Trendsta, a firm that helps marketers promote products through online social networks, left East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last month for a new loftlike office in Manhattan's Flatiron district. The space has all the high-tech hallmarks, including a Ping-Pong table and a mini-fridge chockful of beer.

The move was made possible by an offer from a bigger tech-driven marketing firm, which let Trendsta rent space in its offices at a steep discount in return for online services. For Matt Myers, Trendsta's co-founder, the arrangement provided an opportunity not just to collaborate with an established industry player but also to move to center stage.

“The business is all cooperative,” says the serial entrepreneur. “And Madison Square Park has definitely become the center of the startup scene.”

Fledgling tech firms have flocked to Manhattan over the past year. Many have settled in the Flatiron district—more specifically, in close proximity to Danny Meyer's wildly popular Madison Square Park burger and milk-shake stand, the Shake Shack.

“It is our mecca,” says David Rose, managing principal of Rose Tech Ventures, an incubator and early-stage investment fund located steps away from the park.

Like a casual-Friday's version of Michael's or The Four Seasons, the eatery has become the go-to spot for tech dealmaking and general networking. Local techies tweet about their visits daily. Others monitor the stand's webcam to check the lines and better time their visits.

A decade after the great dot-com bust, New York tech firms are back in force. Courtesy of the more recent implosions in two other industries—finance and real estate—they are snapping up engineering talent from Wall Street and leasing ideal loftlike space at bargain rents. At the same time, they are benefiting because of an increasing number of New York-based angel and venture capital funds with money to invest.

Strength in numbers

The sheer volume of tech firms in Manhattan is itself an advantage, as entrepreneurs feed off each other's experience and make contacts at meeting places like the Shake Shack. There are at least 100 tech firms within six blocks of the southern end of Madison Square Park, according to Mr. Rose.

That doesn't even include larger companies like AOL Inc., which is based in New York, and Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which both have well-established outposts here. AOL does not disclose its head count; Google has about 2,000 employees in New York, including temps and outside vendors and contractors. Microsoft boasts more than 800 employees in the city, and estimates that through its employees and local business partners, it contributes more than $12 billion to the state's economy each year.

Overall, tech jobs in the city are rising. After falling to a low of 32,900 in January 2004, the number of industry positions has rebounded strongly; it rose 39%, to 45,600, as of January, according to the New York state Department of Labor. Another 200 posts were added in February alone.

Such growth has spawned an explosion in local tech networking groups and mixers, not only around Madison Square Park, but also in other tech hot spots like Dumbo in Brooklyn and the meatpacking district. New York Tech Meetup, which hosts monthly events that let entrepreneurs present their ideas to a like-minded crowd, has doubled its membership over the past two years, to 12,000.

“Five years ago, there was an event or two a week,” says Trendsta's Mr. Myers. “Now there are a few events per day.”

There are other signs of progress. After years of complaining bitterly about New York's critical shortage of engineering and programming talent, tech firms are finding a lot more fish in the talent pool in the wake of Wall Street's implosion.

“In the past, MBA students would have gone to internships at Morgan Stanley,” says Mr. Myers, who is seeking interns for his four-person shop. “Now that there are fewer jobs out there, those people are available.”

For some tech companies, the hard-hit office market is a godsend. After growing out of its space in Dumbo, Outside.in moved to a 5,000-square-foot space on West 21st Street. The 20-person firm, which helps online readers find neighborhood news, now has the room to double its head count.

“It's not cost-prohibitive to be in Manhattan anymore,” says founder Mark Josephson.

In fact, average asking rents in the neighborhood have slipped to around $30 per square foot—comparable to the levels in Dumbo. Three years ago, rents were at least a third higher.

Super recruiting tool

Having a prime Manhattan location also makes it easier to recruit staff. Since moving to its 3,000-square-foot space on West 22nd Street in September, Zeitbyte Digital Media has hired three employees who live in New Jersey or Queens.

“They would have never called us if we were still in Dumbo,” says Gary Kahn, co-founder of the firm, which provides digital video services.

Meanwhile, the number of angel groups and venture capital firms in the area has ballooned. Among the newer entries are angel groups such as Founder Collective and NYC Seed.

In addition, several business incubators have popped up, offering firms cheap or even free space. Earlier this year, Polaris Venture Partners set up Dogpatch Labs near Union Square. The free incubator has space for 14 life sciences and technology startups. It follows one set up downtown on Varick Street last year by Polytechnic Institute of New York University, in partnership with the city.

