Nate is a Co-founder of Anyclip.com, organizer of New York Tech Meetup and Advisor to Flybridge Venture Partners. In Part 1, he talks about AnyClip, why New York is a great place to be an entrepreneur and the reality vs hype of what is going on in Silicon Alley.

Update – A transcript can now be found directly below the video. Thanks for your patience.

Sean: So we’re here with Nate Westheimer.  The… a lot of titles:  co-founder of AnyClip[.com], organizer of  the New York Tech MeetUps, and the newly appointed advisor to Flybridge Capital.

Nate: Yep.

Sean: You’re a busy guy so thanks for stopping by.

Nate: My pleasure, yeah.

Sean: (Laughter) So, let’s talk about the New York Tech community, in general, but as probably a good specific example maybe you could tell us a little bit about “AnyClip.” Maybe just like the elevator pitch…

Nate: Yeah, that elevator pitch that I give for “AnyClip” is  the only one I’ve ever given that gets a round of applause…But, it’s the index of the world’s films so people can search for and find any moment from any film ever made, instantly.

Sean: Oh, so that favorite food fight from Animal House?

Nate: Food fight, Animal House,”BAM! Gas station scene, Zoolander, “Roll on Shabbos,” “Make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

Sean: That’s awesome.

Nate: Yeah, it’s… the movies as a medium are just an, incredible force. I mean it’s almost the most democratic form of culture and of art. And so working with films is just a delight.

Sean: So you have an office in New York?

Nate: Yep.

Sean: And Jerusalem?

Nate: Yep.

Sean: Uh, And we were talking a little bit about the story behind how that came to be and I think it is a really good and interesting story that entrepreneurs would enjoy.  So maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background.

Nate: Yeah. I think, you know, what entrepreneurs can take away from the “AnyClip” story is that it’s not the traditional “two guys and a bowl of Ramen, in a garage” story that I think has been, sort of, canonized. You know, it is the “Google” story, and it is down to the “Foursquare” story, and it’s the “Tumblr” story. And that’s amazing for a number of reasons – those types of stories that’s;  capital efficiency, sort of being or having all of the skills in-house,  all of those things that help small ideas, or big ideas start small and then grow to be big. But “AnyClip” is a different story that people say an existing company that had tried something in the movie space, and knew wasn’t working with their current idea, with their current management, but, they had assembled a great team and the investors wanted to keep going. The investors, themselves, were quite passionate about the space for a number of reasons.  And so they were actively recruiting new management and they got around to my friend and co-founder, Aaron Cohen, who… he and I sort of talked about that opportunity.  We were sharing different opportunities. I was on my way out of Rose Tech Ventures. My term as EIR was coming to a close. He had been out of Menu Pages, he was the CEO of Menu Pages [inaudible] with New York Magazine. He had been out of that for about six months, sort of thinking about his next thing. We started talking about ideas. We took a look at this company together and decided that, you know, we had an Idea – the idea of “AnyClip” – that would be really, really compelling and that we would enjoy working on. So we took that back to the investors and they decided to hire Aaron and including myself to come in and, turn it around and, that was almost a year ago in a couple of weeks.

Sean: And, what happens in New York and what happens in Jerusalem?

Nate: In Jerusalem, the two main functions of everybody in Jerusalem is engineering and data engineering: so software engineering and data engineering.  When we say indexing the films, there are some things that we do logarithmically, but there is actually a huge manual component to that.  And then from an engineering perspective, we have sort of three teams, people on the core data, API and search teams, and then people on the web and product teams, and some on the Flash and development, which happens in both camps. In the [United] States, it’s more on the product side. So, I run product and technology for the company as a whole and Gabby Moore, our lead designer, sits next to me in New York.  So she is the main interface between, sort of, product and code because she is a developer, a former developer. Then in terms of business functions:  Aaron, our CEO, our head of licensing is in New York. And actually our head of business development is in L.A., so we kind of have an office in L.A.  And then we have a number of support staff here in New York as well. So we’re about 20 people – about half New York and Jerusalem.

Sean: Yeah. What do you think about building an engineering team here in New York?  What’s kind of the pros and cons?

Nate: Well the pros are… I adore my team in Israel and I couldn’t see doing this project without them. Of course it has its difficulties – to be so far away – and so I think that most people should and would be wise to look for building their team locally. And I think that in terms of – and not always, but in a lot of cases – start lean. Lean start-ups  can really… it might be cheaper in other places. Certainly that’s not a reason to be in Israel , but in other places in the world– it’s cheaper than New York. But you lose a lot in just that, sort of, having zero-latency in getting feedback, and brainstorming, and all that. So New York is the place where I think you’d want to be building your engineering team. And the question is, “Can you?” and I think, “Absolutely!”  It’s not that… There is no reservoir of engineers, nor should there be. Right? Engineers are highly skilled individuals and so it’s going to be tough, no matter where you are to find the right set of skills for your start-up.  I don’t think anywhere else in the world there is this reservoir that you can just dip into.  And so what you have to do is, just like any other place, you have to convince people to work for your company where you are. Well I can’t speak for your company, you know, but in terms of New York, it’s been increasingly easy to convince people that New York is a pretty awesome place to do work. And the quality of life here – what I put in a recent blog post and sort of made myself chuckle was– “where else can you live a life of such luxury and have a smaller carbon-footprint  than anyone else in the country?”

[laughter]

Sean: Yeah. You can live in box and have the best life ever.

Nate: Yeah, it’s true. That’s one of the appeals of living in New York. You, both, can take public transportation everywhere and you‘re actually living well and doing good at the same time. The lifestyle is just hard to beat. Outside of just business, right,… the MoMa, the entire city. So it’s easy to recruit people to come here and then a lot of those people are here anyway. I don’t think you generally have to hire somebody, convince somebody to come in from Chicago or Atlanta or San Francisco to move here. A lot of those people have decided that New York is going to be their home anyway. And so New York is a great, you know, a great feeder itself for talent.

Sean: So what do you think, about what’s happening with the New York, sort of, tech scene in general? We were just talking about how in 2006 we would go to these MeetUps,  New York Tech MeetUps, with about 100 people give or take.  Now there’re 800 people – you’re organizing them.

Nate: Yeah.

Sean: What do you think is going on?

Nate: I think a number of factors.  I think even in that 3-year period of time, or 3 ½ -year period of time that I’ve been involved, just the things that I’ve seen happen are… we had a sort of a bubble, we had a fever-pitch, I think, of you know like a year ago where… I’m always sensitive to the amount of publicity or attention given versus how much is deserved.  And I think it’s ok to have, sort of, one the formerly the later. Right? It’s ok a little bit more attention but not too much.  And I feel like we were, maybe 2007, things were getting a little out of control because of Tumblr and Digipop and started… I think they were the main two; the main brands that people were recognizing that were coming up in consumer internet. And consumer internet drives a lot of the perceived hype and awareness of the industry.  I think what’s changed between you know’06 and then ‘07 and sort of now is that everyone sort of is doubled, sort of reinvested the attention that they got, reinvested in really creating value.  People, I think, go to less parties because they are working harder, and that’s really healthy.