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Earlier today, Betabeat dropped by WeWork, a coworking space filled with techies diligently laboring away, to watch as Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer debuted a new report titled, "Start-up City: Growing New York City's Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for All." As you can probably tell from the name, it's an attempt at cracking how the city can broaden access to the city's booming tech economy and make sure everybody's boats are still bobbing away on the rising tide.

"I think it's important that government officials don't get stuck in the century we're in, but rather think about the century of the future," Mr. Stringer told Betabeat.

The report (which we've embedded below) identifies 11 areas where the city needs to focus in order to do that. Several are near and dear to the hearts of the city's techies, from expanding the computer science curriculum in New York City schools and developing a CUNY program focused on the STEM track to creating a municipal fiber network as a means of fixing our citywide connectivity headache.

It's no secret that the fruits of the tech renaissance are accruing more to the city's middle and upper classes, while working class New Yorkers struggle for an entry point, without the skills to take part. The report's executive summary frankly admits this:

Despite its rich history, it is clear that large swaths of today's entrepreneurial ecosystem lie beyond the reach of millions of working class New Yorkers, contributing to an unemployment rate of nearly 10 percent and to rising poverty that now encompasses one in five New Yorkers.

Not clear enough? Here you go:

If New York wants to remain a middle class city, then government must do everything it can to foster the entrepreneurial ecosystem and create a pipeline of jobs for working families.

As Mr. Stringer pointed out in his remarks, it's pretty unfortunate that there's a war for tech talent raging when there are New Yorkers out of work. And the report makes clear that the city's government needs to help close that skills gap. He doesn't expect the report to be a panacea, however: "I'm not suggesting those problems or those issues have to be solved immediately," he admitted.

"I would be very pleased if this report begins to get people thinking about legislative initiatives, policy initiatives, how do we invest in this infrastructure in this city," he added.

Here's the report for the curious:

Start-up City Report

Artist's rendering. (Image: Cornell University)

The starchitect-designed Roosevelt Island campus won't be ready 'til sometime in 2017, but that doesn't mean the embryonic staff of Cornell NYC Tech plans to sit around for the next half decade, twiddling their thumbs. A rolling stone gathers no moss! Time and tide wait for no man! Haven't you heard there's a tech talent crisis on?

Today Cornell University (with Mayor Bloomberg, naturally) announced that applications are now being accepted for the "beta class" of the school's one-year Master of Engineering in computer science program. Classes commence in January 2013, in space borrowed from Google. So if you've been kicking the tires on a graduate degree, today could very well be your moment of glory. 

Mayor Bloomberg got a little cliche in his excitement:

“There’s simply no better place to further your education and launch your career than New York City. Getting in won’t be easy, but if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”

God willing, this was followed by a rousing display of jazz hands.

However, before you say "what the hell" and submit some half-assed, tossed-off paperwork, know that Cornell has no intention of priming the pump with lax admission standards. The announcement takes pains to point out that this first class will be "small and highly selective." And a gander at the information for potential applicants suggest that a bit of Code Academy and a couple of courses at General Assembly probably aren't going to cut it:

Successful applicants to Cornell NYC Tech should have excellent academic credentials and strong entrepreneurial interests, leadership skills and a passion for community engagement.  A bachelor’s degree (BA, BS, BE) in computer science or a related technical field is required except in exceptional cases.  All applicants, regardless of their undergraduate degree, should have taken courses on programming, discrete structures, architecture and operating systems.

And judging from the remarks of Daniel Huttenlocher, Dean of the tech campus, the expectations don't stop there:

“Candidates for the beta class must be future tech leaders, with not only the highest academic credentials but also strong entrepreneurial interests, leadership skills and a passion for community engagement.”

Applications are due October 1, so anyone who wants in better start frantically emailing potential recommenders right this minute.

London calling. (Photo: flickr.com/anniemole)

Turns out Twitter's mobile ads are more engaging than Facebook's. [VentureBeat]

Amazon is opening a new "digital media development" office in London, which is likely to focus on streaming TV. Naturally, it is located in techie Shoreditch rather than the traditionally bookish environs of Charing Cross. [Telegraph]

The company arrives just in time for the tech talent wars to hit Europe. [TechCrunch]

"One industry party I attended had a jungle theme. This included a real, 600-pound tiger in a cage and a monkey that would pose for Instagram photos." [New York Times]

Lots of users are less than thrilled about Google's acquisition of Sparrow. [GigaOm]

Meanwhile, in cleantech: Researchers at UCLA have developed a transparent solar cell. Dare we dream of window-unit solar panels? [Engadget]

The whole thing ends with Pinckney saying that if you work for Hunch you will get to show off you programming ability. Not sure if that means you can throw everything up on GitHub or if Chris Dixon will personally tweet it out when you hammer out some seriously amazing lines code. Hacker fame is certainly a smart carrot to dangle when you can't compete with Google's checkbook, but can offer a work environment where individual work won't be hidden behind a pile of non-disclosure agreements.

