Brad Hargreaves | Building Things

There’s an old adage in the game design field that good games are easy to learn, yet difficult to master. That is, a game should be simple enough for even the most uninitiated user to understand yet challenging enough for a master to spend years working to hone their skills. Chess is one oft-cited example.

Cities operate by similar principles. Great cities are easy for visitors to navigate yet take years if not decades for residents to fully explore and understand. Cities can be too simple, like so many in middle America that bore their smartest residents into submission (or departure). And cities can be too complex for newcomers — New York, for instance.

This is why Adopt a Hacker is a great idea. New York is possibly the most fascinating city on earth to master — but it’s also one of the most difficult places for a newcomer to learn, especially when it comes to meeting new people. Adopt a Hacker NYC lowers the bar to get great hackers engaged in the city by lowering the learning curve. By pairing visiting developers up with veteran NYC residents, it adds a tutorial to an otherwise dense game.

If you haven’t read Paul Carr’s piece on his experience at New York Internet Week, go read it now. If don’t have time, I’ll summarize. Paul’s interaction with New York went something like this:

1. Media tool gets invited to New York by other media tools
2. Media tool goes to an internet week party populated by “identically unique hipsters”
3. Media tool only sees other media tools
4. Media tool goes back to the ‘burbs and writes shit about New York

Well. He argues that good content is dead, so at least he’s eating his own dog food. But he does get some things right. Old media is dying, and lots of people don’t understand how it’s dying. Many of those people hold on to false hopes that the bright shiny piece of technology of the day (social media, the iPad, Web 3.0) will save their shitty business models. Many of those people are in New York. He’s totally right on there.

But he’s the equivalent of a European tourist who visits Disneyland and thinks it is an accurate representation of America. He goes to an Internet Week party and thinks he gets it. Well, people who are actually creating interesting tech companies in New York don’t go to those hipster-filled digital / new media parties because they are clogged with PR reps, “content creators”, glassy-eyed social media strategists and starfuckers. Or they aren’t even aware of these panels and parties — as I’ve written before, the New York tech scene is huge yet strangely siloed, with founders aligning with particular industries rather than the broader “tech community”.

But — in Paul’s defense — the media world has used its superior resources to more or less occupy “high profile” NYC tech. If you go to a “tech” or “internet” event in the Valley, you’ll meet tech people. If you go to a similarly branded event in NYC, you’ll meet media people. And you’ll think there’s nothing to New York tech beyond hipsters and old media dreamers*.

Want to meet New York tech? Head over to Hackers and Founders or the Y+30 or NextNY. You’ll meet awesome people there, but they won’t fly you out. If you insist on having your ticket paid for, you’ll end up in the same media bubble-world you unfortunately fell into this time around.

* Many in nyc new media are great people, and quite a few are my good friends. But they aren’t what Paul Carr is looking for at a tech event, and those are the buckets he’ll throw them in.

I hosted a party with Superconductor’s Matt Brimer a couple weeks back. Since I’m more or less incapable of throwing a party these days that doesn’t turn into a NYC tech mixer, we decided to embrace it and craft an appropriate drink menu.

I wish I could take credit for more of this, but it’s primarily the work of Brimer and HomeField‘s Reece Pacheco.

[Click to enlarge]

They tried to capture the spirit / theme of each startup in the drink. Or something like that.

The Bit.ly: Tequila shot

The Boxee: Vodka, triple sec, lime, shaken, serve on rocks in tumbler

The Drop.io: Beer + Shot of Bourbon, Vodka or Tequila

The Etsy: Vodka, muddled lemon, sugar, ginger ale

The Foursquare: Vodka, sour (shaken), garnish w/cherry + orange

The GoodCrush: Vodka, triple sec, lime juice, cranberry, shake on ice and strain into martini glass.

The Hot Potato: Jager-Bomb

The Hunch: Gin and tonic

The Kickstarter: Muddled bitters, sugar, orange, cherry, add rocks, bourbon.

The OMGPOP: Lemonade, Gin, Peach Schnapps, sour mix. shake. Highball or glass on the rocks.

The Parse.ly: Muddled mint + sugar, bourbon, sour. Tumbler glass on rocks.

