Xconomy held its first Big Apple tech event (well, mostly tech, since there was one life sciences company on hand) on Wednesday. We called it New York’s Venture Emergence, and a fantastic crowd of nearly 250 turned out to the Apella Center on East 29th Street for an afternoon of startup snapshots, VC-entrepreneur stories about building great companies, and keynote chats featuring some of New York’s hottest emerging companies and investors.

On the VC side, speakers included Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, RRE Ventures’ Eric Wiesen, Nick Beim of Matrix Partners, Todd Dagres from Spark Capital, Rich Levandov of Avalon Ventures, Michael Greeley from Flybridge Capital Partners, and Dennis Purcell of Aisling Capital.

Companies presenting included bitly, Gilt Groupe, Armgo Pharma, Simulmedia, BarkBox, and Gotham Greens. We also heard from HackNY and Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of SecondMarket—on the day Facebook filed to go public.

We snapped a lot of pictures of the speakers—and our audience. Following is a selection of shots of both. We hope you enjoy them.

A great thanks to our venue host, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, and our fantastic event sponsors: Cooley, EisnerAmper, Halloran, IDA Ireland, and TriNet. Special thanks as well to the National Venture Capital Association and New York Angels, which went above and beyond to help with this event.

And thanks most of all to all of you who came to see it, and made such a great crowd. I hope we got a picture of you.

(Xconomy digital media intern Teddy Worcester contributed to the production of this slideshow)

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	New York’s Venture Emergence — The crowd gathers
	Photo by Keith Spiro Photography courtesy of Kendall Press

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Snapette was supposed to be an unusual way for Sarah Paiji to spend the summer between her two years at Harvard Business School. It was a mobile app idea she started working on last winter with Harvard alum Jinhee Ahn Kim, aimed at enabling women to better share and find fashion products in brick-and-mortar stores.

Then, two days before school was set to wrap up that first year, a Twitter interaction with the colorful Silicon Valley investor Dave McClure more or less changed all that, Paiji says. She tweeted an infographic about local shopping, which McClure then retweeted. He also directed his Twitter followers to sign up for the Snapette fashion app. The resulting traffic clued Paiji in to the fact that McClure was someone important in the startup world.

At the suggestion of friends, Paiji reached out to McClure, who runs the 500 Startups seed fund and accelerator in Mountain View, CA, to share some more information on her company. “He liked the idea but said he doesn’t know anything about fashion,” she says. So McClure passed Snapette along to his 500 Startups partner Christine Tsai and Jess Lee, founder of fashion tech startup Polyvore, to take a look at the company. Snapette got the OK, the 500 Startups fund invested an initial $50,000, and Snapette left its digs at Boston’s MassChallenge program to join McClure’s accelerator—three weeks after it had already started.

Now, Paiji is working full-time on Snapette and has no foreseeable plans to return to business school. The 500 Startups demo day in August put Snapette in front of 700 investors.”If they’re interested, it’s hard to say you’re going to back to school and will do this on the side,” says Paiji.

“It was very thematic of the whole journey: unexpected,” she says.

(And this isn’t the first startup I’ve written about whose Twitter interactions with McClure ultimately led to inking an investment from him. The other one would be Cambridge, MA-founded and now San Francisco-based Baydin.)

Snapette officially launched its app in late August in conjunction with demo day, and Kim and Paiji finished up the year at Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, CA. The company also continued to be a part of the MassChallenge program remotely, Paiji says.

Just last month, it made the move to New York City (to Dogpatch Labs, again) to be near the “high shopping density of boutiques and users,” says Paiji, who I caught up with in Boston this week.

There’s plenty of buzz around social, local, mobile, and even fashion tech startups. So what makes Snapette different? Most of the plug-ins and apps and platforms aimed at better tailoring shopping to consumer preferences exist in the online world. Not so much for the physical world. “Our idea was, we would love to help women find great products in stores using crowdsourcing,” Paiji says.

