The Faces of NYC Tech in 2012

Cornell University Professor of Computer Science Daniel Huttenlocher was awarded one of the coolest titles in the city last February, when Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced he would be the vice provost and dean of the new tech campus. While the full campus on Roosevelt Island won't be completed until 2017, classes will kick off next September on a floor of Google's NYC headquarters.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: I am just moving to the city later this summer, but have been spending about three days a week here for nearly a year and a half, starting not long after the Bloomberg administration announced the competition for the new campus.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I am a computer scientist, with a bachelors degree from the University of Michigan, and masters and doctoral degrees from MIT. My undergraduate studies included a double major in psychology, so I have a strong appreciation for the human element in technology development. My faculty position at Cornell is joint between the Department of Computer Science and the Johnson School of Management. In addition to academic positions, I have been CTO of a small financial technologies firm, was on the senior management team at Xerox PARC (the Palo Alto Research Center), and have been a consultant for a number of leading tech companies.

Q: What’s the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: The most useful career advice I've gotten is not specific to tech, which is to continually learn from people you have the opportunity to work with, particularly those who are good at working with others and at leadership. These are things that are hard to learn in school but are there for us to learn about every day if we work at it.

Q: What's your next step?

A: We have an unprecedented opportunity to build a new kind graduate campus for the 21st century technology industry, a campus that attracts the very best and brightest faculty and students from around the world, engages them both in leading edge research and in making a difference through commercial success and through using technology for societal good. My next step is to realize that opportunity, by hiring great faculty and staff, working with the rest of the CornellNYC Tech team to build a great campus on Roosevelt Island, and working with local companies and early stage investors to build ties to the high tech community in the city.

Q: Where do you see the city's tech scene five years from now?

A: There's a lot of exciting activity in the city's tech sector right now, from accelerator and incubator programs for new companies, to small and medium size tech companies with popular products and substantial revenues, to the increasing number of national and global tech firms that are increasing their presence in New York. Particularly important are the serial entrepreneurs and early stage investors who have been through several rounds of starting new businesses and raising funds. I believe this growth is going to accelerate and we will see the tech sector comprising a much larger part of the city's economy, including having more nationally and globally known tech companies that have their roots in New York.

Christina Cacioppo is an analyst at Union Square Ventures, the tech-focused venture capital firm that helped launch giants like Foursquare and Etsy.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: 2.5 years. Berlin and the Bay Area before that.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I studied economics (BA) and design (MS) at Stanford. I've been at Union Square Ventures for two years and recently began teaching a graduate-level class at SVA. I worked at Deutsche Telekom in Berlin and at Google in Mountain View before all that. I also spent summers during college with organizations in Rwanda, Uganda, Bolivia and Thailand.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: Some variation on the cliche "a rising tide lifts all boats" -- basically, be helpful to others, especially when you're not looking for help yourself.

Q: What's your next step?

A: Continuing to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation in New York City.

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now?

A: Larger and stronger than it is today, because of the work we're all doing now to foster an ecosystem for startups and entrepreneurship. Some initiatives in New York City are spearheaded by entrepreneurs; others are led by VCs. Programs like HackNY, Techstars, and the Academy for Software Engineering -- among many others -- add up, build on one another, and will strengthen New York.

Nate Westheimer is the executive director of New York Tech Meetup, which organizes monthly events where tech entrepreneurs show off new ideas and products. In early 2012, Westheimer announced that he was co-founding Picturelife, a cloud-based photo storage website, with OMGPOP founder Charles Forman.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: I moved to New York City during the summer of 2005, a few month after I graduated from college, so I'm nearing my seven-year anniversary here.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I attended Brandeis University where I studied sociology and politics. However, I always had an interest in business and -- back then -- the stock market, so my first job in New York was at a stock surveillance firm on Wall Street.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: When I shut down my first start-up, Brad Burnham, co-founder of Union Square Ventures, told me that he didn't like investing in people who hadn't failed at least once. That advice has carried with me, and made me embrace my failures as important lessons learned. Tech is about experimenting and learning, and so this wisdom is incredibly important.

