New York Nerds: Where art thou?

New York Nerds: Where Art Thou?

By Andrew Freiburghouse, Edgelings New York City Bureau Chief

 Boston-based big thinker Paul Graham once wrote a famous essay called “How to Be Silicon Valley.”  It’s a thorough exploration of an important topic, but its thesis is wonderfully simple: you need money, and you need nerds, and if you have those two and bring them together, you can be Silicon Valley.

One of the first things I noticed, upon delving into the tech biz community of New York City, was the conspicuous lack of nerds.  Rich people?  Sure, plenty.  But nerds…where? 

In Queens, maybe?

I’m not talking about people who have nerd tendencies, play video games or read graphic novels or whatever.  No, I’m talking about hardcore, unshowered, antisocial, dreaming-in-code, pony-tailed, fingernails-painted, crusty, Red Bull-guzzling, freakishly smart nerds.  And God bless’em and God love’em because they do a lot for our world.  I ain’t hating, I’m appreciating, and I know them when I see them.

And that I don’t see many of them—or any of them, really—in and around New York City.  Not at the networking parties, not on the streets, not in the subway.  Thinking I’d be edgy because I work at a site called Edgelings, I went to a recent Manhattan tech event in a black T-shirt with the word “Brainwashed” blazed across the front.  And I must say, I felt completely out of place.  Unwelcome, even.  And dirty and gross.  I was the only dude in the place not wearing a collared shirt. 

By comparison, in Silicon Valley, I might have been the best dressed man in the room.  Because Silicon Valley is full of nerds.  Asperger Syndrome poster boys whose life is writing Java script.  Geeks who’d rather talk to a computer than a human being by an order of magnitude.  Virgin programmers so incredibly wrapped up in the tech biz that they don’t talk about anything else, ever, so don’t bother to mention your that wife’s pregnant or you saw Demi Moore the other day, because They.  Don’t.  Care. 

Meanwhile, the New York tech community is full of people who habitually, incessantly talk about topics other than technology.  Two of the five tech interviews I’ve done in this city have included semi-extensive discussions of Russian literature.  “We love our businesses,” summarizes web designer Susan Fritz, who goes to all the NYC tech events.  “But we love good restaurants even more.” 

This attitude, normally evidence of sanity, is worrisome if you’re an NYC tech community booster like Donna Bogatin of Startup Alpha.  Bogatin hopes against hope that “Silicon Alley” will someday surpass its big sister out West.  That it do what Silicon Valley does but better.  The next Google will be born in New York City!!

The bad news:  it’s not gonna happen.  The good news:  something else can. 

And is starting to.

One of the hottest startups in the NYC, for example, is Meetup.com, whose Founder/CEO Scott Heiferman explicitly states that the purpose of his computer business is to get people away from their computers.  Whatever you’re interested in — politics, gardening, real estate, or Internet startups — chances are there’s a “Meetup” you can join.  But the bizarre thing is, you actually go to real events, and talk to real people, and that’s the whole idea.  You actually meet up.  You don’t just interact via avatars and virtual worlds.  How weird is that?

That’s the kind of new technology business that could find a home in New York City.  Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, a major investor in Meetup.com and a long-time Silicon Alleyite, thinks there’s more where Meetup came from, and sees New York as a sort of testing ground for real-life applications of what would otherwise be just brilliant ideas by guys who went to Stanford.

In a recent post on his blog AVC.com, Wilson wrote:

“Many of our friends are not geeks. We live in NYC where our social circle consists of a wide range of professions and people. When we go to a dinner party, there’s usually nobody who knows what venture capital is and facebook is the thing their kids use.

“But in the past several weeks, I’ve been seeing some signs in our social circle that make me very optimistic. The Gotham Gal and her friends are chatting on their blackberries like they used to chat on the phone. My friend, who’s a mother of two college age kids in Long Island, is twittering about her daily life. We are getting facebook invites instead of evites.”

That may make Fred Wilson optimistic, but what does it really mean?  If New York’s goal is to become the proving ground for Silicon Valley ideas, doesn’t that make just make Silicon Alley its own worst nightmare:  a perpetual Silicon Valley also-ran?  And if Silicon Alley instead decides to take Silicon Valley head-on, every night when its entrepreneurs and workers head out to try the latest hot restaurant – or, for that matter, sleep – they will do so with the certain knowledge that there is a half-million nerds out in Silicon Valley, living in their cubicles, focused upon defeating them.