[URBAN NOTE] "This Man Is on a Mission to Turn NYC Into a Tech Magnet"

[rfmcdonald]

Wired's Issie Lapowsky started an interesting discussion by profiling a businessman who wants to make New York City a technology hub. (The real action is in the comments, where people debate whether or not the city has a culture that would work for tech start-ups.)

When Alex Iskold became the managing director of Techstars New York, he came armed with a secret weapon: a script he had written that crawls the web for new startups and assesses whether or not they’d be a good fit for the Big Apple incarnation of this burgeoning tech accelerator.

Just what those metrics are, Iskold isn’t saying. “I don’t want to give out all of our tricks,” he says, laughing. But it’s not too hard to figure out what Iskold is looking for. A serial entrepreneur himself, he has founded and sold two companies, including, most recently, GetGlue, a television social network. Now, at the helm of one of New York City’s largest tech accelerators, this engineer by training is on a mission to bring what he calls “heavy tech” to New York City.

If Techstars can help build these heavy tech companies, Iskold believes, the engineers will come. The aim, ultimately, is to turn New York into a true tech hub. That will take some doing, but Iskold’s work is part of a much larger effort to bring more tech minds to New York, a city that leads the world in so many things but trails places like Boston and Silicon Valley in terms of engineering talent.

Iskold defines “heavy tech” companies as any business for which the technology itself is the primary reason for being. As examples, he lists New York City success stories like MongoDB, an open-source NoSQL database; MakerBot, a 3-D printing company, and Digital Ocean, a cloud hosting service and Techstars graduate. “With, say, e-commerce and finance startups, tech supports the business,” he says, “but with companies like MongoDB, Digital Ocean, and even MakerBot, the technology is the business.”