(Photo: Venture Village)

Who says majoring in English is worthless? A leaked job listing from a Columbia English major listserv obtained by Salon proves that even professional wordsmiths can delve into the star-studded startup world. You could toil away at a publishing company for $25,000 a year, or you could work at the hot new startup from self-described brainiac and actor/investor Ashton Kutcher.

"Ashton Kutcher is looking for a writer to join a small team of designers and engineers who are cofounding a consumer-oriented technology company," reads the job listing. "Your writing will be a centerpiece of the company?s [sic] product and will reach millions of people." Please tell us this isn't another daily deals company seeking to corner the market with quirky copy.

Of course, in order to take the job you have to uproot yourself and move to L.A. The ever-knowledgable Mr. Kutcher isn't suggesting Columbia English majors leave the Ivy League to join his new venture, is he?

You can read the full ad over at Salon.

Pitch me maybe? (Photo: flickr.com/joeshlabotnik)

Tonight is the premiere of the Public's revival of Sondheim's In the Woods, which means free tickets were distributed at 1p.m. yesterday. Because New Yorkers love nothing so much as an excuse to stand in line at a park (see also: Shake Shack), Gothamist reports that the queue was hundreds of people long by midday.

And because New Yorkers also love to make a buck, the waiting musical theater enthusiasts were immediately descended upon by pitchmen. One man handed out flyers for a deli that delivers to the line. Random House interns were distributing galleys of an upcoming release. Manhattan Fruitier was handing out sample apples, plus coupons, and another team was passing out ticket vouchers for Katie Couric's new show.

But notice who's missing from that list? Tech startups, usually the biggest hustlers in the game. The closest thing appears to be the team promoting an "online trivia game." What, you can all decamp to Texas for South by Southwest, but Central Park is too much of a trek?

(Photo: Exec)

Sometimes when we pass a homeless person on the way into our multi-million dollar luxury Chelsea apartment, or our driver takes us through the island slums to get to our private beach on St. John's, we suspect that we should probably think about giving back a little bit. People are, like, poor, you know? But the problem is that we're frequently so busy being the CEO of a Very Important Venture-Backed Startup that we don't have the time to go volunteer somewhere.

For that, we are thankful that Exec exists.

The San Francisco-based startup is a lot like TaskRabbit, minus the price bidding for each task. All execs make a flat rate fee of $25/hour, and you can hire them to do everything from personal shopping to cleaning to research. Starting today, you can also hire them to volunteer for you.

Users can pay to hire an exec for a definitive amount of time to volunteer at one of three designated charities. It's an interesting twist on the volunteering model: the thinking behind it is that people frequently donate money instead of time even though a lot of charities desperately need physical volunteers. All profits go to the three charities beginning now through the end of August.

Any honest way to help a charity--no matter how painfully privileged--is a good thing. But we couldn't help but bristle at the notion that if you throw enough money at something you'll never have to interact with it. Maybe instead of paying a poor Exec employee to help build a house or read to kids, you could actually get out in the world and make a difference? Just spitballing here.

Now if you'll excuse us, we have Instagram photos of our tennis court to take.

Canvassing means no AC. (Photo: flickr.com/labor2008

Now, what does this sound like to you?

One recent morning, 14 job candidates filed into his fourth-floor office in Alexandria, Virginia, where a wiffle ball net is stowed in the lobby and a pirate flag hangs in the conference room. How many might he hire? “Fourteen, if we like them all,” he said.

If you guessed "a venture-backed consumer Internet startup," you are incorrect. (Thanks for playing; better luck next time.)

That sentence was written by Bloomberg regarding Targeted Victory, which is not, as you might expect from that name, a maker of drones but rather a tech startup / political consulting firm, working to help elect Mitt Romney president.

And it looks like that company sure has stumbled onto a lucrative niche:

Federal candidates and super-PACs have spent more than $46 million so far this election cycle for the services of just three firms -- Targeted Victory and the two major Democratic tech operations, Blue State Digital and Bully Pulpit Interactive, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of Federal Election Commission reports conducted for Bloomberg News.

And what are the various political campaigns getting in exchange for all that cash? Glad you asked. Companies help with things like, oh, online advertising and digital databases and social media and such. You know, your basic product peddling:

“Every online technique used by Fortune 500 companies will be in the hands of politicians in the next four to eight years.”