Illustration by Oliver Munday

“If I’m not the most well-connected guy in New York, I’m one of them for sure,” Dave Carvajal told The Observer, leaning back into his chair at the Park Avenue South headquarters of Dave Partners, the executive search firm he founded in 2009. It was the Friday before the Fourth of July and Mr. Carvajal, olive-skinned and trim, was already dressed for the long weekend in salmon-color khakis and a snug white shirt.

Mr. Carvajal was discussing the finer points of recruiting developers—a skill suddenly in great demand, as Google, Wall Street and top media companies battle an army of starry-eyed young co-founders for technical talent, raiding a local labor pool better known for its dreamers than its doers.

After all, those mobile apps, data-mining algorithms and high-frequency trading applications aren’t going to build themselves.

“I love it! It’s the age of the recruiter,” Mr. Carvajal said. “In New York City the only thing hotter than tech people are tech recruiters.”

Mr. Carvajal, a type-A optimist who still finds time for a rigorous Ironman training schedule, wasn’t talking just about himself. In September, Foursquare poached Susan Loh, a former lead technical recruiter at Google, away from Yelp to head up its efforts in New York. A month later, Yoonie Kim, a veteran tech recruiter for Meetup, Mozilla, and Google, opened up an office for her own agency, Lab 8 Ventures, in New York. She had to turn down 15 start-up clients last quarter because she was too busy between staffing up Amazon and Gilt Groupe. This March, Rob Dennis traded in a five-year career leading technical recruiting for Bridgewater Associates, a cult-like Connecticut firm New York magazine recently called “the world’s largest and indisputably weirdest hedge fund,” to recruit at Lincoln Square Advisors, an independent midtown i-bank and consultancy. From the Solow Building, upstairs from Brasserie 8½, he now hunts for tech talent for big tech and finance firms as well as start-ups. Mr. Dennis, in turn, raided Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters to lure Aaron Kirchner away from his position as lead tech recruiter to join him at Lincoln Square. Meanwhile, Mr. Carvajal’s firm filched Sean McDermott from Googleplex East’s recruiting team last month so he could work on beefing up Tumblr’s engineering staff instead.

Indeed, while the rest of the city anxiously watches unemployment hover just below a demoralizing 9 percent and Wall Street braces for more layoffs, developers are complaining about being spammed with too many job offers on LinkedIn. The best recruiters know how to catch an engineer’s attention. Working in their favor is the fact that at the top of the market, salaries for chief technical officers and VPs of engineering are the most competitive they’ve been in years.

For example, one high-profile fashion e-commerce start-up recently attempted to hire a CTO away from its main rival. The desired candidate was offered a $350,000 package ($275,000 base and a $75,000 bonus), 1.5 percent equity and a board-approved $500,000 loan that would allow him to exercise his stock options at his current employer—the “golden handcuffs” keeping him in place—and pay off the considerable income taxes he would incur. (He politely declined.)

“CTOs typically go for like $225K, with $50K bonus and 1 percent equity, but that’s rich for a small start-up,” said Mr. Carvajal, who recruits for large companies like Microsoft and Amazon as well as for New York’s suddenly ubiquitous venture capitalists. Though recruiters report that start-up salaries for engineers rose 20 to 30 percent in the past year and a half, to upwards of $140,000 for a developer with three to five years experience, that still leaves start-ups priced out of top talent in a city where working for a hedge fund can mean bonuses of up to 80 percent on a good year and CTOs command seven figures.

“We came from a place over the last two years where people were going to start-ups for below market [rates],” Mr. Carvajal noted. “People aren’t necessarily going to do that now.” In fact, they’re likely to ask for more equity, especially as the high-flying IPO market has opened up the plausibility of a lucrative exit. The fact that Forbes’s list of the world’s richest billionaires now features three early Facebook employees not named Mark Zuckerberg made a bewitching case for the upside of equity.

