NYC is the Next Venture Capitol v2 0 - WordPress.com · 2014-03-08 · ! 2!!!!!...
Transcript of NYC is the Next Venture Capitol v2 0 - WordPress.com · 2014-03-08 · ! 2!!!!!...
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NYC is the Next Venture Capitol David Aronoff General Partner, Flybridge Capitol Partners March 2014 This post is not about comparing Silicon Valley to NYC. That’s tired. Silicon Valley is the gold standard, sure, but there’s no “next Silicon Valley.” It’s a one and only, unique and special place. Instead, this post is about NYC and its potential to become, in its own right and with a different flavor, a unique and special place to build multi billion-‐dollar startups. This is the question we posed to our own investors about the NYC tech economy in light of the explosion of startup activity over the past few years and our own decision in 2012 to dedicate half of Flybridge’s staff and resources to the cityi And rather than take a qualitative approach to this question as has been done before, we conducted a data-‐driven analysis, a summary of which I present below. First, to frame the evaluation, it’s important to get the prevailing criticisms of the NY tech scene on the table:
• We lack talent, particularly technical resources. • It is just too expensive to live and to build a startup in New York City. • Seed rounds are easy to get funded in NY, but follow-‐on rounds are difficult. • We're deficient in terms of big exits and content to sell companies early. • And finally, NYC is strong in traditional sectors like AdTech, FinTech, Fashion
or Media, and nothing else. While at one point there may have been truth to each of these points, they are simply no longer accurate. To address these topics in some detail, we’ve constructed the following graphic as a summary of the “state” of NYC’s startup ecosystem and why we conclude the city is on the rise as an important venture capital center:
i To be clear, we remain great fans of Boston as well and its ability to create more unicorns in the future.
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123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627 Talent New York City has always been a magnet for talented people, but in the past decade it has become a lure for the technorati. There are more than 260,000 people employed full-‐time in tech companies here – more than 150,000 in highly-‐skilled roles, with more than 26,000 of these jobs added since 2007 -‐ including the effect of the recession. Additionally, NY is the top destination for graduating seniors from the top 5 universities in the country; the global capital for women entrepreneurs, and the top US city for H1B visas granted in the last cycle. In addition to being a tremendous draw for talent from the outside, one of Mayor Bloomberg’s great legacies is in helping us grow the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders from within. With groundbreaking initiatives such as Applied Sciences NY, in a just few years we'll double the annual number of masters-‐level engineers graduated in the city to more than 5,500. Moreover these graduates will be educated with a strong entrepreneurial curriculum. The innovative New York City Foundation for Computer Science Education, which is driving the long-‐term goal of computer science education for the city’s more than 1.1 million public school students, over time will provide our businesses with a technically skilled and locally sourced workforce. Costs
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And what about costs? There's no denying that NY is expensive, but when compared to Silicon Valley and San Francisco, it turns out that rent and salaries are actually lower; rents in New York City are lower by roughly 19%28 and, according to both Glassdoor and AngelList, the cost of engineering salaries are between 5-‐ 7% lower in NYC than in the Valley29. This attraction has not been lost on the giants of the tech sector, with many of them, like Google with more than 1,500 engineers, making significant commitments to long-‐term employment in the city. This phenomenon is critical to our ecosystem because their presence signifies the importance of our region in the tech world and because Google and other established tech companies provide a safety net for startup executives concerned about alternatives should their companies fail. Estimating “employment capacity” based upon office square footage taken by some of the larger players, we reckon Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon alone appear to have capacity for more than 4000 employees. In addition to our homegrown entrepreneurs, many of these people will eventually leave to start their own businesses and continue the entrepreneurial cycle. Funding You cannot accurately assess where NYC stands relative to startup financing without pulling the lens back to see where we are in the natural gestation cycle of startup companies of this era. Consider the traditional startup lifecycle funnel –
There are inputs in terms of financings, the natural loss of companies that fail, and exits in terms of M&A and IPOs. It’s important to note that according to SEC filings,
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VC-‐backed tech companies that have gone public in the past two years were on average 9.5 years old. Looking at VC investments in the NY region over the past dozen years, a pattern emerges suggesting that the current generation of startup investing began around late 2005 or early 2006. By this point in time, the excesses of the Internet bubble of 2000 had largely been drained from the system and after five years of negative or no growth, venture investing nationally had returned to an upswing30. 3Q-‐4Q 2005 represents the low point in total number of financings and total dollars raised over the past decade31.