We should probably be very concerned about the more Orwellian implications of this. But mostly we're wondering whether this means Mitt Romney's face is about to start following us around the Internet like that Lands' End dress we looked at last week.

Note the "lunch" sign, in case someone was confused. (Photo: courtesy of Cater2Me)

Founded a year and a half ago in San Francisco, Cater2Me quickly found its niche feeding the ravenous techies of Silicon Valley, nabbing clients like Dropbox, Square and Klout. "You can call it the Google effect, if you want," cofounder Alex Lorton told Betabeat, and "that idea is becoming the norm in New York, as well."

Hence the company's decision to expand to New York City. The service just launched yesterday, but it sounds like Mr. Lorton is already halfway to going out for the cheerleading team.

"I think it's cool to be part of the expansion of Silicon Alley, to use the phrase, to be part of that startup community," he said. "People in startups are, I think, more willing to embrace something that's new, something that's initially not as tested."

Well, hopefully it's not that untested.

He also expects to have a leg up with the financial sector, as Mr. Lorton and his cofounder did tours of duty in consulting and banking, respectively. (He didn't have anything to say about financiers' appetite for untested ventures, however.)

Asked about their competitive advantage, Mr. Lorton basically just told us that he's bonkers about food: "We go out and we follow the food blogs religiously and we are constantly looking for the highest quality and the most interesting things," he said. Seamless, for example, can't match that, he argues: picking from the wide variety and knowing the chosen vendor can handle spiraling headaches like service elevator snafus are real challenges for the poor non-foodie coordinator likely charged with ordering.

He expects the city will be logistically more difficult. Then there's the fact that Seamless is the market leader. "There's just more things vying for people's attention here," he said. Nevertheless, he has high hopes for New York and expects they'll be serving 20,000 to 30,000 meals a month* a week by the end of the year. (They're currently at "well over" 70,000 in San Francisco.)

They might have to borrow a few coolness points from their startup clients, though: Mr. Lorton told us they're working out of an office in... East Midtown.

As denizens of the Times Square area, Betabeat sympathizes.

*Updated: This article originally stated that Mr. Lorton predicted Cater2Me would be serving 20,000 to 30,000 meals per month; Mr. Lorton reached out to let us know he anticipated they'd be doing that many meals per week. Betabeat regrets the error. 

Widener Library. (Photo: flickr.com/cthulhuwho1)

On a clear November day, the hard-working students of Harvard College took a collective study break and poured onto the walkway in front of Lamont Library. Undergrads, an inordinate number of them sporting hoodies, pressed their bodies against a set of temporary barricades, their smartphones and cameras held aloft, eyes intent on a grinning visitor making his way from one of the Yard’s gates to a mic stand that had been set up smack in the middle of the walkway.

The excitement wasn’t for Jason Segel, who would be selected as the Hasty Pudding’s Man of the Year in February, nor for Andy Samberg, who’d be tapped to give the Class Day Speech later that year, but a former classmate—a “concentrator” in computer science and psychology—who eight years ago had been just like them, a hard-working kid with amazing grades and questionable social skills, well on his way to a comfortable future.

As Mark Zuckerberg paused to answer questions, the giddiness was almost enough to make everyone forget that, like Bill Gates before him, the Facebook founder had dropped out of Harvard well before receiving his sheepskin.

Six months later, the day before Facebook’s IPO, Stanford law fellow Brian Love published an op-ed in the Boston Globe, pointing out that Harvard had a decent legal claim to a cut of the $16 billion jackpot. After all, Mr. Zuckerberg and his cofounders built the site “while enrolled in Harvard, working in a Harvard dormitory, and using Harvard’s computer network,” he wrote.

It’s impossible to say how much Harvard could have added to its already massive endowment had the university pressed the issue. But one point of comparison might be helpful: When Stanford eventually sold its shares in Google, the transaction netted the school a cool $336 million. That would go a long way toward re-energizing development on that applied sciences campus in Allston.

Still, given the millions being minted by enterprising graduates of Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions of higher learning, and the spotty track record of the nation’s most prestigious university in the emerging realm of tech-fuelled entrepreneurship, potential students might be forgiven for wondering if a Harvard education is still the best path to success in the digital age.

