I’m at Clickable’s Interesting Cafe tonight to hear Fred Wilson speak about what makes the NewYork Venture Capital Startup scene special.

The presentation is up at AVC blog.

New York is a great place to do a startup, and the genesis came from a talk he did at Web 2.0 last year.

New York has 150 Technology startups vs. 336 in Silicon Valley this year. Why?

– Diversity of Industry (different ideas)
– NYC is Application Focused
– NYC is media obsessed (access to media)
– NYC is creative minded (and artists interact)
– entrepreneurs abound here
– Life style is more social, walk alot, and easier than many other places.
– Density
– International Trade Hub (non stop flight)
– People want to come here, NYC is the Mecca for many
– commercial mindset
– Immigrants
– world’s biggest stage

New York school of web design – where are we leading the way?

– Commence
– Job Search
– Advertising Tech
– SEO/SEM
– Meetup – get people off the web
– Publishing 2.0 with HuffPo and Gawker
– Email ( Daily Candy)
– Payments?

People build companies to make money.

Continue the discussion at AVC.

Jack Dorsy, cofounder of Twitter, speaks next. Twitter was founded, in a way, to connect people, off the web.

Next Chris speaks, co founder of Flickr, makes a point we need a critical mass that leads most companies to want to start / build here.

Questions:
A. With all the pressure to produce revenue, will many west coast companies move here? Fred thinks not, but NYC is coming into it’s own.

B. How much has Google done (by having it’s 2nd largest office here) to change perception that NYC is a great place to build a large business.

My take is this is the best Clickable Cafe yet and, packed.

An interesting point came up with New York’s lack of talent in Product Management. Fred Wilson said VC’s look for Product Development first, in the founder’s of the companies they invest in.