Q: What's your next step?

A: A year and a half ago I decided to stop focusing on the business side of start-ups and instead become an engineer. My next step is to continue my education as an engineer and continue honing my craft.

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now?

A: NYC's tech ecosystem will continue to grow and thrive in the next five years. We have an amazing foundation and five years from now we'll see many times more companies, workers, and investors in this industry, building tremendous value for this City.

Campbell McKellar founded Loosecubes in 2010. The company serves an important role for thousands of creative workers who don't have an office. With Loosecubes, anyone who needs an office space -- whether in a week or in an hour -- can browse from open desks in offices across their city.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: I've been in New York City since the spring of 2005. It's hard to believe that it's already been over seven years!

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I graduated from Princeton undergrad in 2000, with a BA in history, and then moved to Boston to co-found a nonprofit called New Sector Alliance, which focuses on providing business strategy resources to nonprofits using the support of volunteer consultants and students. I left New Sector in 2003 and enrolled in the Public Management Program at Stanford GSB. After business school, I became a real estate investment banker at Goldman Sachs and then worked for Tribeca Associates, building boutique hotels in lower Manhattan. It was those four to five years of experience in commercial real estate that lead me to start Loosecubes in mid-2010.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: I think it has to be what Pete Flint, the founder and CEO of Trulia, told me back when I was first thinking about Loosecubes. He said when you come up with the idea for your company, you'll know it's the right idea because you'll have no choice but to pursue it. I'm often reminded of his advice when I wake up each morning and want nothing more than to make Loosecubes better than the day before.

Q: What's your next step?

A: Our next step is to bring Loosecubes to every innovative city in the world and help people change the way they think about work.

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now?

A: In five years great companies run by women -- like LearnVest, Birchbox and Gilt -- will have gone public and started investing in new, younger companies. The founders of these companies will be educated at places like General Assembly and Hacker School, while expanding their skill set through services like NYC-based Codeacademy. Most importantly, it will no longer seem strange to be a female founder of a technology company.

Dan Porter runs OMGPOP, the force behind the popular mobile game Draw Something.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: I moved to NYC in 1988 after graduating from college. I currently live and have lived for a long time in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I have a BA from Princeton and an MA from NYU in Latin American Studies.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: Skate to where the puck is going. Cheesy and a sports metaphor, but it forces you to think about the future.

Q: What's your next step?

A: Keep learning. Keep focusing on mobile.

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now?

A: Fully diversified outside of advertising and finance tech start-ups.

With budgets tight in the current economy, many people can't afford wedding planners. Enter Kellee Khalil's Lover.ly. The company curates images and concepts from weddings around the world to give brides to be ideas for their own special day.

Q: How long have you lived in New York City?

A: I moved to New York City two years ago from Los Angeles and I love it. There is always something happening and it is such a diverse and dynamic city.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I have a degree in entrepreneurial studies from University of Southern California. After college, I worked in finance and corporate sales in Los Angeles before moving on to work on new business development for Be Inspired Public Relations, the leading public relations agency servicing the wedding industry. While working there I saw there was a plethora of great wedding blogs and media, but a void in an easy-to-use search engine that brides could use to navigate all of the visual inspiration online, so I packed up and moved to New York to solve that problem and start Lover.ly.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: The best advice I've received is to stay focused. There is always something new coming on the market that it can be easy to get distracted, but you can't. Also, don't stop until you get the answer you want. If one person doesn't give it to you, go on to the next until someone does - and they will.

Q: What's your next step?

A: Next steps for Lover.ly are to continue to innovate and improve upon our product. Our main goal is to make sure we are providing our users with the most intuitive and easy to navigate platform. Our goal is to make wedding planning easier and more fun! We plan to introduce more commerce partners and add more features, making the site more social and engaging. We are also working on an iPhone app because brides are on the go!

Q: Where do you see the city's tech scene five years from now?

A: I love that media and technology are fusing. I think NYC is a great place to be as it the media capital of the world. In five years, I think it will be a major hub for tech innovation as traditional media continues to cross-polinate with the new tech crowd.

