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Good morning. It seems oddly fitting that a New York fire marshal essentially shut down a massive party to celebrate “30+ years of Silicon Alley” on Friday night, and that my son, 20, responded to that news by asking, “What’s Silicon Alley?”
The term came out of the Flatiron and Soho neighborhoods in the 1990s where companies like DoubleClick, Razorfish and About.com were born. That was a time when the media-minded startup community in downtown Manhattan competed for mindshare, if not money, with the tech scene springing up around Stanford and Sand Hill Road in northern California. Like the battle between East Coast and West Coast rap, though, it’s a relic of another era. While Silicon Valley drew about 46.3% of all U.S. venture funding in 2024, with New York getting 13.3%, VC spending is a small fraction of startup funding and an even smaller portion of overall investments in innovation.
“Nobody talks about Silicon Alley anymore; it’s just tech,” said attendee Stephen Messer, who co-founded LinkShare with his sister Heidi in New York in 1996, sold it to Rakuten for $425 million in 2005, and later co-founded Collective[i], an enterprise AI firm that operates on both coasts. “New York’s tech scene is so large now that there’s no center.”
Indeed, the city’s tech ecosystem now spans fintech, biotech, e-commerce, climate tech, and more, spawning brands like Etsy, Bilt, MongoDB, Ramp, Warby Parker, Datadog, Kickstarter, Tumblr, Foursquare and OpenSea. Some local tech darlings have had high-profile stumbles—hello WeWork!—while others like Bloomberg were thriving long before a bunch of young entrepreneurs set up shop downtown as the internet was taking off. Add in the fact that tech hubs have since sprung up in many other cities and countries around the world.
Still, nostalgia can be fun. Friday’s party felt more like a throwback to the raves of my youth than a reflection of what tech has become. Instead of alcohol-fueled merrymaking with young singles in some seedy warehouse, this was a gathering of middle-aged professionals clutching cans of water and Whoop bands in an office building overlooking Wall Street. But I enjoyed running into folks like Bloomberg Beta’s Karin Klein, Indiegogo’s Slava Rubin, “sextech” guru Cindy Gallop, entrepreneur Josh Weinstein and cohost Kevin Ryan, the so-called “Godfather of NYC tech” behind DoubleClick and now Alley Corp. Prior to hitting the exit as fire department officials poured in, I picked up a souvenir magazine filled with sepia-toned photos and articles like “Ten Reasons to Be Happy After the Dot-Com Crash.”
As I wandered around, overhearing conversations about AI, pilates, private equity, Mamdani and the new Melania documentary, it struck me that what the 1,000 or so attendees wanted most was a reason to meet up with creative people on a cold Friday night. I suspect that instinct, as much as funding, is what really fuels the tech scene in New York.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.
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