Snapette’s iPhone and iPad interface provides a stream of product pictures that have been uploaded by the user community, with information on the brand, price, and store that carries it. Users can search streams near them, and get directions to the store selling the products nearby. They can also interact with and follow others in the Snapette community, share products to other social media outlets, and view a stream of what products are hot and trending based on likes and comments on Snapette.

“It feels like Pinterest for the real world,” says Paiji. (The comparison had to be drawn.)

Snapette has since expanded beyond this crowdsourced content, and is explicitly partnering with brands and boutiques looking … Next Page »

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Day in and day out, venture capitalists ask questions of entrepreneurs—some might say grill them. But on February 1, at Xconomy’s New York Venture Emergence forum, former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt, who’s now CEO of luxury online marketplace 1stdibs and chairman/co-founder of Group Commerce, will help us turn the tables. Rosenblatt will be the moderator of a fireside chat with legendary investors Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Todd Dagres of Boston’s Spark Capital.

Rosenblatt knows both men well. He and Wilson served on the Twitter board together—Rosenblatt is still on it, while Wilson is no longer a director. And Rosenblatt knows Dagres through Spark Capital’s investment in Group Commerce.

He has some great questions ready for the both of them. I spent some time on the phone last week with Rosenblatt—who outlined his plans. I can’t reveal his specific queries, so as not to ruin the surprise for Wilson and Dagres and let them get too prepared. But I can say they will cover the gamut of how to start companies (and who should start them), how to mentor and grow them, the latest trends and their downside, and a lot more. The discussion should be of immense interest to entrepreneurs and hopeful entrepreneurs, not to mention anyone interested in entrepreneurship, investing, and innovation. “I’m an operator, not an investor,” Rosenblatt says. “And the questions will be for the most part from the point of view of companies—not investors, but entrepreneurs…Hopefully, they are questions that will be helpful for you in relating to investors.”

Rosenblatt plans to leave plenty of time for audience questions as well. But just in case you are shy, or he doesn’t get a chance to call on you, feel free to share yours beforehand. Just put them in the comment stream below, or send them to events@xconomy.com. We’ll do our best to make sure they get addressed.

The keynote chat between Rosenblatt, Dagres, and Wilson is just one part of a star-studded afternoon that includes another keynote chat with Barry Silbert, founder of SecondMarket, and featured talks with the founders and founding investors in Gilt Groupe, bitly, Simulmedia, and more.

We hope to see you there. Get your tickets soon—space is limited for this great event and Early Bird registration ends tomorrow.

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In ancient Roman times, Ingenuitas was a legal term for those who had been born free, and the word served to distinguish those who had enjoyed freedom since birth from freemen who started out in slavery. Nathan Oostendorp, Katherine Scott, and Anthony Oliver chose Ingenuitas as the name of their startup tech company because the “born free” ethos is a clever nod to their mission to revolutionize the manufacturing sector through open-source software.

Launched in April, Ann Arbor-based Ingenuitas was created with the goal of bringing the technology used on factory floors into the post-Internet age.

“There’s a big deficiency in smarts when it comes to the computers used in manufacturing,” says Oostendorp, who was a co-founder of Slashdot.org and director of SourceForge.net prior to starting Ingenuitas. “The computers used on the line are based on technology that’s 20 to 30 years old.”

What Katherine Scott, Ingenuitas’ director of R&D, wants to eliminate are the inefficiences in the current system of checking for product defects as they roll off the assembly line. “Right now, a person stares at the assembly line all day. That’s not only expensive, it’s a very monotonous job that leads to high turnover,” Scott says.

What Ingenuitas has developed is software called Simple CV, which uses a Python interface to open-source vision libraries to give users access to algorithms in feature detection, filtering, and pattern recognition. It’s supposed to enable camera-equipped computers to take over line-inspection duties.

“Manufacturing is probably the least startup-friendly sector right now,” Oostendorp says. “Certainly in the last decade, it’s been a really unfashionable sector. But a lot of people in the manufacturing sector who have survived realize we need different models to compete globally—we need to change from a labor-based model to a tech-based model.”