Evan Ratliff is an award-winning journalist and contributing editor at Wired magazine. Concerned about the dwindling number of outlets for longform journalism, he co-founded Atavist to provide an online forum for stories too long for blogs, but not quite long enough to be books. Users can purchase stories on Atavist for a few dollars, and read them on their iPad or Kindle.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: Three years.

Q: What is your academic and professional background?

A: I've been a magazine journalist for most of my career, having worked on staff at Wired magazine and then for over a decade as a contributor to Wired, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and a host of other magazines. My training was all on the job; I studied environmental science as an undergraduate. In 2009 I co-founded the digital publisher and technology company Atavist, which launched in 2011.

Q: What is the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A:I don't think I ever got any, since my recent career in tech, if you can call it that, is accidental. But some of the best advice I got in my freelance journalism career was that rejection is part of the job, and that it's never really personal. Which comes in handy in things like fundraising and trying to get people to read or use the thing you created.

Q: What's your next step?

A: As far as Atavist, we are launching a new version of our publishing platform that anyone will be able to sign up and use (to publish stories to places like the iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Nook). And we've got some really amazing longform journalism of our own coming out this summer and fall. I'll be working with the great, small group of folks we've got on both of those, while hopefully doing some writing as well.

Q: Where do you see the city's tech scene five years from now?

A: I'm not much of a prognosticator. It does seem to be booming now, which I think is great but as someone who lived in San Francisco in the late 90s, can't help but fill me with a bit of trepidation. I guess my hope for it, if I had one, would be that it keep growing but not come unmoored from the creativity that makes New York great.

Success in the startup game is all about taking calculated risks. Zach Sims took a big one in 2011 when he dropped out of Columbia to co-found Codecademy. The company uses a unique framework to teach anybody how to code software, and its catching on like wildfire.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: I've been in New York for four years (student at Columbia for three years, running Codecademy for one year).

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I went to Columbia University as a political science major and dropped out to work on Codecademy.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: Work on what you care about. Additionally, people are the most important thing you can spend time on in your company. Hiring well is crucial.

Q: What's your next step?

A: Continuing to make Codecademy the best place to learn how to code.

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now?

A: Continuing to grow. Hopefully more Foursquares and Buddy Medias will pop up to create an ecosystem for companies.

Vipin Goyal started Sidetour to harness the power of people's talents. The company allows anyone with a marketable skill set or body of knowledge to create a guided urban tour, which they charge a small fee for.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: I moved to NYC the summer of 2005 and have been here ever since except for the six months my wife and I left to travel around the world, which was the inspiration for SideTour when I returned.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I’m the co-founder and CEO of SideTour. I was previously VP of business development at Joost, the online video company started by the founders of Skype. Prior to Joost, I was director of strategy & business development at MTV Networks International. And I began my career as a business analyst at McKinsey & Company, in Chicago and Mumbai. I have an AB in economics from Harvard College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: You will spend an incalculable amount of time on whatever you decide to pursue. Make sure it’s something you want to spend time on. It will make it that much easier to enjoy the journey. And more importantly, life is too short not to be crazy passionate about what you’re building every day. Our mission at SideTour is to help people experience the amazing world that surrounds all of us. What could be more enjoyable than that?

Q: What's your next step?

A: Grow SideTour into a global business. We believe the types of experiences that are available on SideTour in NYC – experiences that are unique, more entertaining, more engaging, and at times, transformative – should be available to people everywhere. We started the company last summer and we’re just getting started. Watch for us to start the expansion later this year.

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now?

A: New York City has the most exciting tech scene in the world right now. There is so much energy, so much community, so much talent, and so much activity. It’s completely different than it was five years ago, and I only see that trajectory accelerating. Five years from now, there’s no doubt in my mind that the world’s next big tech company will have been born in NYC.

