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How the New York City innovation community can still lose (and what you can do about it)

This is going to be BIG.

I remember hearing that a New York City venture fund was raising money in 2004 and almost skipping the meeting, because New York wasn’t a viable place to deploy that much capital—it was a small blip in the past. From an infrastructure perspective, we’re a lot better off than we were before.

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Technology Trends: 10 Areas of Innovation to Watch for 2012

This is going to be BIG.

2004 gave us widespread blogging and Meetups, and 2008 showed how the web could be a community organizing and fundraising tool. It feels a lot like NYC as a whole did back in 2005--a handful of relatively disconnected folks, a few marquee companies and a whole lot of pent up interest in doing something impactful in the local community.

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Playing the Long Game in Venture Capital

Both Sides of the Table

This “overnight success” was first financed in 2004. All four companies were in Los Angeles (or adjacent … Santa Barbara) and our community has now matured and regularly produces billion dollar+ outcomes. This is true in consumer but it’s also true in enterprise software.

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Why the NYC startup scene needs Sean Parker

This is going to be BIG.

He spotted Facebook in 2004 and Spotify in 2009. NYC needs him not only to wave the flag a bit on the ideas here that could go big, but also to share the steps needed to get here with the local community. Parker made a huge dent in the web as co-founder of Napster, then built Plaxo up to 20 million users. VCs seem to listen.

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Master of Customer Acquisition, Matt Coffin, On Startups …

Both Sides of the Table

I figured if Matt was on the verge of bankruptcy and one mentor changed his trajectory, what if we had a formalized, community-wide program? Selling LowerMyBills: o In 2004 he was getting a lot of call to take more money but was not interested. Since selling Matt has gone on to become one of the smartest angels I have seen operate.

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This Week in VC – Scott Painter, CEO of Zag & TrueCar

Both Sides of the Table

Based in Palo Alto and founded in 2004 by PayPal alumni. Used by hedge funds, the intelligence community and multiple government agencies. See: TechCrunch. Offers two products: Palantir Government and Palantir Finance. Palantir’s products are used for integrating, visualizing, and analyzing multiple large datasets.

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Brad Feld Drops Knowledge. Here’s What He Said …

Both Sides of the Table

In 2004 / 2005 I was starting to get intrigued with user-generated content. I do something I now call community hours. And so that is a steady import of talent but even more interestingly what it really did is it re-energized the entrepreneurial community.”. Venture Capital in Boulder and other smaller communities. “So