Last night, nextNY had a great event at the midtown offices of CRESA Partners called NYCHub. (We had originally called it Alley 2.0, but then we found out there was a breakfast earlier in the week with the same name, and so I just left it the name of the wiki page, to avoid confusion. We had some great participates, including Jerry Colonna, Dennis Crowley, Alejandro Crawford, Saul Shapiro, and nextNY's own Darren Herman, and I'll write more about that later, but for now I just want to get my thoughts down and I'll blog more about it over the next few days.
- The need for space in NYC isn't about needing a place to build your business, its about a place to aggregate community and meet other creative people.
- Real estate is a red herring... no one seems to be having a real issue affording to live here. (Bay Ridge as tech center?)
- There is a serious lack of angel funding, and the expertise and guidance that comes with it, in NYC.
- Our "heros" have their volume set too low. We need to put a megaphone in front of the charismatic personalities of NYC and get them out in front of more people.
- We need to refocus on our natural business advantages. Instead of having the next nextNY open houses at AOL or IAC, the "tech" companies, we need to be having them at CBS Interactive, NYT Digital, Digitas, MLB Interactive and Goldman Sachs.
- UPDATE: After reading Darren's post, I realized I forgot the NYC education system as a point. NYC students need to hear a lot earlier about entrepreneurship as an option.
More thoughts on this to come!