A startup that proposes to change manufacturing from a labor-based model in a state that is arguably the last bonafide labor-union stronghold in the United States? Sounds tricky. Not so, say Oostendorp and Scott, who acknowledge that some jobs would be lost as part of their vision, but the payoff would be local manufacturers who are lean and profitable enough to survive and grow in the global market.

“The people who make things in factories would still be involved in the process,” Scott says. “What we’d see is more custom production. Manufacturers would have the ability to pivot quickly and change what they’re making according to the market.”

The other advantage to workers is that their system, they say, is open-source, meaning that anyone can learn the software and teach themselves skills that are highly transferable.

“Something we’re trying is running free classes in hacker spaces in Ann Arbor and New York,” Oostendorp says. “It makes the technology accessible, and we want to court the people who are experimenting with the software as a hobby.”

After successfully releasing version 1.2 of Simple CV a few months ago, Ingenuitas is now developing ServoHub, a social showcase for innovations in Machine Vision, Robotics, Sensors, and Control Systems, and Seer, which transforms any PC with a camera into a Network Managed Machine Vision appliance.

Ingenuitas is still in the process of writing the user’s manual for Simple CV, but right now, Oostendorp says, they’re collecting feedback on Simple CV’s deployment (“very positive”) and what the software is still missing, as well as meeting with local manufacturers to demo the product.

Oostendorp is a Michigan native; Scott is a University of Michigan graduate who has a lot of family living here. Both say they can’t imagine starting their company anywhere besides Southeast Michigan.

“If there’s a capital for U.S. manufacturing, it’s the midwestern region,”  Oostendorp says. “Michigan is the place to be in the manufacturing sector, and the story of Ingenuitas is very much a Michigan story.”

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“The time to invest in social media was two years ago.” That was a quote—or the gist of it, anyway—from Todd Dagres, co-founder and general partner of Spark Capital, during the venture panel at XSITE, Xconomy’s innovation summit last month.

Dagres ought to know, since Spark is an investor in both Twitter and Tumblr, the white hot mixed-media blogging platform—and Twitter co-founder Biz Stone recently became a Spark strategic advisor. So his quip seemed a perfect setup for me to ask the obvious follow up: What’s next?

I sat down with Dagres last Friday in Spark’s offices on Newbury Street in Boston to get the skinny on what he sees as the emerging new areas for investing that might take off the way social media has the last few years. “I can’t tell you that,” was his first reaction, but he wilted, as you’ll see. We also covered some other interesting ground—such as his views on what has made New York tech so hot and how it compares to Boston, why Groupon doesn’t get his investor juices flowing, why tech investing is better than making movies (Dagres had a stint as a Hollywood producer and still does it on the side), and more (Governor Patrick—read on, because there’s some stuff for you, too).

We started with New York, since late last month Spark closed its 19th deal in the Big Apple—joining in a new $50 million round for Foursquare—out of a total of 43 the firm, which was founded in 2005, has done. And Dagres says Spark has signed two more term sheets with NY companies. That’s a whopping percentage, almost half the total. The rest, he says, break down as a dozen in Silicon Valley, seven or eight in the Boston area, and a few others scattered around.

Here are the take-homes from our conversation:

Boston vs. New York—Dagres says New York surpasses Boston on some key parameters for entrepreneurship. “It really is a vibrant community of entrepreneurs. It’s a very creative environment. It’s an environment where there’s a sense for the customer. And it’s also a community where there’s a lot of sharing going on.” What Dagres calls “a powerful mixture of factors” has led to the ascendance of New York entrepreneurship. “I think it grew out of the Wall Street bust and also the transition from traditional media to digital media. Kids grew up in a media hub and an environment of a lot of risk-taking. That all mixed together. The other thing I will throw in there is the artistic element.” All these things previously existed in pockets around the city. “Now, it’s kind of come together into one big vibrant, collaborative community.”