A poster on the Q&A site Quora recently inquired, "How does a star engineering high school senior choose among MIT, Caltech, Stanford and Harvard?" One reply compared the various colleges to houses at Harry Potter’s alma mater, Hogwarts. Guess which school got tarred with the villainous name of Slytherin? The respondent concluded: "Harvard is known for social climbing and an atmosphere where interactions are perpetually shaded with professional networking.”

Meanwhile, Harvard’s neighbor in Kendall Square, MIT--where the term “hacking” was born to describe a clever solution to a technical problem--attracts the kind of student who will turn a building facade into a game of Tetris, just for giggles, then go on to found a promising company like Dropbox. Here in the five boroughs, two Empire State bastions are taking advantage of Bloomberg’s attempted great leap forward to expand their innovative holdings. Cornell is partnering with Israel’s Technion Institute of Technology to build a starchitect-designed school of applied sciences on sleepy Roosevelt Island, while NYU is converting the MTA’s old Brooklyn headquarters into a second tech city campus.

Meanwhile, Stanford, the “Harvard of the West,” recently received the 7000-plus-word length treatment in The New Yorker for its role in the Silicon Valley talent pipeline.

The university gave birth to both Yahoo and Google; provided Instagram founder Kevin Systrom with the connections he’d need to launch his photo sharing application and, more important, sell it for a cool billion dollars; and currently provides a home base for alumnus and PayPal mafioso Peter Thiel to hold forth on entrepreneurialism (even as he offers “fellowships” for students willing to drop out and try building something of their own). Would-be tech moguls can gather at BASES, the Business Association for Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, where they can attend weekly lectures from luminaries like LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and VC Brad Feld. They wrap up the year with four simultaneous funding competitions, jockeying for $150,000 in prize money.

The University in Pennsylvania—red-headed stepchild of the Ivy League—has a strong alumni network in New York’s budding tech scene, including Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer, Local Response CEO Nihal Mehta, and the entire Warby Parker founding team. Brett Topche, who is a principal at MentorTech Ventures, a VC devoted wholly to startups emerging from the university, said Penn's pitch to prospective students is simple: “We're not just going to prepare you to go get a vice president title at some giant corporation—we're going to teach you how to create something from scratch.”

Even the humble University of Washington is getting in the game, recently dubbed “a northwest pipeline to Silicon Valley” in a flattering New York Times write-up.

This is not to say that the Crimson is in any immediate danger of becoming an also-ran. The university still sits comfortably atop the upper echelon of the world’s colleges, and every year it sends 1600 or so graduates off to top-tier professional schools, prestigious jobs at investment banks and consultancies, tenure-track Ph.D. programs and, for those naive enough to have majored in Folklore and Mythology, maybe even a reporting job at the New York Observer.

Then again, those jobs are not what they once were. Freshly minted lawyers are practically making a federal case about their grim employment prospects these days, and, with storied firms like Dewey and Leboeuf imploding, even a degree from a well-ranked law school is no guarantee of a make-it-rain corporate law salary. It’s still remotely possible for a gifted academic to find a cushy tenure track—provided they don’t mind living in Doha and they’ve got a certain dramatic flair. (Have TED talk, will travel.) Meanwhile, the 2012 presidential election is shaping up to be an alumni circular firing squad of Bain Capital versus the Harvard Law Review. And dare we even mention “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs”?

The characteristics that are viewed as most critical to success in the startup world happen to be some of the very ones that Harvard has for centuries viewed as the kiss of death for eager applicants. Harvard students are, by and large, a population of people who’ve never been described as “disruptive” in their lives. And anyone willing even to entertain the idea of failure—a badge of honor on the startup scene—might want to refrain from mentioning it in his or her admissions essay.

Of course, being out of step with the times is not always a bad thing, and Harvard can usually afford to take the long view. Founded in 1636, this august institution predates the differential calculus that makes computing possible, the piano, and the Enlightenment itself.

But the leveling effect of the Internet has only just begun to lap at the steps of Widener Library. Coding is about competence, not pedigree. A sufficiently motivated teenager can build the next online juggernaut with little more than a Code Academy account, a MacBook, and a liter of Mountain Dew. And the recent explosion in online learning will only hasten the trend, threatening the relevance not only of Harvard, but of formal education itself. (Perhaps that’s why Harvard recently partnered with MIT to launch an online learning initiative dubbed EdX.)