Even recruiters themselves are willing to put their ear to the train tracks to hear those ka-ching sounds in the distance. Mr. Dennis mentioned Lincoln Square accepting equity payments from promising start-ups in the same breath that he reminisced fondly over Peter Thiel’s plunking down $500,000 for a 10 percent stake in Facebook. Mr. Carvajal also accepts equity in start-ups, but Lincoln Square plans on doing him one better by launching its own venture capital arm and incubator.

“Investors are giving them money, but these start-ups are just turning it around to get talent. In the early stages of a company, a single superstar hire can mean the difference between success and failure,” added Mr. Dennis, who gives off the same bookish, hmm-how-should-I-explain-this-to-you vibe as his sitcom doppelgänger, Doogie Howser. “It occurred to me, why not just take out the middleman?”

But Lincoln Square is even more ambitious. This fall, Mr. Dennis is beta-testing a college recruiting program that borrows a business model from sports agents. Avoid the campus cattle call and let Mr. Dennis do the leg work. “I’m going to do the job that career services should be doing,” he tells them. In theory, the employers pay Lincoln Square's fees. Then, when those kids become managers, who do you think they’ll call when they hire their own team?

IF THAT’S WHAT IT TAKES to close a coder, it might explain why tech man-about-town Rex Sorgatz was forced to delete recruiting from the menu of services his company, Kinda Sorta Media, offers start-ups. “It was too difficult finding people,” Mr. Sorgatz told us over beers at a digerati meet-and-greet. “If you want a CTO, you have to go to, like, Tel Aviv.”

Eager to hang onto talented staffers, Google—a company known to aim for the 85th percentile in terms of compensation, to separate the greedy from the truly passionate—has gotten fast and loose with its counter-offers. Out in the Valley, Google reportedly tried to load down employees with stock, worth $3.5 million in one case and $6 million in another, to keep them from jumping ship to Facebook. But even in Manhattan, it’s turning into a numbers game. Mr. Carvajal said he recently had two bids from start-ups for a developer from Google’s $1.8 billion Chelsea outpost who was also weighing another outside offer. “One of the highest was $180,000, and Google offered him $240,000 and the chance to work from Paris, because it was some special project they needed.” He stayed with Google.

Although Googleplex East employs a team of roughly a dozen recruiters, each with a dedicated support staff of “résumé sourcers” hunting for engineers, a source familiar with the company’s hiring process says in the last quarter, the New York office’s efforts resulted in the most rejections ever: 13 Thanks, but no thanks—up from a typical one or two. Although Google is quick to note that this was a record year for hiring, our source paints a more desperate picture: “All someone needs to say is, ‘Oh, I got an offer from a start-up,’ and Google will come back and give you this real generous counteroffer to stay.”

Typically that means something along the lines of a 50 percent raise and a couple thousand shares of restricted stock units, or R.S.U.’s, for a valued employee. Those units work on a four-year vesting schedule, which means employees have to stay to cash in. “They’re giving them out like candy,” said the source.

“Look I’ve got guys at Google who want to leave Google, some top engineers,” Mr. Carvajal said. “But the problem is, you know, they’re sitting on $2.5 million of Google stock. On a cash basis, they could leave, but it’s the equity keeping them there.” That said, Google’s increasingly bureaucratic infrastructure is losing its sheen. Mr. Carvajal says he talked to one of the top developers from Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters who broke down the decision tree for a typical top engineer on the West Coast. “He said, ‘If you’re lazy, you go to Google; if you want cash, you go to Facebook; if you want cool work, you go to a start-up.’”

The source familiar with Google’s inner workings concurred: “Google is a little stale. It’s almost impossible to get fired.”

For start-ups processing meta-data (or data about data) like Bit.ly, which not only shortens URLs to help users meet the 140 character requirement, but also pulls information from the source page and how it’s shared, the talent pool they want to tap might be closer to Wall Street than Chelsea. Mr. Carvajal says they’re looking for engineers who have experience with “algo trading” at big securities firms or hedge funds building systems for processing massive meta-data. “The problem is the Betaworks guys, the Bit.ly guys, they’re cheap,” he says. “They want the guy to leave his job making $400,000 to $500,000 and do it for equity.”

Jonathan Basker, Betaworks newly-hired "vice president of people" sees it differently. "More and more, engineers are turning away from the financial industry completely (yes, pay-cuts and all) in order to find more meaningful and rewarding work," he emailed The Observer. "We're here because it's good for the soul and we can leave everyday with smiles on our faces and 100 new ideas racing through our brains. Frankly, the type of engineer we like to hire couldn't possibly be happy in one of those firms, so this doesn't present much of a problem for us."

