StartupAlley is a blog learning from and contributing to the (re)emerging “Silicon Alley” internet technology startup scene in New York City.
How?
By interviewing NYC entrepreneurs, angel investors, and venture capitalists and demystifying the startup process by offering tips and tricks around starting and growing great companies.
Who?
My name is Sean Black. I am the founder of SalesCrunch, a new Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) company who’s mission is to revolutionize the sales profession and make sales sexy through technology and education. I was the founding VP, Sales at leading vertical search engine Trulia.com from 2005 to March, 2010.
I live in Hells Kitchen with my wife Heidi and son Christian. My office is in TechSpace in Union Square, where we share space with lots of great companies like LinkedIn, Flixter, eHarmony, Trulia and Pandora, to name a few.
Why?
I want to help make New York the best place to start an internet company. I attempted to start the predecessor to Trulia in New York in 2005 only to find that the Internet ecosystem on the East Coast had largely evaporated when the bubble burst in 2002. Fortunately, I joined forces with Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen in San Francisco and Trulia has since raised over $33M from prominent Valley investors like Ron Conway, Sequioa Capital and Accel Partners. Trulia now has almost seven million unique users, hundreds of paying enterprise clients from Bank of America to Home Depot, thousands of paying real estate broker and agent customers and over 100 employees spread between San Francisco and New York. Fortunately, five years later New York is also an Internet success story of its own, but it needs the community’s help to rival the ecosystem in Silicon Valley.
Why Now?
New York’s Silicon Alley is poised for in a technology revival thanks to a host of emerging factors. Besides being the best city in the world in which to live, work and play, some catalysts for the revival include the close proximity to top academic institutions like MIT, Harvard and The University of Pennsylvania, a mass amount of bored and vested Google engineers leaving the New York office in droves and starting and joining startup companies, the bursting of the financial bubble that put engineers otherwise (lucratively) working on trading systems for the likes of Lehman Brothers and hedge funds back on the street and events like Meetup.com’s NY Tech meet-ups, now boasting 800+ attendees per month, providing entrepreneurs and engineers a venue to demo and promote their startups.
Funding sources are also popping up from prominent angel investors like Flickr founder Caterina Fake and the Founder Collective to seed funds like New York Angels, Polaris Ventures’ Dogpatch Labs and government supported NY Seed. And finally, many early stage venture capitalists including Union Square Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, First Round Capital and DFJ Gotham now call New York home as well. As a result, startups like Etsy, Foursquare, Tumblr and Hunch have sprung up in NYC and many more established Internet startups like LinkedIn, Trulia, Pandora and Yelp, to name a few, are establishing large offices in New York City.
Obviously there is a technology revival in New York. StartupAlley is a beacon to existing and aspiring entrepreneurs to show them that this is the place to be to start and grow their companies!