Harvard remains a leader in biotech and other capital-intensive fields, and it has numerous patents to show for its efforts. A consumer Internet startup doesn’t need the support of a research insitution; all it needs is some server space. While some universities have tried to assert their claim to startups created on campus (University of Missouri being a prominent example), there’s really no way to shoehorn consumer Internet innovation into a traditional research university model.

That’s one likely reason Harvard didn’t angle for a cut of Facebook: the school’s technical contribution was relatively minor. “Students, in fact, are perfectly capable of writing code in their dorm rooms,” said Brian Love, a Stanford Law fellow who’s written on the subject of university patents, and they’re “at the vanguard of what's going on in the high-tech world.” So a couple of undergraduates can team up and create something valuable “without faculty mentorship, and without funding—at least, direct funding—from the university.”

That said, Harvard University is not run by a bunch of dummies. The institution’s leadership is not about to sit back with its collective nose in a Loeb Classical Library tome while Stanford, UPenn, and NYU vie for the prestige, the superstars and the future donations that it once took for granted.

Instead, the university is unleashing a campus-wide push to spruce up entrepreneurial offerings and lend more support to would-be innovators. Hence the creation of the Innovation Lab (known on campus as the I-Lab), a new home for would-be entrepreneurs. Students contemplating the notion of starting up can attend workshops on topics like user-interface design, while those who’ve reached the idea development stage can schedule office hours with entrepreneurs-in-residence. Once they’ve got a workable idea, they can claim their own corner to work in, like a study carrel but bigger.

With its open floorplan, enormous windows, and bright yellow walls, I-Lab—a $25 million redo of the former WGBH studios—is clearly based on someone’s untested assumptions of what inspires young people to productivity. Ideas are scrawled across whiteboards; tables are equipped with wheels; power cords drop from the ceiling. There’s also a kitchen stuffed with free food and consoles for after-hours gaming.

In 2011, the school announced something called the Experiment Fund,  a venture capital fund based at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which will make seed-stage investments in companies with some connection to Cambridge. Eager to avoid any conflicts of interest, Harvard has no financial stake in the fund. Rather, SEAS offers access to faculty advisors and, once renovations are complete, will provide partner Hugo Van Vuuren with an office. So Harvard isn’t likely to make any money out of this deal, though the somewhat intangible benefits to its reputation will likely prove useful.

Mr. Van Vuuren (class of ’07) was quick to point out that the X Fund will serve Boston's entire Red Line corridor, which also includes MIT and Tufts. But he was effusive in his praise for the university as a partner, and he expressed complete faith in the school’s ability to change with the times. "A university does not remain the top university in the world for 375 years without adapting," he said.

The question is whether a real cultural shift can take root with sufficient speed in such staid soil. Harvard hasn’t been a startup in centuries. Nor is the school particularly famous for its population of engineers and entrepreneurs. Tuan Ho, whom The Observer found working in the I-Lab when we visited a couple of months ago, graduated in 2009 and is now the cofounder of Tivli, a digital TV startup aiming to disrupt the cable business. When he was an undergraduate, Mr. Ho explained, Mark Zuckerberg was "like, the one guy who did a startup—in spite of Harvard."

Yet the student body seems ready to force the issue if they must. Harvard’s introductory computer science course, CS-50, is bursting at the seams. That growth is due partly to the aggressive evangelical efforts of instructor David Malan, said teaching fellow Lexi Ross, but she also name-checked both The Social Network and the near billion-dollar Instagram acquisition as having had an effect.

"You didn't have to be a computer science person to know what was going on," she said.

Peter Boyce, a founding member of Hack Harvard, has also seen a shift. Mr. Boyce started out on the “Goldman quant” track, but found himself seduced after a summer at Skillshare, a New York-based startup that aims to be a kind of Airbnb for those with in-demand skills. “It’s a more popular option,” he said of the startup track. “I still don’t think it’s, you know, the most popular option.”

To some, the problem is best viewed in economic terms. Even with the troubles on Wall Street, there’s still not much real incentive for students to venture out onto any entrepreneurial limbs.

“The opportunity cost for them to become entrepreneurs is much higher than the grads of regular schools,” said entrepreneur and academic Vivek Wadhwa. MIT, on the other hand, “has a huge advantage in being an engineering school—so grads leave with excellent technical knowledge and mentors. Their likelihood of success is higher and opportunity cost lower.”

