If you’ve been to any NY Tech Day events recently, you may have heard of Return on Change, a new startup that allows every day individuals to help fund socially-conscious startup companies. Aimed at exploiting a hole in the market created by the passage of the JOBS Act, Return on Change officially launched its private beta site today. Read More
At an industry breakfast yesterday, the commercial real estate brokers at Cushman & Wakefield announced that New York City has reached a tipping point: For the first time since 1999, the information and media sector (including technology) beat out financial services terms of office leasing.
In the first quarter of 2012, information and media accounted for 27.8 percent of office leasing by square footage, compared to the financial sector’s 26.3 percent. “New York is not just a financial town anymore,” Cushman’s managing director Ken McCarthy told the Real Deal.
You don’t have to tell Dumbo. Yesterday, the Brooklyn Paper reported that commercial vacancy rates in the neighborhood are down to 2 percent, prompting city planners to try to make Downtown more appealing to Brooklyn’s creative class. “Everyone in the tech industry wants to be in DUMBO,” said the paper. And here we thought the ideal spot was spitting distance from Union Square Ventures. Read More
In order to win its war against the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ has put together a little video outlining “What it means to be Made in NYC.” The logic goes something like: (1) this video convinces the next Mark Zuckerberg to launch in New York (2) Zuck 2.0 invents Facebook 2.0 (3) when it comes time to go public, he/she looks back fondly at the inspirational video that brought him/her here and gives Duncan Niederauer the finger.
The video is cute and charming and makes New York sound like one big happy family, well except for the sobering presence of recently-defoundered Naveen Selvadurai, of course. But the U-Haul advertisement also veers dangerously into caricature. Read More
Ready your startups, the early stage investing climate is about to go into overdrive. This afternoon, the JOBS Act (or Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act) passed in the House with an overwhelming vote of 380-41. Next, the bill moves to President Obama, who is expected to sign it into law.
It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride. The JOBS Act originally passed in the House a few weeks ago with a 390-23 vote a couple weeks ago. The Senate’s version of the bill, called the CROWDFUND Act (or Capital Raising Online While Deterring Fraud and Unethical Non-Disclosure Act), added a number of safeguards for investors and passed last week 73-26. The JOBS Act was then revised to reconcile with the Senate’s bill, which is why the final version had to move back to the House for another vote. Read More
Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!
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 follow him at @garysguide and reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.
Alley vs. Valley 2.0?
Holy Guacamole! Am I hallucinating or are micro-blogging pioneer and Silicon Alley darling Tumblr and the latest social media “pinning” sensation, Reddit for girls and current Silicon Valley obsession Pinterest heading for an epic startup throwdown?
Read More
Goooood Morning Silicon Alley!
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 follow him at @garysguide and reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.
Believe In Yourself
Back in mid-December just seven weeks ago, the Giants were 7-7 after a loss to low-ranked Redksins. Folks were calling for coach Tom Coughlin’s head, Eli Manning was being doubted as an elite quarterback and it seemed like the Giants’ post-season hopes were fading fast.
As a startup entrepreneur, it is common to be told that something is not going to work or that your startup is going to fail or that you don’t have what it takes. But real entrepreneurs never let that discourage them. In fact if anything that puts a spark inside them and motivates them even more to go out and prove their detractors wrong. Read More
Maybe you’ve heard of (Harlem) startup PolicyMic, the startup most famous for:
- Having a former Goldman Sachs trader who quit his job venture into StartupLand,
- Being a fancy politics forum where the ability to speak is doled out in a currency of “Mics,”
- Having contributors like Condoleezza Rice, and especially,
- Being based out of Harlem. Harlem! How utterly progressive/gentrification-forward!
Well, Business Insider has finally cracked the largest story on (Harlem) startup PolicyMic basically ever. Are you ready?
719-266-2837. Call it.
Don’t worry, it’s not a phone sex line. Just call it.
Feel better? Know why? Read More
This is a guest post from Eric Wiesen, a general partner at RRE. It originally appeared on his blog.
The recent acquisition of Gowalla by Facebook is just the latest incidence of the potential tension between investors and founders when a company is acquired primarily for the team rather than for the technology, product or business that they’ve built. People around the web will take the opportunity to observe that in situations where a company is acquired in this way, the founders typically get a package of equity to motivate them to join (and remain at) the acquiring company, while investors usually get anywherefrom zero to a small return on invested capital. Look around and you’ll find people willing to condemn the founders for unethically “selling out” their investors and you’ll find people who say the exact opposite, that such a company didn’t have saleable assets anyway, and so investors are owed nothing because the business failed. Read More
There is an informal poll running on Paul Graham’s Hacker News right now asking startup workers about their experience with stock options.
“Just want to see how much people earn actual cash from their employee stock options. If you joined a startup as an employee and had some stock options, how much did you earn during exit or IPO?”
The most common response by far: None – my stock option vanished and don’t own any Read More