The Postling: Bourbon, Ginger Ale, highball or tumbler on the rocks.

The ScoopSt: Vodka, Gin, Rum, Tequila, Triple Sec, Sour Mix, Jagermeister

The SpeakerText: Tequila, mixers

The Tumblr: Vodka Cranberry with a lime.

The Yipit: PBR

Editor’s Note: This post was created in collaboration with Chris Paik, who was invaluable in helping me crunch the numbers. He’s looking for an internship in venture capital, so if you like this post, get in touch with him via his blog.

Lots of you enjoyed my post a few weeks ago on buzz and fund size among NYC venture firms. But why not take it further? Why not use all the data in Crunchbase of financings of NYC companies over the past five years?

So that’s what we did. And we got data for 814 venture financings since March 2005 worth a total of $3.1 billion. We were careful to exclude angel and strategic investors, since data around those deals are poor and would make the results harder to parse.

To start, let’s look at all venture firms that have completed over 7 financings of NYC-based companies in the past 5 years. Here, you can see how they stack up based on number of deals done:

Keep in mind that there’s a long tail here — this chart represents 300 total financing events, only 37% of all the venture financings of NYC-based companies in Crunchbase. The rest of financings were done by other firms.

But this is just parsed by the number of financings — with no thought given to the size of the deals. Thus, let’s look at the (relative) deal size by the firms listed above when investing in NYC companies:

You’ll probably notice that there aren’t any labels on the Y-axis. In brief, I don’t trust the absolute data here. It’s often impossible to distinguish the relative contributions of investors in a syndicated deal. For example, if Union Square does a $1 MM seed deal, there isn’t any ambiguity there. But if the company’s next round is a $10 MM round syndicated among two growth capital firms and Union Square, there’s no way to really know how much each firm invested. However, it is probably safe to say that the growth capital firms do bigger deals than Union Square, since they first joined the syndicate at a later (bigger) round. Thus, the relative data is accurate, but the absolute numbers are highly questionable.

Since we selected these financings based on the zip code of the funded company’s headquarters, we can drill down a bit further and draw some really interesting conclusions. Specifically, where are funded companies? The following map looks at two factors: the number of financings in the zip code (the color of the dot) and the total amount of venture money invested in the zip code (the size of the dot):

There are certainly some surprising things here, at least to me. This entire map seems to be shifted a bit further north than I expected; are there really that many well-funded startups in Murray Hill? I also expected to see a bigger presence in TriBeCa.

There’s a lot of data here, and I’m sure there will be follow-up posts — especially as we dive into the data on the types of companies that are receiving this financing.

Red is work, Green is fun

I like data, especially when I find it in unexpected places. Our favorite urban bureaucracy the MTA has a wealth of data on subway and bus ridership just waiting to be parsed here. I suck at graphic design, but I’m just going to throw something out here in hope that it inspires someone with actual Adobe Fireworks skills.

While playing with this data, I came up with one interesting metric in particular — something I call the “Fun Index,” which you can see below. It’s simply a comparison of ridership per subway station on weekdays versus weekends. Initially, the outcome seems obvious: stations that serve offices will be heavily trafficked during weekdays, with a substantial drop-off during weekends.

But what about other stations that don’t serve Midtown East or the Financial District? It may be reasonable to expect those stations’ traffic to be reasonably smooth, as residents use the subway to go to work on weekdays and to fun places on weekends. Since most people go to work every weekday but may not go out every weekend day, you’d expect a slight decrease in traffic on weekends. And that’s exactly what you see in stops in the UES, UWS, Chelsea, Murray Hill and other heavily-residential areas.

But if not to work, where are people going on weekends? Interestingly, two subway stops in Manhattan actually show an increase in traffic on Saturday over an average weekday: Canal Street JMZNQRW6 and Prince Street NRW. If you view this data across all subway stations, you can create a “Fun Index” of sorts that compares New Yorkers’ destinations during weekdays versus weekends. On weekdays, we go to Midtown and the Financial District. On weekends, we go to TriBeCa and SoHo. Those places are simply more fun.

Would love to see what others can do with the MTA’s data.