City Mice
It’s NYTech Week next month and last Friday I was fortunate enough to join a gathering of Founders NYC which shared much of what this community is all about. Almost 10 years ago, I wrote this post City Made, which was my love letter to this city and its entrepreneurial identity. I’ve been thinking recently about the decade since and that identity over time. First, as far as naming conventions go, NYTech has gone through periods of dormancy and intense debate. I’ve always preferred Gotham. There’s grittiness to Gotham and perhaps a gloom, but it nails a truth that discards hyperbolic glorification, which can’t be acronym’d, nicknamed, or contracted into trendy term. while originating from a fictional version of a maybe NYC, Gotham is an instantly recognizable, ‘nuff said moniker.
In the last almost ten years, a lot has happened in Gotham’s own NYTech. MongoDB and Datadog went public and currently have a combined marketcap of $54 Billion with stock prices that are a combined +721% since IPO, more than earning their places as homegrown pillar companies. Squarespace, Wiz, Stack Overflow, Braze, AppNexus, FanDuel, Flatiron Health, Shutterstock, EvolutionIQ, Moat, Zoomin, Gem, Jackpocket, Adore Me, Frame.io and many others had outlier exits. Cornell Tech went from a handful of debut courses and one partially opened building to an exceptional, expansive campus and hub for builders and creators on Roosevelt Island. The city has become a hotbed for applied AI. Virtually every name brand Silicon Valley VC firm that wasn’t here already opened an office in the city. A soaring employment sector, NYTech has grown +162% over the past ten years. The 275,000 strong who make up NYTech now outnumber the total staffing on Wall Street and account for 12% of total city incomes annually.
The decade has also had its share of pain in Gotham and NYTech. WeWork collapsed, we were an epicenter for at least two crypto-mania boom and bust hyper cycles, and an epicenter for a worldwide pandemic. We marched, we hurt, we struggled, we shined. A city like New York in its everyday mode, in which bonds gather and dissipate with a dizzying fluidity and yet, for the duration that they hold fast, can display a mighty strength. Isn’t that creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship at technology’s frayed edges and bold frontier all together and writ in big, bright lights? Emboldened communities swell with chaos, indelible resolve abides the widening gyre.
This city is like a Big Bang rewinding: where a limitlessness of energy, varietal, and possibility is compressed into a five-borough crushed tin box that hums to the best music of every genre. It draws dreamers to a poetry in tilt-a-whirl motion and paces restless strivers in a centripetal orbit. For those singular, intrepid founders — within whom unthinkable vision meets unshakable nerve — Gotham may be the most genuine environment for entrepreneurs to be in-residence.
I love that New York City is never going anywhere. I love when new New Yorkers arrive and when former New Yorkers decide to return. I love that when they do it will be a different version of the city they left, which, nevertheless, in its nooks and crannies, will shoot memorable winks from the one they remember. I’m overjoyed to be a tiny, little one in a place that overwhelms in its embrace. I love that I’ll never feel like I’ve seen it all. I would never ever want to. Gotham calls to the seeker who may never arrive at their definitive conclusion nor cover every inch of this metropolis, and can’t wait to see what’s down the next alley, around the next corner.
The author Durga Chew-Bose once wrote: “the best ideas outrun me, that’s why I write.” Maybe that’s the point with the city. New York is a never-ending story. As dreamers harden into strivers or grow into dreamers that strive or strivers that dream, the city pervades. It’s an impossible archipelago whose magic in multitudes daily nourishes its resident millions but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At once the chameleon and the phoenix, Gotham dances to surprise and dares to persevere. And so, we of it beat ceaselessly on, ever coming forth to once again behold its stars.