There have been a lot of words flying around recently about why the NY startup scene is starting to get real traction and attention. Today, Stowe Boyd at True/Slant launched Hotbed, a new blog covering the NY tech scene. In his inaugural post, he claims that smart early-stage investors were the missing ingredient in the NYC startup world until this point. I’m sure David Rose is thrilled about that.

Later today, Matt Mireles, who has been making a bit of a name for himself recently, fired back with a claim that entrepreneurs are at the core of NYC’s tech renaissance and investors are just along for the ride.

The emergence of industries in particular cities is a complex problem that has been studied at length by economists and policy experts, of which I am neither. But it still seems like a massive oversimplification to claim that a certain group of people showed up one day and decided to make things happen. If that were the case, it absolutely begs the question of why it didn’t happen sooner. It’s all related — money follows companies and companies follow money, and I don’t believe that one really gets too far out of balance with the other on a local scale.

But that doesn’t mean the volume of investors (or entrepreneurs) doesn’t matter. In fact, a large startup network is particularly important for New York, a city with notoriously siloed industries. In the past, media guys didn’t talk to finance guys, tech wonks didn’t talk to policy wonks, creatives didn’t talk to quants, et cetera. If you showed up at a startup event, finding someone you knew was tough — and it was even tougher to find someone who had a broad base of connections and could introduce you to someone helpful.

This is distinct from the Bay Area, where the volume and density of people interested in startups created a very tight social network. If you were a, say, entrepreneur in New York from Conde Nast working on a startup in the fashion industry, it was tricky to meet the right people in the tech world. There were few “connectors”, since there were simply fewer people to connect — entrepreneurs, investors, executives, engineers, service providers and such. The connectors that did exist — for example, guys in NY Angels — were fairly inaccessible, as angel investors are wont to be.

Thus, the emergence of “smart early-stage investors” is important. But it’s important because they are bringing social capital to the table, not financial capital. First Round Capital could do zero deals in New York over the next 12 months and they would still have a major impact on the NY startup scene because they’re paying Charlie O’Donnell to hang out in the Ace Hotel Lobby and chat with any entrepreneur who walks up to him. Charlie and the rest of the emerging investor class in NYC are guys who can and will connect the finance guys to the media guys, the tech wonks to the policy wonks and the creatives to the quants. And that’s huge.

And let’s not forget the entrepreneurs. As I wrote a week or so ago, the Celebutante Entrepreneur is a dying breed in New York City. And that’s a great thing for entrepreneurs, as celebrities are (almost by definition) inaccessible. I couldn’t go to Julia Allison for advice about getting my startup incorporated, nor would I want to. But guys like Chris Dixon, O’Donnell and Mireles are easier to track down.

The startup social network density has reached a tipping point in New York City. And that’s all that matters.

Entrepreneurship in New York City is evolving. Everyone is talking about it — at meetups, at conferences, at drinks with friends. While there’s a lot of (warranted) concern about the venture community as a whole, there is a feeling in New York of inevitability; when the dust clears, the City will no longer be playing second fiddle to Boston and Silicon Valley in the world of tech entrepreneurship. Having a NY office is the new hot thing for any east coast VC, and tech startups are increasingly looking at New York as a better place to set up shop for the long term. One could easily claim that NYC owns the hottest VC (Union Square Ventures) and the hottest tech company to launch in the past year (foursquare).

But there’s one symptom of the coming of age of the NY startup scene that people haven’t really been talking about. I was having a conversation with a friend at Gawker Media the other day, haranguing her about Gawker’s lack of coverage of the web celebrities that it lent such weight to just a year or two ago. The Julia Allisons, Jakob Lodwicks and David Karps of the world. Where are they? Yeah, I know, Gawker has been clawing its way into the mainstream; to do that, is has to cover mainstream celebrities rather than NY media darlings. But at the same time, no one has taken Gawker’s place. Even The Awl shies away from the kind of webutante-centric coverage that Gawker became known for.

Most may write this off as a simple shift in new media’s focus — or haven’t even noticed. But I think it is extremely relevant and symptomatic of deeper trends in New York. After all, bloggers write about the topics that get pageviews.

In other words, it is indicative of bigger things. It means that the NY startup scene is maturing. It means that we are focusing less on the media-crowned personalities driving “the tech scene” in New York City and (hopefully) more on the awesome things that tech startups are creating. It’s a democratization; It means that tech in NYC is coming out of media’s shadow. It means that Richard Blakeley’s Webutante Ball last summer wasn’t the debut of the NY web celebrity but its timely demise.

Two years ago, there were essentially no high-profile tech events in the city that weren’t dominated by “new media” (and even quite a few old media) brands and individuals. New media became synonymous with New York Tech. Even the well-known New York Tech Meetup was throwing events at IAC, in the belly of the media beast. Now there are too many tech events to count, headlined by the burgeoning Hackers and Founders — an event that came out of the Valley’s YCombinator and a refreshing alternative to NY Tech Meetup’s cliquish lecture class. New York Tech is growing up.

Of course, you still have celebrity entrepreneurs in California. But their coverage has been focused on — or at least cognizant of — what they’ve accomplished professionally. Even on Valleywag during its heyday. And I can’t really name any big California celebrity entrepreneurs without reasonably sized companies to their names. A year ago, the same could hardly be said about the NY scene.

Still, personalities are important, and it will be interesting to see which (if any) individuals emerge into the roles of successful celebrity entrepreneurs you find on the west coast. Some of the old guard, such as Karp (if you can possibly call a 23 year-old a member of the “old guard”), are good entrepreneurs in their own right. And I can see at least a few investors who are rising to take more prominent and vocal positions in the NY tech scene.

Then again, it is quite possible that I’m suffering from some sort of observer bias, as I’m reasonably integrated into the startup scene. What do people think?