Todd Dagres of Spark Capital participated in a discussion of the social media bubble, among other things, at XSITE 2011.

Boston, says Dagres, now falls short of New York on at least two of the factors listed above: collaboration and sense for the consumer. When it comes to venture firms, he says Boston VCs have traditionally invested in enterprise-focused software companies-and see consumer-oriented startups as too risky. “It’s all risky,” he counters, and meanwhile the unprecedented ability of small companies today to reach billions of consumers is “incredibly powerful.” Besides Spark, Dagres could only name one other Boston-based firm he felt was comfortable investing in consumer plays and taking big risks (another, oft-cited critique of Boston venture firms, which Dagres agrees with)—and that was General Catalyst.

But Boston’s shortcomings vis à vis New York don’t stop with venture firms. Dagres says as a whole, Boston’s entrepreneurs lag New York startups when it comes to collaboration and sharing—and that, in turn, has prevented Boston from matching the spirit of the entrepreneurial community in New York. “We don’t quite have the critical mass in the community,” he says. “And we don’t have … Next Page »

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Brad Hargreaves, co-founder of New York City’s newest tech incubator, was just 19 years old when he learned some bitter lessons about starting companies. He was the chief operating officer of GXStudios, one of the first players in online social gaming. The venture-backed company’s flagship product was GoCrossCampus, a multiplayer, rivalry-themed game played by college kids across the country. But there was a problem.

“We could not figure out how to make money,” says Hargreaves, now 24. GXStudios ultimately shut down.

Now Hargreaves is passing his wisdom to more than 30 companies headquartered at General Assembly, a new incubator that opened in January in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. General Assembly’s 20,000 square-foot space is designed like a miniature university, presided over by Hargreaves and fellow founders Adam Pritzker, Jake Schwartz, and Matthew Brimer.

Unlike the tech incubators of the early 2000s, this one is not backed by any venture capitalists. The funding comes from organizations like Skype, Ideo, Silicon Valley Bank, and the New York City Economic Development Corp. (NYCEDC) General Assembly, then, is more about educating and nurturing entrepreneurs and less about spewing out companies ill-suited for primetime.

From left: Hargreaves, Pritzker, Brimer, Schwartz

That makes General Assembly fundamentally different than the incubators of a decade ago, Hargreaves says. “The fact that we aren’t venture backed lends itself to an open environment,” he says. “It allows people to be more forthright about issues and to ask the community for help.”

As Pritzker, 26, leads a walking tour of the freshly decorated space, he emphasizes its educational mission. General Assembly holds about two classes per day, in topics ranging from HTML to online advertising to “How to Pitch Your Startup to Big Media.” Some are taught in small seminar rooms, others in bigger classrooms. One classroom has a giant sliding door that doubles as a chalkboard. “We have different typologies for teaching,” Pritzker says.

More informal networking events might be held in the incubator’s main entryway, where huge, black, modular couches can be quickly cleared out to open up more space.

General Assembly has just unveiled a new classification system for its courses. Each one has a label—Technology, Design or Business—so entrepreneurs can design a cirriculum that fits their needs. The classes are also tagged with numbers, ranging from 100 for easy to 900 for advanced. So “A Practical Introduction to Javascript” is labeled “Tech 463,” while “An Online Advertising Primer” is “Business 253.”

General Assembly’s founders have been working hard to attract teachers who bring real-world experience to the table. Recent instructors include Matt Cooke, CEO of Sandcastle and Mike Potter, co-founder of Disrupto. “Someone who wants to be a CEO will be taught by someone who has been a CEO,” Hargreaves says.