Alexa Hirschfeld co-founded Paperless Post with her brother, James. The company allows users to create and send design-savvy stationary and invitations all online -- a perfect mixture of cool graphics and eco-friendliness.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: I've been in New York City my whole life minus the four years I was at college, so I've been here a total of 24 years.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I was a classics major at Harvard and started working on Paperless Post with my brother James shortly after graduating. Everything I've learned professionally I've learned from turning an idea we had into a successful and growing tech company.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: "Find something you love to do and you'll never work a day in your life." It's a little idealistic, but I think that kind of lofty optimism is healthy.

Q: What's your next step?

A: My brother and I are excited to continue growing Paperless Post into something greater than what it is now. We want to change the way people communicate and enhance their capacity for self-expression.

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now.

A: Where NYC's tech scene is in five really depends on where tech is in five years. If people are still making money on the tech bubble the way they are now, I'm sure New York will find a way to get in on it.

Jason Goldberg founded Fab.com in 2010. The website is a marketplace for sleek designer items of all varieties and price ranges. Membership-based, carefully curated and offering daily flash sales, the website generated 750,000 members within its first 120 days in business and has continued to grow since.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: I have been in New York since 2009.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: My first job was working 100+ hours a week in the Clinton White House for Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles. I later got my MBA at Stanford and went on to start two companies, Jobster and socialmedian. After XING AG acquired social median I became XING's chief product officer. I founded Fab in 2010 and have served as CEO since then.

Q: What's the best advice you have ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: Do one thing, and do that one thing better than anyone else.

Q: What's your next step?

A: At Fab, we're all about making people smile; our design partners, our members and our employees. We've been successful in doing that and we're going to continue working hard to keep people smiling.

Q: Where do you see the city's tech scene five years from now?

A: The past year or two have been incredible in terms of the number of successful companies that have emerged. With the large supply of human capital, creativity and the number of investors present, I think we will continue to see the sector grow immensely in the years to come.

Samantha John and Jocelyn Leavitt founded Hopscotch to teach the next generation of tech. With simple jargon-free games, kids can learn how to build their own websites.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: We've each been here about seven years.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

Jocelyn: I used to be a teacher, and was always particularly interested in the role of experiential and project-based learning. Later, I went to Columbia Business School and did commercial real estate private equity before coming to consumer software. I started noticing the abysmal male/female ratio among engineers, and remember being appalled once at a Hannukah party where all the little boys got programmable robots and other engineering toys while the girls got little pink purses. I thought: wow, I wish there were some great girly engineering gift they could have gotten instead.

Sam: I majored in applied math at Columbia undergrad, and then worked at Pivotal Labs before we started Hopscotch. I taught myself programming when I needed to build out a web app for a database-backed website for a club I ran. I found that I got great joy and satisfaction from programming, especially the 'making stuff' part. I'm excited to start Hopscotch because I want to introduce kids to that feeling at a younger age.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: Your competitors don't kill you, consumer apathy to your product kills you. Being in "stealth mode" for a product or idea is ridiculous.

Q: What's your next step?

A: We're knee-deep building out an iPad programming environment for kids we like to explain as "Legos for the digital age" --easy enough for total beginners to get started building actual programs while learning core concepts of computer programming and logic in the process. It will have a entirely visual interface where you can drag around and sequence different methods. We may offer early access to it through a kickstarter campaign, so interested folks should sign up here: www.gethopscotch.com

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now?

A: The tech scene here is only growing. NYC attracts top design talent which will be a huge resource as user experience continues to drive top consumer tech properties. We're the seat of so many other industries, and we can expect to see the tech scene here continue to expand to encompass them. Additionally, with initiatives like HackNY and AFSE, we're building a pipeline of technical talent from the ground up.

Jon Sukarangsan runs Party4aCause, an organization that uses technology to support local nonprofits doing charitable work. The company helps nonprofits put on fundraising parties that are promoted through digital means.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: Almost four years now. I'm originally from Texas, but also spent time in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I guess you can call me tri-coastal, but I'd have to say it's hard to top New York.

Q: What's your academic and professional background.

A: I've worn alot of different hats as a tech/digital professional - working at places like Oracle, Dell, and Ralph Lauren as well as some startups. I studied information systems and computer science in school and ended up cutting my teeth as a developer and graphic designer. I realized one day I was much better at telling people what to do than actually programming and pushing pixels, and so I got into more business, management, and product-centric roles.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: Never sell yourself short on your creative intelligence. Technology is not all about about 1's and 0's or algorithms. It can be a foundation, but the most successful people working in the industry understand that building something that really matters is an exercise of creativity, design and careful thought.

Q: What's your next step?

A: Party4aCause has always been an endeavor for me, and we're blessed to have a great team behind it. Our next focus is growing the organization to make a larger impact in the New York community. We're always got new volunteers joining us, and are gearing up for a huge fundraising event this fall. Personally and professionally, right now I'm continuing to do some cool things with social media at Edelman Digital (the digital agency arm of the world's largest PR firm). I get to work with some very fun and respected brands.

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now?

A: I'd like to think New York and Silicon Valley will have an even more heated rivalry in terms of entrepreneurship, if not large companies. I think the explosion around novelty consumer-focused apps with marginal utility will eventually fade. I think the stronghold that cable TV providers have over most of the country could be seriously disrupted within five years, given the types of alternate media, devices, and distribution strategies that some startups are exploring. I'd also hope to see a resurgence of interest in clean energy and green startups, given the environment us New Yorkers live in. And I also think healthcare tech will come into its own in a big way, but probably more so in other cities with larger hospitals and research centers.

Jordan Goldman founded Unigo in 2008. The company bills itself as "the Web’s largest resource of information to find, get in and pay for college." Parents and students can use Unigo to find out everything they need to know about colleges without visiting the school, including speaking to current students and former administrators and working with financial aid experts to find out how they can afford to go to a school.

Q: How long have you been in New York City?

A: I moved to New York in 2006, right after I finished graduate school, so its been seven years now. For the first few years, when I was still coming up with the idea for Unigo, I lived in a lot of sublets, and ate a lot of Ramen. Now I finally have my own apartment.

Q: What's your academic and professional background?

A: I studied English lit at Wesleyan University and Oxford University, and got my MFA in creative writing from The University of East Anglia. When I was in college, I created the Students' Guide to Colleges series of college guidebooks, which came out in five annual editions from Penguin Books, and became one of the top-selling college guides in the country. I founded Unigo after I graduated. Now we're one of the biggest college resources on the web - we get more than a million unique visitors every month, we have hundreds of thousands of college reviews.

Q: What's the best advice you ever received regarding a career in tech?

A: The tech scene moves really quickly, but it's also really supportive. There are a constant stream of meet-ups and parties and lectures and classes. Really, you just have to immerse yourself in it - there's so many smart people to learn from, who are really giving of their time. I'd say, jump into the scene headfirst. Talk to everyone you can, see what you can learn from them. If you don't bump into someone at a party, but you'd love to meet them, find them on LinkedIn and shoot them a message. You'd be surprised at who might respond and grab coffee with you within a few days.That's how I met a lot of people when we first started out, I emailed them and asked for advice, and they were really giving with their time.

Q: What's your next step?

A: In addition to college information, we now have the ability for users to have live video chats entirely through our site. So, if you want to learn more about a college, you can have a live video chat with more than 15,000 current college students at schools all across America. If you want help getting in, you can have a live video chat with a college admissions expert, including former Deans of Admissions at Ivy League schools. And if you want help paying for a college, you can have a live video chat with a financial aid expert who can help you save tens of thousands of dollars, and help you find some great scholarships that could be perfect for you. We're also rolling out some exciting new products this August that I can't talk about just yet to help the next crop of college applicants find and get into their top choice schools.

Q: Where do you see the city’s tech scene five years from now?

A: New York's tech scene has really been exploding over the past few years. There are more start-ups here than ever before, more smart and talented people than ever before, and more mature companies, or companies that have had some really great exits. I think it's just going to continue to accelerate, and offer more resources for new and existing entrepreneurs. Plus, entrepreneurs have ready access to professionals other industries they can learn from - finance, entertainment, advertising, fashion, everything is right here. I wouldn't want to be starting a company in any other city right now.