There are a number of problems you could mention in the New York City startup scene, but the solutions have been slow to emerge. There have been a few I others have thought of recently that I thought were particularly valuable and should be shared with the community. Many of these ideas appealed to me because they 

1. Health insurance: Many entrepreneurs are making a very risky move by working without health insurance. Matt Meeker - EIR at Dogpatch Labs - and Matthew Brimer - Founding Partner at General Assembly- both have thought of some interesting ways to attack this. It would be great if places like Dogpatch Labs and General Assembly could negotiate with one of the PEOs to offer any startup with month to month health insurance plans for early stage companies at a reasonable cost. Founders wouldn’t have to risk their health and the PEOs gain early access to potentially valuable customers. 

(Update: Shai Goldman of Silicon Valley Bank had an idea to have Founders Card aggregate coverage for early stage startups. Good call Shai!)

2. Engineers going to Wall Street: One of the biggest problems startups have with attracting talented engineers straight out of school is the fact that Wall Street firms can lock up students far before they graduate. A startup can’t offer jobs that far in advance, placing them at a huge competitive advantage. Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson’s Deputy Chief of Staff Scott Schwaitzberg and Foursquare Co-Founder Naveen Selvadurai came up with what I think is a genius idea. 

Somebody should form a company that partners with a dev shop like Pivotal Labs and provides guaranteed full-time job offers and relocation assistance to talented devs from Universities around the country. These devs would be assigned temporarily to different startup projects, with the startups able to purchase the contract for a premium. This would allow the startup scene to have more agile hiring while providing more stability for graduates as companies compete with Wall Street for talent.

3. Recruiting engineers from outside the City: This idea was sparked by Charlie O’Donnell’s idea to give tax credits to companies who relocate developers from around the country. I tweaked it a little because giving tax credits could be perceived to incentivize companies to hire developers from out of town. Instead, I think the City should offer to waive 1 year of income taxes for web designers/developers who move to New York and join a small business (i.e. a startup). 

This tax rebate would be about $3500 per participant if on average they were paid $100k in their first year. This would maintain a level playing field for NYC based devs/designers and foreign ones, companies making a decision based upon fit not tax implications. While the City would lose some tax revenues in the first year, program participants would continue to command high paying jobs and add to the City’s tax base. 

These are just three ideas I’ve heard recently, I’m going to continue to write about other concepts I hear around town. If you have any ideas, please leave them in the comments below. 

(UPDATED - HERE”S WHERE TO VOTE!) The New York Tech Meetup serves as the center of the New York Tech Scene. Each month, hundreds of people come together to see cool demos of new products and meet other innovators in our community. While the NYTM is already a great organization, I believe I could add a great deal as a member of The New York Tech Meetup’s Board of Directors.

Who am I? In my spare time, I’m a blogger for VentureBeat and an amateur rapper (see my raps about NYC startups directly below, the first one you need to endure my BRIEF campaign speech).

Watch live streaming video from nytechmeetup at livestream.com

My full-time job for the past six months has been as founder and CEO of Standard Start, a non-profit helping startups with the nuts and bolts of starting a business. In partnership with Gunderson Dettmer, we’re producing standardized legal documents from formation to financing with plain English explanations of each clause.

We’re syndicating content from bloggers like Fred Wilson, Mark Suster, and Matt Bartus and creating original materials breaking down the real life mistakes of entrepreneurs. We’re covering the stuff that is basically the same for everyone, allowing founders to easily discover and comprehend the basics of running your own business. We’re currently in private Alpha, with our full launch coming at the beginning of next year. 

I funded Standard Start out of my own pockets because I don’t want anyone making the same mistakes I’ve made starting businesses. In addition to working on the site, which is now in private alpha, I’ve personally advised a number of startups in areas including legal, communications, product, and financing. I’ve dedicated the past 6 months solely to helping startups and the the tech scene as a whole expand and evolve. This is why I’m running for the NYTM board.

So what do I want to do?

