Friday, April 1, 2011

New York and New England: Tech partnerships already happening

By Rodney H. Brown

If you think that there is any kind of hatred between New England and New York in any area other than baseball anymore, you are behind the times - at least as far as tech companies go.

That was the clear message that came out of the “NY-New England Connections in Tech” panel put on by Mass High Tech Thursday night and held at Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge. Many of the panelists made the point that the younger workers that make up the bulk of the workforce – particularly in any kind of media company, be it traditional, Internet or social – enjoy the idea of living in one city and working in the other.

That point was hammered home most by panelist Andrew Moss, founder and chief strategy officer of group buying site BuyWithMe.com, which was founded in Newton in 2009. The company expanded into a New York location in December, and it has been growing rapidly since.

“We’ve got 70 people in New York at this point and about 30 in Boston,” Moss said. “We are a very sales-force-driven kind of company – putting feet on the ground.”

The panel was comprised of Moss; Lee Hower, co-founder and partner, Nextview Ventures; Alexis Ohanian, creator and co-founder, Reddit.com and Y-Combinator ambassador to the East; and Bill Pescatello, founding member, Peacock Equity Fund and vice president, Comcast Interactive Capital, as well as a board member at Vivox and Ramp (formerly Everyzing).

Another point made was the sense that, to compete with Silicon Valley as the primary tech sector in the country, the New England region needs to eliminate the “city-state” mentality – the “I’m from Boston,” or the “I’m from Providence” attitude, as opposed to “I’m from the Valley.”

“Here in New England, when we cross state lines it is like the dark side of the moon,” Hower said. “In Silicon Valley, you drive up to Marin, you’re in San Francisco, you drive out to the Penninsula – it is one contiguous area.”

“There is something to a name for a region,” Hower said, in agreement. “Everyone knows what the term Silicon Valley means. If you think of the Boston to New York corridor, there is no one name for that area.”

Moss, however, made the point that the difference in culture between New York and Boston is vast, and probably greater than any two cities in the Silicon Valley area, making it more difficult to create a single branded concept to encompass the region.

Still, there is a growing trend in the New York-New England corridor of taking advantage of what each city has to offer, and that means basically that the Greater Boston area has the brains and New York has the bodies – not in the sense of dumb bodies, but the trained content creators and media workers needed to produce product at a commercial scale.

“In Boston here, we crank out a gajillion engineers from really good institutions,” Pescatello said. And Ohanian pointed out that New York dominates in media creation. “Most of the media produced in the United States comes from a pretty small radius around mid-town New York,” he said.

Pescatello also pointed out another difference between the cities is in venture capital. “The VC sector in Boston is bigger and stronger in Boston than in New York,” he said.