And General Assembly differs from other incubators in that it offers three membership choices. Startup execs can apply to get workstations for $500 a month. Or, for $300 a month, … Next Page »

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Pfizer’s (NYSE: PFE) investigational compound, tafamidis, slowed the progression of a rare and fatal neurodegenerative disease over 30 months, according to a press release. The disease, called Transthyretin Familial Amyloid Polyneuropathy (TTR-FAP), affects about 8,000 people worldwide. The data came from a late-stage clinical trial of the drug and was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Neurology on April 12. A week earlier, the FDA indicated that Pfizer would need to provide additional information to support its filing for approval for tafamidis, and the company indicated it was working with the agency to resolve that issue. The company also announced that an advisory panel to the FDA voted that the company’s cancer drug Sutent shows a favorable benefit-risk profile for the treatment of unresectable pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. The vote brings the New York-based drug giant a step closer to being able to expand the label for Sutent, which is currently approved to treat some stomach and kidney cancers.

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Brooklyn, New York-based SocialGuide, where TV viewers go to talk about TV shows as they air, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding, according to a press release. The seed round was run by Alex Zubillaga and angel investors. The company will use the money to build out its site, which is designed to foster social engagement between consumers and networks. “With more than half of the nearly 300 million Americans who watch TV having a second screen experience, the market is ripe for a social TV product that connects with consumers and networks,” said Alex Zubillaga in the statement.

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In a scintillating report released today, the Public Policy Institute (PPI) of New York blasts the state’s leaders for failing to support the local biotechnology industry. New York ranks fifth in the nation in biotech employment, for example, and sixth in total capital expenditures made by the industry. And despite churning out more college graduates than any other state in the nation, New York’s biotech firms don’t provide enough high-paying jobs to get them excited about working in the industry, the PPI says.

The report’s authors declare that New York’s stance towards biotech is “severely anemic in its care for its people, support for entrepreneurship, and economic development strategies.” Furthermore, they say, because of rapidly growing competition from other states—not to mention China, India, and Brazil—”the biopharmaceutical ecosystem in New York is growing weaker, and Albany and major local governments must act before the equivalent of a climatic cataclysm strikes the state.”

Ouch.

But the PPI’s goal isn’t to bully New York’s leaders. Rather it’s to present a plan of action for turning New York from a perennial also-ran to a world capital of biotech. “Our report makes specific recommendations of how to get us out of 38th place in annual growth,” said Heather Briccetti, the PPI’s acting president, during a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the New York Biotechnology Association (NYBA), just a few days before the report’s release. “We’ve identified this sector as one that the state needs to make a strong commitment to.”

The PPI lays out some compelling and often disturbing numbers to support its thesis, which is reflected in the report’s title: “New York Must Step Up its Game.” For example, every life-science research job that biotech and pharma companies create in New York spawns an additional 3.46 support jobs—double the effect of a new Wall Street position, the PPI says. Every manufacturing hire translates to 9.36 additional jobs. So when 3,000 pharmaceutical manufacturing positions were eliminated from the state in 2010, a staggering 30,000 other New Yorkers lost their jobs.

In virtually every category it tracked, the PPI found New York to be an embarrassing laggard. New York employs 10,320 scientists, far fewer than California (41,200), Pennsylvania (15,920) and Massachusetts (15,300). The average wage in the biopharmaceutical sector … Next Page »

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OK, so they’re not quite the Emmys. And this being New York, they’re not even the Tonys. But for the city’s legions of Web developers and interactive advertisers they might as well be the Oscars. That’s right, it’s time for the 15th Annual Webby Awards. The nominees were announced today in New York.

The Webby Awards, presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, include more than 70 categories, encompassing websites, interactive advertising, online film and video, mobile, and apps. Winners will be announced May 3 and honored during a ceremony June 13 in New York. The ceremony will be streamed live on the Internet, in HD, by MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM), which is owned by Major League Baseball. Under an agreement signed March 14, MLBAM will webcast the awards using technology that allows viewers to interact with the presentation via mobile and tablet apps.

