ass out here and stop wasting time with this bullshit,” Mr. McClure told The New York Observer. The bullshit was that Mr. Rosen had been hustling business development for a West Coast start-up, which it is hard to imagine him being bad at--he's a natural networker who berates himself if he can't remember someone's name. A gaggle of entrepreneurs had accosted Mr. McClure that day at General Assembly, but Mr. Rosen was the one the investor brought home.

Mr. Rosen had been splitting his time between his job and his start-up, Speakergram, with only a few hours left for sleep. He had good relationships with investors in New York and never missed a networking event or a meetup. But it just wasn't happening for Speakergram in New York. He had a lot of interest--the Foursquare team and Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian were early adopters of the app, which streamlines requests for speaking engagements--and investors were keeping an eye on him. But no one in a position to mentor or fund the company was ready to do so quite yet.

Now Mr. Rosen gets intensive tutoring in design, data and distribution at 500Startups. He’s demo’ed for influencers Tim O’Reilly and Jason Calacanis. In New York, his mentors were full-time CEOs with their own businesses to run. But in Mountain View, the former Googlers who roam 500Startups are often effectively retired, happy to spend hours talking to a young entrepreneur or give him rides home.

There are drawbacks, though. He misses his family, friends and girlfriend, but he also misses the scrappiness and diversity of the New York tech scene.

“In New York, it’s all blowing up, it just hasn’t happened yet,” he said. “One thing I really miss most is the strong New York City camaraderie. We’re smaller and scrappier and fighting harder to prove ourselves.”

And sometimes all tech, all the time gets a little boring. “My friends in New York City, one would be in marketing, my good friend was a producer at MTV. Other friends are lawyers, other professionals might be bankers… Here you go to the party and everyone is in tech,” he said. “It’s not like I’m tired of talking about my company, but it’s all we talk about.”

He's heard similar sentiments from founder friends who are considering grooming their start-ups in New York.

Right now Mr. Rosen is working 17 and 18 hour days to get ready for the 500Startups Demo Day in April, and he estimates he'll be in California until May or June. But after that, he’s hoping to get back east. “I’ve been viewing this as a business trip,” he said. “I’ll be out here as long as I need to be until I can get to a place where I can come back home,” he said.

Rosen had been working full-time doing business development for a West coast startup, running around town trying to clinch deals, all so he could afford to spend his free time working on his own startup, Speakergram. Being a young entrepreneur was running him down.

“As luck would have it, that night I came down with one of the worst colds I've had in recent memory,” says Rosen, who estimates he was getting three hours of sleep a night between his day job and his startup. “After about a year-and-a-half on the grind, there have been multiple times when I was either a little tired or under the weather and thought about passing on an event or a meetup, but every time I ended up going because something in the back of my head said, this could be your break."

So that Monday, Rosen headed down to General Assembly, the swank new startup space in Flatiron. Exiting the elevator, he could sense the buzz, and sure enough there was Dave McClure, one of the most prolific investors to come out of the PayPal mafia, surrounded by a school of eager young startups pitching him their projects.

When Rosen finally got his chance to chat, McClure was ready to leave, but he invited Rosen along to private dinner. The evening was packed, but two ended up sitting next to one another, and afterwards Rosen got a chance to demo Speakergram. It seemed like a great connection, but Rosen figured that was all. A few days later, his phone rang. It was McClure, offering him a chance to be part of his program, 500 Startups, a seed fund and startup accelerator.

“I was driving home and I remember thinking, don’t be such a fucking idiot, just call this guy and tell him to get his ass out here and stop wasting time with this bullshit,” says McClure. “It wasn’t the most strategic decision I’ve ever made, but I tend to go with my instinct. Sam had that starry startup look in his eyes, seemed like had been hoofing it for a while, and had built a product that addresses a problem I actually have myself.”

Speakergram, Rosen’s startup, is web tool for public speakers. Instead of struggling to juggle inbound requests, users create a page on Speakergram. Anyone interested in booking them uses that page to communicate dates, payments and other details. It’s a funnel and a filter that targets a specific group of users, the kind who are also happen to be terrific influencers and investors.

“Basically I said to him, how fast can you get on a plane?” recalls McClure. “I gave him the weekend to decide.”

Rosen did a quick gut check and pulled the trigger. He was leaving behind his girlfriend, his team and his day job for the chance to devote himself to his startup full-time. “My plan is to come back to NYC to run my startup, but of course, there are no guarantees,” says Rosen. “I think the number one thing I'll get in California is the ability to dive fully into SpeakerGram and really give it my all. I'll probably still only get 20 hours of sleep every week, but at least it'll all be spent working on my company.”

Check Out SpeakerGram pages for Foursquare and Alexis Ohanian.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper