A Trip Down Memory Lane

With the news of Google and Amazon’s huge expansions into NYC, many people are asking “how did NYC tech get to this place?”  Well, I am going to post a 25 minute video history lesson at the end of this blog post that explains that.

But first, I’d like to talk about how I ended up doing that history lesson, which in and of itself is a history lesson.

When the Internet sector started to emerge from its nuclear winter in the late 2003/early 2004 (which is also when Brad Burnham and I went out and raised the first USV fund), those of us who were still working in the Inernet sector were looking around for a narrative and a rallying cry.

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle came up with it. They called the re-emergence of the Internet/web sector “Web 2.0” and they launched a conference called Web 2.0 Summit in the fall of 2004. It became the hub of the renewed vitality of the tech/internet sector and we went out to SF every year to attend it.

By 2008, it was clear that NYC was increasingly an important part of the Web 2.0 story, by virtue of companies like Etsy, Tumblr, Delicious, and other important “web 2” companies started in NYC (and funded by USV).

So John and Tim decided to host a Web 2.0 Summit in NYC in 2008 and to celebrate that, they asked me to give a history lesson in the emergence of tech in NYC in the mid 90s. I did that and it remains one of my favorite talks I have given.

Here it is. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed doing it.