New York companies made a great showing this year, with more than 200 nominees coming from the Big Apple. Some are predictable, such as … Next Page »

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SocialFlow, a New York based developer of social-media optimization tools, pulled together $7 million in a Series A, according to a press release. Investors included Softbank, RRE, Betaworks, Highline Venture Partners, AOL Venture Partners, and SV Angel. SocialFlow’s product analyzes the Twitter topics that people are most engaged in and their likelihood of taking action on a Tweet. SocialFlow’s clients use the platform to publish Tweets at times when their audiences are likely to be most receptive. SocialFlow also said that it sewed up a partnership with Twitter, which will allow it to incorporate Twitter’s data into its platform.

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OrbiMed Advisors, a healthcare investment firm in New York, has brought in $203 million for its one-year-old OrbiMed Israel Partners fund—including $40 million from the Israeli government, according to VentureWire. OrbiMed will use the fund to back 15-20 Israeli startups, OrbiMed general partner Jonathan Silverstein told VentureWire. The fund’s first big move is a $10.5 million investment in SMT Research and Development, an Israeli company that’s developing medical devices for use in complex heart procedures. OrbiMed is also expanding its team in Israel, according to a press release.

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Online retailer Exclusively.In, which offers flash sales of discounted Indian clothing and jewelry to its members, has started a luxury travel division, according to a statement from the company. Exclusively.In launched last summer with $2.8 million in funding from Accel Partners India and Helion Venture Partners, and has offices in New Delhi and New York. By expanding into discount travel, the company is following a trend popularized by other members-only, flash-sale sites, including New York-based Gilt Groupe.

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Legolas Media, an advertising technology company based in New York City, raised $5 million in an equity-based funding round, an SEC filing shows. There were three investors, according to the document. Legolas’s website defines the company as “not really” an ad exchange, but rather a marketplace that connects advertisers with publishers in a manner that’s designed to help them maximize ad revenue.

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The 20th annual meeting of the New York Biotechnology Association (NYBA) kicked off on April 6 with a panel called “The Global Struggle for the Biopharmaceutical Industry: New York Must Step Up Its Game!” Nathan Tinker, executive director of the NYBA and the panel’s moderator, joked to the gathering crowd at the Marriott Marquis in midtown Manhattan that “there was no controversy at all” to the panel’s “unassuming title.”

In fact, that title expressed perfectly the confluence of themes that emerged at the lively, two-day gathering of NYC-area biotech executives, venture capitalists, and scientists. On the one hand, New York’s biotech CEOs are proud of their association with the city that’s home to pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer, and dozens of top-notch academic institutions and hospitals. But on the other hand, they’re quick to acknowledge the challenges that have landed New York state a perennial third-place ranking in biotech, behind California and Massachusetts.

First, the good points of being a biotech in the Big Apple. Several government agencies are pouring millions of dollars into supporting biotech startups. Eva Cramer of the State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, who spoke on Tinker’s panel, said government grants will allow her college to expand its biotech incubator from 38,000 square feet to 85,000 square feet. “Without the support of the state, we wouldn’t have even been able to build the facility,” she said.

City and state government agencies are starting to get better organized about supporting biotechs in New York. Making its debut at the conference was NY BioHud Valley, a new public-private partnership designed to bolster biotech companies in Westchester and other areas north of the city. The group handed out a map showing the 83 companies that are headquartered in the Hudson Valley. And during the keynote lunch, Seth Pinsky, president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, lauded Pfizer for embracing NYC as the home of its new Centers for Therapeutic Innovation, which opened in January. It’s a sign, Pinsky said, “that we’ve arrived.”

Now for the negatives. Despite the millions in grants and other government support, New York has some of the highest business and personal tax rates in the country—a serious barrier to attracting top scientific talent. And some executives say the state doesn’t work very hard to woo … Next Page »

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Start browsing the artwork available for rent at Artsicle.com, and it won’t be long before a window pops up offering a real live curator to help you make your selection. The live-chat feature is a lot of work for Artsicle founders Alexis Tryon and Scott Carleton because, well, they’re Artiscle’s only full-time curators. That means they have to respond to every request for live help. But it’s worth the hassle, says Tryon, because choosing artwork is hard, and she wants Artsicle to be the go-to site for every harried New Yorker who’s looking to dress up a bare abode. “Live chat is an amazing tool. We answer their questions, and they don’t get frustrated,” Tryon says.