Not everyone is surprised by the current array of opportunities for tech firms.

“Hard times are good times for the tech startup world,” sums up Nate Westheimer, founder of AnyClip.com, which lets users search for and share excerpts from movies, and the organizer of the New York Tech Meetup.

A fun little mention about our new Flatiron office. Thanks Amanda!

Some items on this list might seem cynical, but they’re not. The fact is, it doesn’t matter what kind of customers you have. I don’t care if your customers are kidney donors or Zen masters or million-dollar contributors to your nonprofit organization. Each one of us has some less-than-loveable characteristics that tend to come to the forefront when we’re in the role of customer.

If you knew, really knew, these 50 things about your customers, and acted accordingly, you’d gain their trust and even their love. After all, who doesn’t want to be loved despite all our flaws and embarrassing insecurities? The better you understand both the noble and not-so-noble secrets in your customers’ consciousness, the better you can serve them.

Here are 50 things your customers wish you knew: about them, about how they see you, and about your relationship.

1. I don’t need you to be perfect, but I do need to know I can rely on you.
2. Telling me what you don’t know makes me trust you.
3. It means a lot when you take the time to thank me for my business or a referral.
4. You don’t need to do all that much to be a superhero. Just do exactly what you say you will do.
5. A friendly voice on the other side of the phone means more than you can imagine.
6. Your employees treat me about as well as you treat them.
7. I don’t mind spending the money, as long as I feel I’m getting real value.
8. My life is really stressful. If you can reduce that stress, you become immensely valuable to me.
9. I want to tell you what would make this relationship better for me. Why don’t you ever ask me?
10. I don’t understand a lot of the messages you send me. Can you make them clearer?
11. My life is very complicated. If you make it easy for me to just buy a simple all-in-one package that I can use without learning anything, I’ll take it and be grateful. (I’ll even pay a premium for it.)
12. I want to trust you, but it’s hard for me to trust anyone.
13. Once you’ve won my trust and loyalty, the truth is you can screw up once in awhile and I will forgive you. If I don’t think you’re taking me for granted, that is.
14. When I refer my friends and you give them exceptional service, that makes me look and feel smart. I love that.
15. I spend an awful lot of time being scared to death.
16. The wealthier I get, the more I like free stuff.
17. A lot of the time, I secretly feel like a lost little kid. I don’t admit it, but I want to be taken care of.
18. I’m lousy at admitting I was wrong, but I respect you when you do it.
19. I like to get little goodies no one else is getting.
20. I don’t understand how to use your Web site, but I can’t admit that because it would make me feel dumb.
21. There’s no worse feeling than feeling like I was suckered into trusting you. If I’m screaming at you or one of your employees, that feeling is probably behind it somewhere.
22. Our relationship isn’t equal and it never will be.
23. I get crazy jealous if I think you love another customer more than you love me.
24. I don’t have any interest in your excuses. In fact, I usually don’t notice them at all, and if I do, they annoy me.
25. I find myself endlessly fascinating.
26. I hate salespeople, but I really like to buy things.
27. I only like to communicate over the phone/Web/mail and I hate when you try to make me communicate with you over the mail/phone/Web.
28. I want to buy your product, but I need you to help me justify it to myself.
29. There’s something in my life I’m afraid of losing. If you can make me feel like you’ve protected it for me, my gratitude will be intense and eternal.
30. I’ll give you anything you ask if you can help me not feel silly.
31. I want you to do the hard work for me. Even better if I can get all the credit.
32. I’d rather do it the convoluted hard way than learn something new.
33. I’d love to know something about your product that I could use to brag at a dinner party.
34. I have the attention span of a goldfish. Go too long without contacting me and I’ll simply forget you exist.
35. Money is no object when it comes to my obsessions.
36. What you think you’re good at is not what you’re good at. Ask me, and I’ll tell you what you do better than anyone else.
37. I like it when I feel like you’re talking just to me.
38. It infuriates me when you answer the phone while I’m talking with you face-to-face.
39. Embarrassment scares me more than death.
40. I’m lazier than I would ever admit.
41. I’m more selfish than I would ever admit.
42. I’m more vain than I would ever admit.
43. I’m more insecure than I would ever admit.
44. Despite all that, I secretly think I’m a better person than most people. Help me believe that and we’ll be fast friends.
45. I believe I deserve much more than I’m getting.
46. I want to tell you everything you need to know in order to sell to me, but I’m lazy. Make it easy enough and I will. (Especially if you flatter me a little.)
47. I don’t know what I want most of the time. You need to figure it out for me.
48. I mostly daydream about making life better for myself, but I’ll take action to keep from losing what’s mine.
49. I believe that most of what’s wrong in my life is someone else’s fault. Let me keep that cozy illusion and I’ll believe anything you say.
50. It really is all about me.