“SO YOU MET DAVE, huh? Was he smiling?” Marc Cenedella, founder of TheLadders, a website that lists only $100K-plus jobs, asked The Observer. Mr. Cenedella and Mr. Carvajal were both pivotal in scaling-up HotJobs before Yahoo bought it for $436 million. (Without admitting any wrongdoing, Mr. Carvajal paid a $32,398 settlement to the S.E.C. on allegations that he bought HotJobs shares in his parents’ name and unloaded them shortly after the sale.) The two also worked together again on TheLadders.

Why, yes, we did notice the permasmile, we told Mr. Cenedella. And why not, he seems to have some tricks up his Ralph Lauren sleeve.

“I like Dave—don’t want to expose his secrets,” said Matt Pavelle, now the new CTO at Moda Operandi, wrote The Observer via gChat. Dave Partners recently secured Mr. Pavelle for the members-only fashion e-commerce company, co-founded by socialite Lauren Santo Domingo. “Let’s call him an excellent communicator,” Mr. Pavelle conceded.

About that sizable network of his, Mr. Carvajal said he built it up over years in the business. “Gilt Groupe is a good example,” he noted, sucking down a Swamp Thing-color smoothie concoction of kale, spinach and green apple. Mr. Carvajal says Gilt founder Kevin Ryan, who was on the board of HotJobs and an early investor in the Ladders, initially asked him to head up talent acquisition for the flash sale site. "I was just having too much fun. But I introduced him early on to some people, including the guy who’s running the Jetsetter business,” said Mr. Carvajal. After letting Dave Partner’s agreement with Gilt expire, “Now half the company at Gilt Groupe is reaching out to us and asking for help," he said of the notoriously difficult environment for developers, adding, "Now it’s okay to pull people out of there because they’re not a client.” Gilt responded that its attrition rate is “extremely low.”

With developers kvetching about “recruiter fatigue” and turning off their cellphones to avoid calls, it takes a psychological understanding of what geeks want to get them to jump.

Mr. Carvajal views companies as either clients or targets, figuring out which are which by conducting interviews that end up functioning not unlike therapy sessions. “Once [employees understand] that everything we talk about is going to be strictly confidential, then they open up,” he said. “People prioritize their own self-interest over loyalty to the company.”

Mr. Dennis takes a more mathematical approach at Lincoln Square. He’s a few months into a plan to map the country’s top technical talent and how they move through the market in real time. “An example of mapping we’ve done is looking at every Harvard graduate back to 1970—with the caveat that school isn’t always necessarily the best aggregator of top talent,” he said. To find indicators of talent, which he defines as “the raw capability to do difficult things and a track record of having done difficult things,” he sorts data from candidates and employers using various algorithms. He’s even trying to figure out a way to incorporate in cultural influences—the release of Hackers, say, which set off the ascendance of the nerd.

As it turns out, Mr. Dennis himself is among the growing ranks of folks who turned down an offer from a company with a market cap approaching $200 billion. Last year, a source says Google offered to invent a position just for him, head of engineering recruiting strategy. He declined.

-ntiku@observer.com

We're not much for sharing.

The city will be revealing the RFP tomorrow for its new engineering campus, and if history is any guide the mayor will name drop Stanford at some point during the proceedings. The world's best known computer science university has been playing public footsy with New York during the ongoing bidding process to build a huge new outpost in the Big Apple. But it seems like Stanford's student body has other ideas. "West Coast, best coast," writes Kristi, a sophmore who loves hi-tech, swing dancing and walking backwards talking loudly about how great Stanford is to a bunch of sweaty overweight strangers (ahhh, the student tour guide type).

Yes, admits Kristi, New York is a center for finance, media and fashion, but Stanford epitomizes California's natural beauty and entrepreneurial spirit. "Why mess with that?" asks Kristi incisively. "Were money, time, and resources no object, this might represent an interesting academic experiment.  However, in my opinion this is an unnecessary venture that is at best an altruistic publicity stunt and at worst an expensive and distracting dilution of the international prestige of our wonderful University."