Additionally, beginning in 2005, the seed phenomenon in NYC started in earnest, a trajectory that, when normalizing for the recession of 2008-‐09, has seen consistent growth year over year. It was around this time that venture firms such as Union Square Ventures and Greycroft were founded and/or made their first investments. During this period, important companies such as Yodle, Vidyo, Etsy, Indeed, Second Market and Yext were founded. When you consider the growth of NYC as a funding target for venture firms, NYC has emerged as number 2 or 3 in the US, but more important, we're the fastest growing region over the past decade for financings32.
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So going back to the funnel analogy and focusing on NYC, we observe great health at every stage since 2006:
• More than $13.5B in venture financings in more than 2,700 transactions33. • More than 800 M&A transactions, including solid exits between $50M and
$1B in the past two years. Notable companies include Admeld, Buddy Media, indeed, MakerBot, tumblr, among many others34.
• Critically, we're seeing the surge of very strong companies toward IPO in the $B+ range, such as AppNexus, mongdoDB and ZocDoc.
• NYC accounted for 7 or 9.3% of the total number of US VC-‐backed IPOs for 201335. Additionally, Shutterstock, the most the successful of 2013 NYC tech IPOs was not VC-‐backed, stands with a market cap of nearly $2.7b.
Sectors It is certainly true we have stars in what are considered NYC's traditional sectors like Fashion and FinTech. But not as heralded are the world class companies emerging in more tech-‐heavy sectors such as Hardware and Enterprise Tech -‐ not thought to be NY's strength. Of note is that 27 of the Business Insider Digital 100 are NY companies. A list of sectors and NYC’s leading companies follows:
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The data supports the diverse investment activity among sectors in NYC. According to the PWC Moneytree Report, VC investment activity for the period 2012-‐2013 breaks down as follows36:
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Software investments dominate VC investments across all stages the last two years, nearly 2X the number of financings for Media & Entertainment. It’s not surprising that media investments are still important within the NY ecosystem, but a more granular taxonomy shows the following37:
Of special note is the acceleration of Internet Commerce, which at 15.6% of all financings over the past two years is catching up to media investments. The X-‐Factor There’s no surprise that the NYC tech community is incredibly active and inviting. This is clearly demonstrated by the more than 350 individual tech meet-‐ups, comprising more than 320,000 members with more than 1/3 of them active monthly. But could community be NY's X Factor and is its impact quantifiable? To answer these questions, we asked for some help from our friends at Endeavor Insight, the research arm of Endeavor, who for years have been surveying global tech ecosystems to determine if there were themes within these communities that could explain the growth of entrepreneurship – in effect mapping their “entrepreneurial DNA.” Endeavor Insight interviews founders and investors, asking key questions about inspiration, mentorship and investment. From this data they create a map of the connections among entrepreneurs leading local tech companies, detailing the various connections that sequence the entrepreneurial genome. A strong ecosystem exhibits the following traits: large success stories, a web of interconnectivity between successful entrepreneurs and companies and emerging entrepreneurs and companies, and long chains of relationships.