Artsicle has been called the Netflix of art, and the name fits—sort of. Potential art buyers in New York can browse the site and pick pieces to rent for $50 a month. Artsicle delivers the art using couriers (which are sometimes Tryon and Carleton themselves). Customers can hang the art in their homes for as long as they’re willing to continue paying the monthly fee.

At that point, the resemblance to Netflix ends. While it’s true Artsicle customers can rent pieces indefinitely, the idea is for them to eventually find something to buy. Artsicle features works by about 30 artists, at prices ranging from $500 to more than $3,000. Artsicle takes a 30 percent commission on every sale. Owners of brick-and-mortar galleries, by contrast, generally take 50 percent, Tryon says.

Ever since the site launched on March 1st, it has pulled in about one new customer every other day. Artsicle has sold 15 paintings so far—way exceeding the entrepreneurs’ expectations. “Our goal,” Tryon jokes, “was to keep the site from crashing.”

Tryon’s low expectations were probably warranted, considering Artsicle’s inauspicious beginning. Tryon, who was working in restaurant marketing at American Express, knew she wanted to start a business that capitalized on her longtime love of art. She teamed up with Carleton, a mechanical engineer, and they started experimenting … Next Page »

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New York is famous in the business world for its large companies in a variety of industries. For the partners at the seed-stage venture fund Founder Collective, however, the focus is on the small tech startups in the city and beyond that have the potential to rapidly grow in value.

In fact, managing partners David Frankel and Eric Paley, among other partners of the fund, formed Founder Collective in 2009 as a continuation of their success in backing each others’ startups and other young companies for several years. And while the firm’s $50 million fund might seem small to the bigwigs on Wall Street, we’re living in a world where tech upstarts are launching products and gaining real customers on budgets of less than $1 million.

Founder Collective, with offices in Cambridge, MA, and New York City, has made more than 50 investments in tech startups around the country, and its partners have made bets on 20 or so firms in New York, according to Paley and Frankel. Though Frankel and Paley have been involved in firms outside of tech, their fund focuses on software and Web startups that make efficient use of capital and for which relatively small investments can carry the companies to major jumps in value. (So, obviously, this excludes capital-intensive businesses like drug developers.)

While Frankel and Paley both keep homes in the Boston area, they have partners in New York, like Hunch co-founder and CEO Chris Dixon, who spend most of their time in operational roles at startups. (Hunch, a New York City-based startup, says that it personalizes the Internet by helping people find recommendations on all sorts of topics.) Frankel and Paley, who are the only partners who are full-time dedicated to Founder Collective, each serve on multiple boards of directors in New York, giving them a close view of what is happening on the ground in the city’s startup scene.

“There’s been, and I think Chris (Dixon) has been very involved in this, a renaissance in … Next Page »

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New York City’s incubator scene has been exploding of late, with Polaris-backed Dogpatch Labs opening in early 2010, and General Assembly setting up in January of this year with help from a $200,000 city grant. Now it’s time to add a new name to that list: WeWork Labs, which opened in SoHo on April 1.

Perhaps it would be more accurate, though, to call WeWork Labs a “pre-incubator.” That’s because it’s designed for entrepreneurs who still don’t have their business ideas fully cooked. They can rent a chair, some space at a long table, and 24-hour Internet access for $250 a month. And they can stay until their business ideas are well enough developed to move into a more traditional incubator. “We’re a feeder for things like Dogpatch Labs,” says Matthew Shampine, a computer scientist who cofounded the space.