Stanford President Hennessy, a native of Long Island, has been a very vocal supporter of the project, but Kristi isn't fooled. No matter what anyone says, NYC's gain is Cali's loss. "Call me Machiavelli, but what do we stand to gain from a New York campus?  We already have our Silicon Valley, with all of the wonderfully symbiotic relationships with industry that it entails.  Helping New York found its own tech region would be a retrogressive move, retracing steps we’ve already taken and perfected out west."

It seems like the rest of Stanford agrees with her. A poll on The Stanford Daily with nearly 2,000 votes found 50 percent oppose the New York extension and 39 percent support. Kristi suggests Columbia and Cornell would be better deserving of Mayor Bloomberg's largess, a wish which might very well come true.

Overall Kristi's sophomoric arguments about campus dilution and knee-jerk defense of some coastal divide makes it pretty clear she's not tapped into the current tech scene. Young entrepreneurs and veteran VCs don't respect any geographic divide when it comes to great ideas (Facebook, Harvard, hello?). Future generations will continue to embrace remote learning and opportunity powered by globalization. If Stanford brought its brand to New York, it would gain far more from access to new networks in fashion, finance and media than it would lose by dividing its CS campus.

And just for the record, we're not exactly chomping at the bit to see New York squander its funding on students who spend their time building Star Wars simulations. Our local CS students would prefer to break shit, rock out and create the default location layer for mobile apps.

This is a guest post from Tarikh Korula, founder of Uncommon Projects, and originally appeared at his blog, unprojects.

I’m often asked what the difference is between NYU's ITP and MIT's Media Lab. Sometimes from prospective students, but mostly from high-powered executives or important writers who have heard of the program or The Show. I had one friend once who left Media Lab disappointed, so I’m super-qualified to speak about it.

MIT kids are smart. Really smart. They probably have been studying violin since they were, like, two. Then they wrote software algorithms when they were 10 to approximate a symphony that could play along with them in real time while they played Bach concertos. If these kids were a rock band, they’d be Emerson, Lake and Palmer with a laser show and a 360 major label deal.

ITP kids are... resourceful. We didn’t invent hacking or email or lasers and shit. We invented QTVR, PComp, Gurl, Arduino and Foursquare. Instead of beautiful John Meada visualizations, we’ve got a lot of wooden tiles that move in concert to show you a picture of yourself and we think that’s art. It’s not really, but we never studied art so we don’t really know any better. If we were a rock band, we’d be the Ramones with their shitty recording contract and Laurie Anderson playing midi controlled tambourine.

And that’s the difference between Media Lab and ITP. I created this Google spreadsheet MIT:MSG :: ITP:CBGB for further study.

I hope this helps clear things up and finally puts the question "What’s the difference between ITP and Media Lab?" to rest.

"During the dot-com boom we went from myself to 150 people," Kim told students from Harvard, Brown and MIT last week. "By January of 2002 we were down to four people. Should died, but instead bloody noses every day for 90 days, pushed on and grew the company up, we'll be close to 300 people by the end of this year."

Rebuilding the company in New York wasn't the advice of the experts. Ram Shriram, one of Google's earliest investors, told Kim point blank his company wouldn't succeed unless they moved out to Silicon Valley. Instead, Next Jump aggressively pursued engineers directly on their college campuses instead of poaching from their competition.

They invested in research and professors, huge intern classes, big competitions at schools and found it paid big dividends. "Arguably no other company is our space invested in college recruiting," said Kim. While it's obviously a bit of biased sample group, the majority of the engineers who attended the event said the Big Apple was now their top destination after college.

"We just felt like there is so much noise out there," founder Jordan Cooper told The Observer. "Tons of companies with no real engineering culture begging for engineers to come work with them."

The challenge consists of two questions: one easy, one hard, and can be completed using any language.

The first problem is to create a way to rank user influence. Despite entering several random numbers,The Observer couldn't nail that.

"We wanted to give the hacker community something fun to work on for a day, and also to communicate our own technical DNA," said Cooper.

The second problem reveals a few interesting details about Hyperpublic's strategy.

The company has an internal karma system to determine which users are the most involved in the ecosystem. Users earn points for tasks like adding places, things or tagging photos. The second challenge asks programmers to determine the minimum number of tasks the Hyperpublic team has completed to hit their current scores.

Prizes include a one year subscription to Dropbox or Github and a free desk for one month at Hyperpublic HQ, located a floor above betaworks and Cooper's office at Lerer Ventures. Sounds cozy.

At this moment there are more than 400 folks hacking on the problems at the same time, and 28 have gotten the right answers. That makes The Observer feel a little better about our lack of coding skills.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper