“I can’t tell you the whole idea.” The Internet entrepreneur on the other end of the phone sounded panicky. “It’s going to sound ludicrous and ambitious, more ludicrous and ambitious than most.”
The voice belonged to a 27-year-old Stanford law student—“just about the oldest you can be where I cannot remember not having a computer”—who was in New York last week to talk to people about his new concept for a website.
He gave a few vague descriptors that could apply to half the start-ups in New York.
“I definitely don’t want it in the newspaper,” he said. “I’m worried that even little sign posts toward what I want to build are dangerous.”
When he had the idea in April, he talked about it to anyone who would listen. “I definitely went manic–which has never happened before–when it came into my head, for about 10 days, which were incredibly productive and I wound up talking to a senior engineer at Google and some very well respected people at Stanford,” he said. “I would not sleep. I’d get to bed at like 3:30 and wake up at 6:30 and the entire time I’m just thinking about how to build this thing that was in my head that I think would make the world a better place… I was pacing and talking to everyone I could about it.”
The mania lasted about ten days, followed by four days of crippling depression. His girlfriend seemed to be the only one who noticed. “The fact that I seemed to be taking along some very, very smart people with me was both exciting and in retrospect, a little bit disconcerting,” he said.
“But it is a big idea, and that’s the language of start-ups,” he continued. “The language of start-ups is a sort of manic language, it’s, ‘I’m going to change the world,’ which for normal people is like, ‘Whoa, that sounds grandiose,’ and you sound a little bit crazy. In start-up world, it’s like, ‘Can I give you some money for that?’”
We hung up. He emailed immediately to scrub the record. “I know this is going to sound a little paranoid, but I’d appreciate it if you would not include the quote about ———– being ———– and wanting to develop a platform for ———-. Paranoia is also a symptom of start-up fever.”
Bankers Pull a Pivot – Read the Diaries of a Fledgling Founder
Start-up fever! Whether it’s due to The Social Network or the new wave of billion-dollar tech I.P.O.’s, lately it seems like everyone has a start-up. Betabeat first noticed it in our own neighborhood, the tech-tending East Village, home of Foursquare. On a recent weekend, we overheard an entrepreneur talking about pitching investors over brunch on St. Marks and glimpsed another demonstrating his website’s Twitter integration to a friend at Ninth Street Espresso. We tried to eavesdrop on a bearded, 40-ish fellow ranting about his start-up to a friend in Tompkins Square Park around 9 p.m. on a Wednesday and caught the words “convertible note.” The trend has invaded our building as well. The Goldman Sachs engineer on the second floor wants to join a start-up. He asked us about tech events.
The start-up mythology—build fast, get cash, save the world—and the low barrier to entry make it tough to resist. “An all-consuming start-up can be very difficult for a mom of young kids,” New York-based mommy blog mogul Philippa Smith said in an email, but “the lure of creating something that was potentially such a benefit to both local moms and the local business community was too great.” Her start-up, Juice in the City or “the Groupon for moms,” recently announced a $6 million round of funding.
“It’s Foursquare, it’s Etsy, it’s Tumblr,” said Zeb Dropkin, a digital media consultant-turned-start-up entrepreneur currently working on RentHackr.com, a website where New Yorkers admit how much rent they’re really paying. “New York City has real investment now, real cycles. This is the real leagues.”
Roger Wu, who organizes the Stamford Tech Meetup, recently raised money for one of his start-ups. The investors remembered him because of his red New Balances, he told Betabeat. “It’s like Hollywood, where everyone’s an actor,” he said. “Everyone with a little idea they had when they were drinking is going to start a company and be the next Facebook.”
(Betabeat got an email recently from a friend seeking cycling routes: “Is there a HopStop for bicycles? Because if there isn’t let’s start one and get riiiiichhh!”)
Cheryl Yeoh was working as a management consultant for KPMG, an 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. gig that kept her in Scotch tastings and Michelin stars, when she realized sometime in the middle of April that she needed to do an Internet start-up for something. Anything. The idea was secondary. What mattered was making something amazing that could reach not just hundreds of people or thousands, but millions. “I knew I could do something greater,” she told Betabeat. “Every time I met someone who told me, ‘Oh, I’m a founder of so-and-so,’ or whatever, I don’t care what company it was, every time they said that I thought, oh my gosh, why am I not doing this, I know I can start something, I know I can do something.
“I was obsessed. You can use the word ‘obsession.’”
Ms. Yeoh had a programmer friend. She took him out to lunch and pitched him a few ideas. He picked CityPockets, a website that imports a user’s coupons from daily deal sites like Groupon and sends friendly reminders when they’re about to expire. “We’d come home at 8:30 at night and right away from 9 p.m. I was writing, researching until like 2 a.m.,” she said. “Or I would spend time going to tech events. Some days I would go until 3 or 4 a.m. because I was talking to my mentor in San Francisco. Even though I was physically tired, I was mentally awake. Every morning I would jump out of bed because I was like, I wonder what new features I can think of next… Even my friends were like, ‘Wow, you’re sleeping so little but you look so much more alive!’” She left her job in August, two months after her 27th birthday. “I told my manager, I have to leave,” she said. “I have to do this thing because it’s consuming me.”
She went on. “I had a one-bedroom in Gramercy, lived the high life, had designer coats and bags, traveled multiple times a year. I quit all that. Moved into an apartment in the East Village—Alphabet City, actually—and slept in a living room on a futon kind of separated by curtains Velcroed up to the ceiling. For five months I did that… I wanted to prove that I can live just bare bones, live the life of a scrappy entrepreneur so that I can just fully focus on the product without any distractions whatever.
“I have enough savings in my bank, actually, to continue living in my Gramercy apartment,” she added. “It was more like I made an active choice to go with that lifestyle.” The day she put the curtains up, she recalled, she giggled until her eyes teared.
“In the Bay Area you have more superstars and guys who have done a bunch of start-ups,” said Shai Goldman, a director at Silicon Valley Bank who moved to New York from the Bay Area in January. “The majority of entrepreneurs here, a lot of them are first-time entrepreneurs. It’s almost like a cohort. They’re kind of all learning at the same time, they’re going through the same missteps. It makes it a little more interesting here.
“Every entrepreneur has the opportunity to make a big mark in New York right now.”
The anonymous entrepreneur we spoke to by phone wants to drop out of Stanford and raise money in New York. “I think New York is kind of the Wild West frontier of investing right now. It’s a little bit unstable and it’s a little bit dirty,” he said. Silicon Valley is “this weird system that’s dominated by these monsters” like Facebook and Google, which are buying “crap companies to get the people.”
“The mythology is a little tarnished out there,” he said. “The people I know in New York are really excited about the things that happen here in a way that people at Stanford and the Valley certainly aren’t. You know, it’s big business.”
Evidence of the city’s start-up fever can be seen on Meetup.com—the New York-based, dot-com-era start-up that became a hub for local techsters—where the number of recurring tech events has wildly accelerated: Startup Lunch, 104 members; Dumbo Tech Breakfast, 641 members; UWS Startup Meetup, 164 members; the NYC Startup Garage, 208 members; NYC Startup Weekend, 337 members; the NYC Lean Startup Machine, 1,553 members; the New York Technology Bathhouse Meetup, 25 members.
Adrianne Jeffries is a reporter for Betabeat and The New York Observer. GPG public key: 222D2F697E12899D. Follow Adrianne on Twitter or via RSS. ajeffries@observer.com
