A couple of great posts on tech/business founders in NYC popped up in my tweetstream today, one bemoaning the lack of hackers, and one bemoaning the lack of worthy entrepreneurs, and I feel the urge to jump into the discussion.
I can see both sides of this: I’m hiring (http://www.gamechanger.io/jobs), and it’s been a struggle to find good engineering talent. And I hear the same thing from other people around New York. On the other side, I’ve been to my share of meetups and “VC” events crammed full of crackpot ideas and idiot “founders.”
But I find myself taking issue with both extremes. There’s a lot of noise, but there are also some very smart non-technical founders roaming NYC (I was lucky enough to have met one in my co-founder Ted Sullivan, who bowled me over with his vision for GameChanger when we first met). What I think is missing is a culturally enforced discipline around presenting ideas, and starting companies. We just don’t have the depth of history here that other places (Boston, SF) have. You can see it in the lack of good presentation materials, understanding of customer adoption and monetization models, and even the relationship of technology to business. But it’s growing, and as a member of the DoubleClick alumni tree, I see more and more legitimate businesses springing up in this area with great ideas and veteran founders (I get about 2 solicitations to go be CTO/founder of new-billion-dollar-idea-X per month, so I’ve got a good seat to see what’s happening in that arena).
On the other side, I’ll readily admit that it’s hard to find hackers here. But they’re here, you just need to know how to find them. And in NYC, they’re often wearing camouflage. Let’s go through some of them: Goldman employees who actually want to make a difference in the real world. Big media coders working for ad networks wasting their skills on website design. They don’t come in the packages we might expect, but there are diamonds in the rough everywhere. GameChanger had the fortune to present last week at the New York Tech Meetup, and the flow of legitimate hacker candidates that I’ve seen since that has been surprising, and refreshing.
We do have to compete with the banks, but we also need to get better at recognizing and recruiting tech talent in this climate. Go look for the people working in telecom, advertising, and banking. Many of them have honed awesome skills solving really hard problems, and some slice are going to be interested in your startup. And because the culture here doesn’t revolve around a startup ecosystem, they’re harder to find. But if you get out there, and go to where the coders are (hit up the Python meetups, Hackathons, and lecture circuit), there are tons of smart people looking for more meaning in their life.
And as a parting shot, I hear it’s ironically very hard for your average company to recruit engineering talent on that other coast too. The numbers are there, but the problem I hear is that everyone wants to work for the “cool” companies, so the competition for the cream of the crop is still intense and unbalanced. The only difference here is that it’s Goldman in stead of Twitter sucking up all the talent (or, frankly, Google in either city).