1.     Increase support for technologists looking to start businesses

While the New York Tech Meetup does a great job of showcasing the New York City Tech scene, I think the organization can do more to support innovators as they create businesses. I founded Standard Start to help entrepreneurs, I believe the time I’ve spent assessing the needs of entrepreneurs would help the NYTM community to better support them.

2.     I want to work with the New York Tech Meetup to further increase civic engagement by the New York Tech Community.

There are so many causes that could be enhanced by the skills of NYTM members, we need to make it easier for the community to give back. I have connected members of City government with prominent members of New York’s tech ecosystem. As a member of the NYTM board, I would work with the City to expand their burgeoning efforts to work with the tech community.

3.     Increase student involvement

The New York Tech Meetup’s student group has already been quite active, I think there are a number of ways we can further increase the number of NYC grads who flow into the tech community. I’m excited about the opportunity to build upon the NYTM’s and HackNY’s already stellar record here and further help NY universities expand the talent pool in the startup community.

If elected, I will work tirelessly with the other members of the board to help the New York Tech Meetup, as well as the broader tech scene, to expand and evolve. If you want to learn more about me, check out my bio here. If you’d like to vote for me, please click here and do so.
Thanks, Jacob

I like to rap about NYC startups. I’m writing a second verse, I’d love some suggestions. I already included Drop.io, Etsy, and Betaworks in the second verse.

Over the past few years, New York City has become a hotbed of startup activity. On Tuesday, the First Round Capital team took a tour of incubator spaces to survey the NYC scene.

A seed and early stage venture capital firm, First Round already has 15 New York based startups in its portfolio including Hot Potato and 33Across. “We typically fund PowerPoints, we fund prototypes, we fund pre-revenue prelaunch companies all the time,” managing partner Josh Kopelman said. With an average initial investment of $600,000, according to Kopelman, the fledgling startups coming out of the incubators are prime investment targets for First Round as they open up their New York City offices.

Kopelman was accompanied on the trek by First Round managing partners Howard Morgan and Chris Fralic, with entrepreneur in residence Charlie O’Donnell, principal Phin Barnes, and general counsel Doug Bernstein also on hand. The group made their way by foot through the cold New York air to 8 different facilities in Manhattan including Sunshine Suites, Rose Tech Incubator, and the NYU/Polytechnic Incubator. The spaces were surprisingly plush, specifically Sunshine’s Tribecca location. While on the lookout for potential investments, several members of the First Round team were impressed with the workspaces, remarking how ideal they were for portfolio companies looking to conserve cash.

Amongst the startups that spoke with the First Round team throughout the day, the most compelling companies were creating disruptive technologies intrinsically linked to New York’s economy and fast paced mindset. One of the more impressive offerings was DrChrono, a SAAS medical practice management platform that provides web-based scheduling, medical record management, billing, and practice analytic tools. The service is secure and can help doctor’s communicate with their patients, staff, and insurance companies to streamline the onerous task of running a medical practice. I found the ability to automatically send email, text, or phone appointment reminders to be a particularly useful feature, communicating with patients on the medium they use.

Another promising startup was Aerocity Wind. Aerocity builds vertical wind turbines to be placed on existing structures. Horizontal wind turbines are more prone to break and fall, can be nosy, and would disrupt the architectural aesthetic of a building. Aerocity turbines  are more suitable for the turbulent environment atop skyscrapers, generating power in a  safe, quiet and efficient manner that can be consumed by the building or sold back to utilities at near market rates. The company is also developing software that will tell building owners where to place turbines to optimize production amidst the obstructions of a vertical city.

Already the finance capital of the world, New York City is also home to a few noteworthy startups in that space. One such company was Hedgeable, an investing analytics product targeted at high net-worth investors. The company’s free retail service, which provides investors with tools to track their portfolio’s performance and risk profile, is already managing approximately $300 million in funds. Investors can pay for a premium service, with premium users on average managing $200,000 through the system. The service is integrated with several online brokerage services including Etrade, TDAmeritrade, and Fidelity Investments.