Spencer Reiss of WIRED moderated the panel, which featured five different NY-based founders. Ironically, Reiss was the only native New Yorker on stage. His panelists, Chantel Waterbury (Chloe + Isabel), Oisin Hanrahan (HandyBook), Aaron Schildkrout (HowAboutWe), Matt Brimer (General Assembly), and Scott Heiferman (Meet Up), hail from all over the country. They were asked why the tech startup scene here is flourishing, and like true New Yorkers they all had different, strong opinions.

Chantel Waterbury:  “There are certain companies that have to be here [to succeed]. Nowhere else can you find people who work with both tech and fashion.”

Oisin Hanrahan:  “We wanted to be near the most difficult customers. If you can make New York customers happy, then it’ll be way easier anywhere else.”

Aaron Schildkrout:  “Building a dating site is about building a brand, particularly if you’re building a subscription site. It felt like this was the place to build a brand.”

Matt Brimer:  “I think, post recession, the opportunity cost for people to pursue an entrepreneurial career or consider more alternative career paths went way down. So you started to see people coming out of all these different industries.”

Scott Heiferman:  “Well, New York is where you have to be if you want to work on a certain kind of Internet. They’re here because of the collision of people […] because at the end of the day the Internet is about how people are turned to each other.”

Heiferman’s point resonated so much that it became a recurring theme throughout the rest of the session. The panelists seemed to agree that NY tech startups thrive on being in close proximity to other people; Schildkrout even referred to New York as a “Bump-into-each-other Petri dish.” Here, startups aren’t reliant on meeting with big companies or potential partners over the phone. Instead, they can walk down the street and meet at a coffee shop. As Heiferman puts it, “[New York] is a fertile mass of human collision that creates this ugliness that is the future.”

[Source: AlleyWatch]