Moreover, the entrepreneurial career path takes emotional resilience and openness to the humiliating public faceplant. “It’s a very different world now,” said Mr. Topche, one where students can choose to create their own job instead of pursuing one at a multi-billion-dollar corporation. But that requires a different skill set, he noted, “and the schools that figure out how to prepare students with that very different skill set, I think, will have a very big advantage in the coming decades.”

Morra Aarons-Mele, founder of The Mission List.

Tereza Nemessanyi, founder of Honestly Now, an online Q&A forum, brought her elementary school-aged daughter along to a tech demo that she said was unlike most others she has been to.

“Last time I demoed was January 2011,” Ms. Nemessanyi said. “I brought my daughter with me and she asked me ‘mommy, why is it all boys?’”

Well that certainly wasn’t the case this time. Last night, more than 100 tech-savvy women (and a few guys) filled rows of chairs in a large room in the Microsoft building in midtown to participate in the first-ever New York Tech Meetup’s Women’s Demo Night.

The event, hosted by NY Tech Meetup and Change:The:Ratio, was set up to support the rising number of female founders of tech start-ups in New York. It featured demos by 11 companies including: ElectNext, Fathom, Findings, HonestlyNow, Hourly, Incline, The Mission List, Paperlex, ReadSocial, Loosecubes and VenueBook. The demos varied from an exclusive online travel site to a contract management site.

The theme of the night was the rising influence of women in the sphere of tech businesses, which was evident by the event’s following. The sold-out event consisted mostly of female professionals and a few male supporters.

But as Andrew Rasiej, board chair of NY Tech Meetup, told the audience, last night’s gender ratio is not typical in the world of tech businesses.

“Right now our industry is not diverse and it needs to be diverse,” Mr. Rasiej said.

The tech industry in the United States has notoriously been known for its small amount of gender diversity and even smaller amount of racial diveristy within the workplace.

Despite the industry’s lack of diversity, New York has recently been experiencing a rush of female influence in technology.

“In New York City, a tech startup is twice as likely to be started by a woman than it is in Silicon Valley or London,” Rachel Sterne, chief digital officer of the City of New York told the audience.

“There truly is a digital sisterhood- and it's not cheesy, it's real,” Morra Aarons-Mele, founder of The Mission List, an online marketing network for women told the Observer. “We get each other funded, introduced, and supported. I've found practical resources like insurance brokers and deep strategic advice from this community of women that talks online everyday, and then meets up all over the globe at events.”

Scott and Stacey Ferreira.

MySocialCloud was still in relatively early stages last year when Stacey Ferreira, now 20, saw a tweet from investor and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, which read, somewhat cryptically: “Enjoy intimate cocktails with me in Miami on June 15th - $2,000 to charity,” and including an email address to contact for more details. It was the perfect chance to pitch her startup, she thought.

RT @richardbranson: Enjoy intimate cocktails with me in Miami on June 15th - $2,000 to charity.For details email: Community.investment ...

— Virgin Unite (@VirginUnite) June 10, 2011

“At the time I was living in California with my brother in a two bedroom apartment that was probably only 750 square feet—and we had to rent out the other room because we couldn’t afford to live there by ourselves,” Ms. Ferreira explained. “My brother and I were on speakerphone and we were begging our parents to wire us the money to go to Miami,” she said, noting that they believed the chance to meet with Mr. Branson was “a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Ms. Ferreira, and her brother Scott, now 21, started MySocialCloud when she was a senior in high school in their hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona, and he was in his sophomore year at the University of Southern California. Mr. Ferreira’s computer had crashed during finals week, and he lost, among other things, the system he had set up to store all of his usernames and passwords. They set about coding up a site that could replace the Passwords.doc files and sticky notes most of us—come on, admit it—still rely on to remember our myriad online identities.

Mr. Branson apparently liked the idea. The siblings were the youngest guests at his party, and although their ages precluded them from joining the drinking, Ms. Ferreira explained, “we made sure to stay close to him, talk to him, and just learn as much as we could from him.” After their weekend in Miami the two keep in touch with Mr. Branson, and, a few months later, they became his youngest investments.

