A group of 26 of New York City's young Silicon Alley new-media companies flew out to San Francisco this week for a debutante party of sorts.
They've come to present themselves to Silicon Valley society, or at least the venture capital community, in an event dubbed "The Alley to the Valley" conference. The visit is a necessary rite of passage, ostensibly, because the old money in New York doesn't understand new media or the new brand of entrepreneurship.
"There's about one-and-a-half firms to go to for venture capital in New York," said Owen Davis, managing director of Thinking Media, an interactive marketing agency. "It drives me nuts."
The event's organizers - including the New York City Economic Development Authority and the Information Industry Association - hope to overcome the problem by bringing the companies out to where they think the money is.
Plenty of people in New York can write big checks, Davis said, but precious few of them understand the young businesses in Silicon Alley. The Alley companies need to come out West because it is important for them to find venture capitalists who are experienced enough to lend the right helping hand in their companies' start-up stages.
Among the big-name West Coast venture capitalists who made appearances at the conference on Monday were Ann Winblad of Hummer Winblad and Stewart Alsop of New Enterprise Associates, who took part in a morning investors' round-table discussion.
Their sage words of advice boiled down to two or three main points: Make sure you've got a great CEO, they said. And, ideally, your company should be offering a solution to broad inefficiencies in a market, as Amazon did for books. Avoid niche spaces, where it's harder to achieve huge growth.
But other than the handful of panel speakers, there weren't many Day One attendees at the event who hailed from California. Nearly every name tag in the rather thin crowd at the Sheraton Palace Hotel pegged its bearer as a resident of "New York, NY." The feeling was one of a beauty contest bereft of judges other than the contestants themselves.
"Three thousand miles is a long way to travel to meet people from down the block," said Alex Sheshunoff, president and CEO of Studio Now, a two-year-old Web software company that builds content modules it says will help newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio stations to create multimedia content more efficiently than they could on their own.
But most presenters clearly had the event in its proper perspective and scheduled meetings with potential partners and others as part of their West Coast tour.
"Maybe one out of the [26 companies] might come away with funding," said Paul Cimino, CEO of a company called Snickelways Interactive, a Web consulting firm that builds extranets and other e-commerce solutions.
Tuesday is the day a presenter just might meet his or her maker, as each company takes the stage for a 20-minute presentation, to what they are expecting will be a larger crowd of local venture capitalists.
"I'm contestant Number Three," Cimino said. "I'm glad I'm going in the morning, so people will still be awake."