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This map shows the interrelationships within the Buenos Aires tech ecosystem in a generational force diagram that was recently published by the World Economic Forumii
The concentric “rings” represent the different eras of startup activity, showing 4 generations of companies from 1990-‐2011. The “planets” are the various companies, sized by their impact and influence on the community over time. The “lines” among the planets indicate the connections and interrelationships. The past few months, Endeavor Insight has their trained sites on NYCii. We've always described our community as open, collaborative and supportive, and the work they’re doing seeks to quantify this effect. Endeavor has not yet completed its diagram for NY, however, the image below depicts one example, centered on Gilt Groupe.
ii Link to the Endeavor Insight map at the World Economic Forum; see Figure 4. ii http://www.nyctechmap.com/
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No surprise, the large planet looming in the upper left is DoubleClick – whose alumni have founded more than 20 companies in NYC tech, and account for more than 30 CEOs in the city. To date Endeavor has mapped more than 700 companies in the city, and the preliminary results are quite interesting and describe a vibrant, growing and supportive community with strong evidence of interconnectivity and long chains of relationships.Buenos Aires). The penultimate question that remains, however, is how many generations until the NYC tech ecosystem is largely self-‐sustaining in terms of human resources? Conclusions NYC tech has had two distinct generations in the past 14 years -‐ the “Internet bubble clean up” period from 2000 to 2005, which prepared us for the beginning of “gear up” period starting in 2006. In just 7 years, we've gone from one of many tertiary tech regions, to a top 3 entrepreneurial center in the US. Some great and growing exits and leading companies in their sectors indicate that we're following the right trajectory toward success. Silicon Valley didn’t “happen” overnight; it took more than 30 years for its ecosystem to mature. New York City appears to be on a faster trajectory, and in the next 2-‐3 years, there will be no doubt that it has arrived if:
• our community continues to demonstrate its special nature of support and collaboration, paying it forward to create new generations of founders,
• the focus of capital remains trained on our startups as a top three recipient of financings in the US, and
• most importantly, our terrific cohort of leading tech companies racing toward escape velocity, produces billion-‐dollar, thriving public companies.
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Footnotes 1 Partnership for NYC 2 Building a Digital City: The Growth and Impact of New York City’s Tech/Information Center, p. 2 3 LinkedIn Research, Dec 2013 4 Startup Ecosytem Report Part 1, p. 35 5 H1 Base 6 Angel List Research, Jan 2014 7 Fortune 8 NYEDC, p 4 Economic Research and Analysis, Tech Trends August 2013 9 NYC TechCity, p. 1 10 Meetup.com Research, Dec 2013 11 Meetup.com Research, Dec 2013 12 NY Tech Meetup Research, Dec 2013 13 Promoting Entrepreneurship in NYC, NYEDC p2 14 Mark Birch Research 15 Mark Birch Research 16 AON / Partnership for New York, p. 11 17 US News & World Report 18 AON / Partnership for New York, p. 11 19 Partnership for New York City, NYC Jobs Blueprint, p. 25 20 Academy for Software Engineering Bronx Academy for Software Engineering 21 The Computer Science Education Foundation of New York City 22 WNYC 23 NYC Real Estate Broker's estimates, Jan 2014 24 Partnership for New York City, NYC Jobs Blueprint, p. 13 25 NYC TechCity, p. 8 26 NY VC Almanac, p. 7 27 The Atlantic / Martin Prosperity Institute 28 National Low Income Housing Coalition Report, March 2012 http://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2012-‐OOR.pdf 29 Glassdoor research Jan 2014; Angelist research Jan 2014 30 PWC / NVCA Moneytree Report Feb 2014, data from Thomson Reuters. Note that 2004 was an 18% growth year, but 2005 was nearly flat at 1% growth. 31 PWC / NVCA Moneytree Report, data from Thomson Reuters 32 The Atlantic / Martin Prosperity Institute Updated with 2012 Data from ??? 33 NY VC Almanac, p. 7 34 PWC / NVCA Moneytree Report Feb 2014, data from Thomson Reuters 35 Wilmer Hale Research, Feb 2014. 36 PWC / NVCA Moneytree Report Feb 2014, data from Thomson Reuters 37 Thompson One