Connections in Silicon Alley (week3 blog for 2020 StartUp)

I come from a theatre and film background. Though my parents are products of the civil rights era American south (Memphis for my mom and small town Texas for my Dad), I was raised in Princeton, NJ in an academically progressive community 90 minutes outside of Philadelphia and, more importantly, New York City. My whole life has been NY centric. Syracuse undergrad, NYU for graduate work, off and on Broadway, teaching and the TriBeCa indie film industry. I have lived and worked all around the world, but every road has brought me back to the Greatest City in the World.

Now I am building an AR/VR centric CollabRatioN company. A dear friend told me that if I was going to be the CEO of a tech company, I had to go sit in a cafe in Menlo Park, CA and figure out what’s hot/not in Silicon Valley and I did that. It was remarkable to me that as I got off the CalTrain at Market Street I was struck to see that Pintrest is a building full of people as well as an app (silly but true observation for me). But after a few trips out west to orient myself and turn old friends into up-to-date contacts and I was able to recruit some top, engineering talent to add value to our company.

And upon my return to NY, we have built the a product line designed to enable richer, faster and more potent information transfer between teams using an array of software and hardware. The NYers who have rallied around me are voracious. On Craigslist, just by posting my (917) area code in the body of the job posting, I have met the kindest hustlers in the world, bar none. Young and old, seasoned veterans of dev and sales that have helped carve out a name, SInDy (seamless integrated dynamics). And through additional moxie, we have jumped into a 90-day accelerator for the company. We chose this program because they are deeply tied to the NYC Tech Community. Just this week we met with Marcos Dinnerstein again and he downloaded what amounts to years of personal research of NYC Newsletters to follow, events to attend and people to know. It is a list of gold and yielded immediate results.

Startup Guide New York, a book on NYC’s startup ecosystem, launches next month. The book promises to be an excellent overview of New York City’s startup scene and a great way for founders and tech workers outside of NYC to begin to make their way here. We caught up with Sissel Hansen, the dynamic founder and CEO of Startup Guide to hear how she started the company, the bumps along the way that taught her valuable lessons and what to expect in the coming months. To keep up on the NYC tech scene subscribe to the weekly newsletter, A Better Mousetrap. https://goo.gl/forms/8TquLXKSN3wEzdGM2

I attended a two day conference at The New School and NYU in a partnership with the NY Media Lab a tremendous organization who lined up a special group of speakers and experiments that demonstrate the powerful force of NY’s Silicon Alley! Headlines for me were Thomas Reardon from CRTL-Labs and the AR sensational artist Amir Baradaran. Christopher Mitchell of GeoPipe thought me how to cut and paste fully 3D real life maps directly into UNITY3d video games and of course there were the tremendous student projects that the Media Lab had facilitated, two of my favs were a women’s health app intended to take away the mansplaining and an AR journey now live on Govner’s Island.

All in all another amazing week in the 2020StartUp world!

Peace,

ChuckieJabba