Shampine’s cofounders are fellow entrepreneurs Jesse Middleton and Adam Neumann, who Shampine met through WeWork, a rapidly expanding collection of communal office spaces for entrepreneurs. Neumann is the founder of WeWork, which has two locations in New York, and another opening in May (A San Francisco WeWork will open this summer). Shampine rents space for his Web development firm, Simande, in WeWork’s SoHo office. While attending a conference, he met WeWork Labs cofounder Middleton, who is now working on his Web startup, GetMinders, there.

When 3,000 square feet became available upstairs early this year, Shampine jumped at the opportunity to bring his vision for a new sort of incubator to life. The idea fit Neumann’s WeWork perfectly, because WeWork is designed as a co-op for entrepreneurs. It’s not quite an incubator—companies that rent space there are mostly established, and they do get their own private offices—but it is designed to allow easy interactions among residents. WeWork Labs embraces the same culture, but it’s aimed at people who are at an earlier stage of starting up companies.

“We didn’t want this to be a space for people to just work on their startups,” Shampine says. “We are focused on building a community of people with ideas.” WeWork Labs’ 30 or so flagship occupants include … Next Page »

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Last year was a watershed year for the NYC tech scene. In the spring of 2010, the hottest startup in the country was located here in NYC and was being breathlessly courted by some of the biggest venture capitalists in VC from Silicon Valley and Boston. In June, Andreessen Horowitz became the winner of the Foursquare sweepstakes, and the startup was suddenly $20 million dollars richer. For Foursquare, there were plenty of VCs who were more than eager to show them the money.

Tech companies and startups located outside New York are also investing big money to establish and grow their presence here. Google, for example, became a big landlord in Gotham City with last year’s purchase of an office building for $1.9 billion and now employs more than 2,000 people in NYC. Facebook is expanding its office here and also acquired two Brooklyn-based companies last year: Drop.io and Hot Potato.

More recently, over 25 leading academic institutions, including Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Cornell, IIT Bombay, New York University, and Purdue, responded to the city’s request for proposals to build a world-class engineering school in NYC. Stanford’s proposal, for instance, envisions a first phase of development that would cost $250 million, would be financed by Stanford, the city of New York, and philanthropists, and would eventually enroll 2,200 graduate students and hire 100 faculty members at a Roosevelt Island campus.

Compared to a decade ago, the depth and breadth of startups in NYC has changed dramatically. New York is not just home to online … Next Page »

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You know what they say about New York City: If you can make it here….But let’s skip the clichés and old song lines and get straight to the big news. Welcome to Xconomy New York, the sixth outpost in our rapidly expanding network of local news sites about innovation.

So, all you Big Apple entrepreneurs, it’s time to get excited. The city’s biotech, tech and energy sectors are bustling, and I intend to find all the great stories of innovation that NYC has to offer. Xconomy New York will report with the same journalistic zeal that began in Boston almost four years ago, and which we have since rolled out in Seattle, San Diego, Detroit, and San Francisco.

Why New York? Because if your mission is to be the authoritative voice on the most innovative sectors of the overall economy—life sciences, info tech, and clean technology—then you must be in New York. There’s all kinds of action in digital media (think Foursquare), it’s the place that gave rise to a billion-dollar blockbuster cancer drug (Erbitux, now owned by Eli Lilly), and it’s the home of Wall Street, the place where most of the really big cleantech ideas are getting financed. Hence, we’ve arrived to report on these stories at close range.

New York is home to more than just the bulls and the bears, of course. It’s packed with venture capitalists and top-notch academic institutions with active technology-transfer arms, not to mention that oh-so-vital source of sustenance for the city’s legions of cash-poor entrepreneurs: The best 99-cent pizza slices the world has to offer.

Even though NYC is widely seen as a world capital for finance, media, entertainment, and fashion—and Silicon Valley gets most of the credit as the capital of innovation—there are plenty of great stories of invention to uncover here, too. And many of them are coming from a rapidly expanding group of technology incubators, which include Dogpatch Labs, General Assembly, and NYU Poly.

New York City is also home to pharmaceutical giants … Next Page »

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