In August, Mr. Branson sent his friend, Jerry Murdock out to Los Angeles to check out the venture. “He grilled us,” said Ms. Ferreira, and ultimately both Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Branson invested, helping MySocialCloud raise a first seed round of close to $1 million.

Last week, MySocialCloud launched a redesign and opened the site up to allow anyone into the beta. The siblings picked a good time to relaunch. Last week hackers hit LinkedIn, Last.fm, and eHarmony, leaking more than 10 million passwords in all. The leaked passwords, of course, ranged from such inspired choices as ‘password1234’ to, perhaps just as predictably, selections like ‘unemployed’ and ‘cooldad.’  (You can check LeakedIn for yours.)

MySocialCloud also introduced a Google Chrome extension that will allow users to automatically log in to any website requiring a username and password simply by clicking a button at the top of their browser. You can sign up to use it now—both to store login information and randomly generate secure passwords.

While there are a number of competitors that provide similar services such as LastPass, 1Password, and Passpack, MySocialCloud has also caugh the attention of Jerry Murdock, the co-founder of Insight Venture Partners, and Alex Welch, the co-founder of Photobucket.

MySocialCloud will also curate a personal profile to share your Internet activities with others. “Since our website focuses on storing information and managing online life, we wanted each of our users to have a personalized profile to view all their online networks, profiles and bookmarks in one place, and also easily share those with people if they felt inclined to,” Ms. Ferreira explained.

The site is targeted at college students like her and her brother, she said, though both will be taking a leave of absence next year to focus on MySocialCloud—Mr. Ferreira from USC, where he is studying architecture and his sister from NYU, where she is majoring in music business with a minor in computer science.

(vooza.com)

Despite the fact that we love to spotlight the companies and characters that make this scene hum here at Betabeat, we occasionally grow weary of all the unbridled enthusiasm for the New York tech space. What can we say? We're journalists--we were born skeptical. So when this parody video of a soon-to-launch startup popped up, its light-hearted jabs at the more eyeroll-inducing side of tech were all too familiar.

"Vooza is a mobile web app that's real-time, cloud-based, social and local," begins the animated video. "What does it do? SHHHH! We're in beta!"

The video is really funny, and perfectly captures all the things that occasionally annoy us about the startup scene: ubiquitous acronyms and buzzwords, "it's like X for Y!", and mentions of Ashton Kutcher, who is perhaps the most irritating celebrity investor.

Despite its light mockery, Vooza seems to be winning over the hearts of startup kids. "Dude, if you're not signed up for the Vooza beta yet, you're so fucking behind," tweeted David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. "Please message me regarding angel funding! I have a jar full of Kennedy half dollars," quipped one Facebook user.

You can watch the Vooza vid here.

New Tech City (Center for an Urban Future)

The Center for an Urban Future, a think tank headed by Jonathan Bowles, has released a lengthy report  about New York City's tech sector, titled "New Tech City." The Center's findings indicate amazing growth over the last decade. While "New Tech City" contains mostly good news for the local tech set, there is a dash of cold water--just a bit--to leaven any prospective startup's bright-eyed optimism.

First, the good news!

• New York is home to the fastest growing tech sector in the United states and has beaten Boston to become second only to Silicon Valley. Out of the top seven technology regions in the country only New York saw a rise in VC deals between 2007 and 2011. During those 4 years venture capital deals rose by 32% in New York while declining 11% nationwide.
• Center for an Urban Future reports New York's tech sector is sustainable and has major potential for growth in the future. This is in contrast to the dotcom bubble that burst so dramatically at the end of the 1990s.
• The Center also found that Manhattan alone has 431 startups and in recent years more than a dozen established startups have migrated to New York from San Francisco and Boston.

Time for some real talk. New York is a good place for continued growth, but the report also notes many of these new startups will fail. Mr. Bowles elaborated in an email to Betabeat, stating that they interviewed over 50 people for the report and were told many startups won't make it because "There just isn’t a market to support every one of them."

"Many are competing in the same space," Mr. Bowles told Betabeat, "For instance, look at all the companies in the fashion tech space. Already, at least one or two of those have shut down." However, Mr. Bowles states this is a relatively normal thing for the industry--"a natural shaking out process."

"All of that said," wrote Mr. Bowles, "I think the bigger message from our report is that even if some of the city’s startups fail, the city is so much better positioned today to keep growing its digital sector."