If you like this post, please Stumble or link to it!

Flickr Creative Commons image by clairity

-->

Pretty great post with commonsense tips for treating clients.

Remember memorizing the times table in grade school? Well now there’s a new one to learn. It weighs the value of the top ten social media platforms against their abilities in four categories: Customer communication, brand exposure, traffic to your site, and SEO. Even if you’re a social media wiz, this chart can be quite useful to keep everything in perspective. A highly developed social media program for a brand will likely utilize the vast majority of the listed platforms. This chart can act as a nice quick reference guide for any social media manager who needs to maximize results and minimize effort.

See the infographic at Daily Bloggr

Man that's a lot of pieces for a CMO to think about in one line item: social media marketing. You can hire someone to manage this, outsource to a social media agency or let influencers do the spreading for you through someone like us. Of course the best bet is all of the above.

RightSide Capital Management is about to shatter the funding landscape. Led by David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee, RightSide Capital believes that seed-stage capital needs a complete overhaul. RightSide will make 100-200 investments per year, and literally manufacture companies in a way that no firm has ever done. The fund, announced at TheFunded.com%u2019s Future of Funding event last Thursday, will debut in the second half of 2010 and may give the angel funding market a much-deserved shakeup.

Partner Kevin Dick went on stage during a panel on alternative funding methods and laid out what he believes to be the future of funding. Quantity, not quality, is king in the seed stage. Entrepreneurs looking for funding won%u2019t have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an application %u2013 similar to applying to College %u2013 and receive a response in 2 weeks.

Other aspects of the fund are equally revolutionary. The term sheets will be determined by a computer, and everyone will receive the same legal terms (the valuation and funding amount will vary based on the application). The fund will have a ranking method to rate applicants on a variety of categories such as experience/technical ability and systematically provide a pre-money valuation. They will also ask founders to put in their own money to ensure they have %u201Cskin in the game%u201D and that they are invested in the future success of the company. The amount of money required will be determined based on financial documentation the founders are expected to provide.

RightSide explicitly claims on their website that they do not care about $100M exits. They are fine with a large number of $10-50M exits. The irony pervaded the room when Mike Maples later gave a speech on investing only in Thunder Lizards at the same event. Mike Maples proclaimed that he only wants to do 10 investments a year, and often makes his decision on investing within the first 30 min of talking to an entrepreneur. RightSide seems to balk at that philosophy, and seems to believe that identifying Thunder Lizards requires more luck than skill. Their website proudly proclaims: %u201CSuspicious of %u2018Gut Feel%u2019%u201D.

The RightSide model represents a stark contrast to the %u201Ctraditional model%u201D of raising early-stage capital. Entrepreneurs meet face-to-face with associates or partners of seed-stage funds. Seed fund managers are extremely elusive and often require multiple introductions to get a meeting. If you%u2019re lucky enough to get this far, after a few meetings over the course of 2 weeks to 3 months (and sometimes longer), the fund gives you a term sheet.

The term sheet is kind of a %u201Cpromise%u201D that the investors will fund your company, and provides you with details around pre-money valuation and funding amount. Then, the lawyers draft the legal documents required for closing a funding round, which can cost between $10-40K depending on the type of deal. Finally, if everything works out (and it can all fall apart at any stage in that process), the startup gets a check and they are officially part of the seed fund%u2019s portfolio.

RightSide believes this model is broken. First, they think that investors are generally unable to predict success of a company at the seed stage. As such, they are trying to systematize the funding process and minimize human bias. Second, Partner Kevin Dick argues that entrepreneurs shouldn%u2019t have to pay thousands of dollars in legal and accounting fees. Instead, they are providing standard terms for all applicants, so the legal costs will be much less. Third, they are applying a %u201Cspray and pray%u201D model of seed funding because they believe that they need to make a lot of investments to net a return. That%u2019s why they%u2019re going to do 100-200 investments per year.

