When Kevin Ryan went out to raise money for DoubleClick in 1996, every California venture capital firm he spoke with told him they would love to invest-if he moved to San Francisco. He couldn't bring himself to leave New York, especially because his burgeoning startup benefited from being close to its clients of advertising agencies. 'It was the right place to be,' he tells me.
Ryan went on to found a string of New York companies-MongoDB, Zola, Gilt, and Business Insider-along with his own venture firm, AlleyCorp. He's rightfully earned the title of the 'Godfather' of the New York tech, which most would argue he shares with Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson.
The mythos of Silicon Valley should be familiar to Term Sheet readers: the 'traitorous eight,' the myriad garages, the emergence of Sand Hill Road, the cycle of exits and new legions of founders. It is decades old and steeped in legacy. But the story of New York's tech scene is just beginning.
For years, tech remained an afterthought. 'A bit of a backwater,' as BoxGroup founder David Tisch puts it to me. 'Getting attention for anything in this city is hard.'
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