If RightSide seems like an incubator on steroids, it isn%u2019t. Unlike Paul Graham%u2019s Y Combinator or Adeo Ressi%u2019s Founder Institute, startups will have no set curriculum and may never meet each other in person. Kevin Dick says that they will set up educational sessions and events for portfolio companies, but will not be able to provide significant one-to-one mentoring for early-stage companies.

Pre-money valuations will be set by a formula, which takes into account the background of the co-founders and the stage at which their idea is developed (i.e., idea on a napkin gets less points than a working prototype). During the panel at the Future of Funding event, Kevin said that this formula would probably have given Mark Zuckerberg a poor valuation, but at least he would%u2019ve gotten funding. He notes that many seed investors passed on him, but RightSide would not have.

The standard terms are yet to be finalized, but you can find a lot of the information on RightSide Capital%u2019s website. Some tidbits have been provided: it will include preferred equity and not require the startup to give up a board seat.

Just read about this new startup investment fund.. very interesting- I can definitely see the value of a large number of startup investments using a more mathematical approach. I like their clear documentation & decision process (http://www.rightsidecapital.com/process.html). I had actually thought how helpful it would be for such a fund, especially one skewed away from people "of means," aka: ones who can realistically get angel money from friends and family themselves.

So Trendsta scored some new digs! We'll be moving into some office space this week.. I love what my friend Maxwell did for his new office. Don't think it'll fit in this space but maybe for our office v2 coming this summer!

%u201COn the Internet,%u201D one dog tells another in a classic New Yorker cartoon, %u201Cnobody knows you%u2019re a dog.%u201D

The Internet is notorious for its digital dens of deception. But on Facebook, what you see tends to be what you get %u2014 at least in one study of tailless, two-legged young adults.

College-age users of Facebook in the United States and a similar social networking site in Germany typically present accurate versions of their personalities in online profiles, says psychologist Mitja Back of Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. People use online social networking sites to express who they really are rather than idealized versions of themselves, Back and his colleagues conclude in an upcoming Psychological Science.

%u201COnline social networks are so popular and so likely to reveal people%u2019s actual personalities because they allow for social interactions that feel real in many ways,%u201D Back says.

Back%u2019s team administered personality inventories that evaluated 133 U.S. Facebook users and 103 Germans who used a comparable social-networking site. Inventories focused on the extent to which volunteers endorsed ratings of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional instability and openness to new experiences.

The subjects %u2014 who ranged in age from 17 to 22 %u2014 took the inventory twice, first with instructions to describe their actual personalities and then to portray idealized versions of themselves.

Then, undergraduate research assistants %u2014 nine in the United States and 10 in Germany %u2014 rated volunteers%u2019 personalities after looking at their online profiles.  Those ratings matched volunteers%u2019 actual personality descriptions better than their idealized ones, especially for extraversion and openness.

Facebook is so true to life, Back claims, that encountering a person there for the first time generally results in a more accurate personality appraisal than meeting face to face, going by the results of previous studies.

Adriana Manago, a psychology graduate student at UCLA, calls the new findings %u201Ccompelling%u201D but incomplete. College students on Facebook and other online social networks often augment what they regard as their best personal qualities, Manago holds. In her view, these characteristics aren%u2019t plumbed by broad personality measures like the ones measured in Back%u2019s study. And students%u2019 actual personality descriptions may have included enhancements of their real characteristics, thus inflating the correlation between observers%u2019 ratings and students%u2019 real personalities, Manago notes.

%u201COnline profiles showcase an enhanced reflection of who the user really is,%u201D Manago proposes. In a 2008 study, she and her colleagues found that 23 college students sometimes used another online social networking site, MySpace, to enhance their images, say by Photoshopping acne out of a picture or posting a video of themselves driving a sports car at high speeds.

Still, the new findings make sense, remarks psychologist Sandra Calvert of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She emphasizes that social-networking sites have fostered a new type of communication among teens and young adults, in which one person can create personal content that gets broadcast to a multitude of friends.

In a 2009 study of Facebook use among 92 college students, Calvert%u2019s team found that young women reported a whopping average of 401 online friends, while young men reported an average of 269.

• Email
• |
• Print
• |
• Comment

Found in: Humans and Psychology

This reinforces one of the hypothesis at Trendsta. We think our technique for segmenting online users by programmatically looking at their online profiles is actually more accurate than having people fill out surveys about themselves. Seems like this could be a nice research study for an intern or two ;)