The Silicon Alley 100: New York's Coolest Tech People In 2010

Founders, Foursquare

Foursquare surged into the spotlight in 2010, leaving its competitors in the dust on its way to over 4 million users.

Attention from print and television media and partnerships with top brands are quickly turning Foursquare into a household name. Along the way, the company raised $20 million, rejected a $125 million buyout offer from Yahoo, and survived Facebook’s entrance into its market.

Cofounder, Hunch / Founder Partner, Founder Collective

Chris Dixon has become the name brand investor in the city. He is New York's answer to Ron Conway.

He saw a big exit in Google's $75 million acquisition of Invite Media, and continued actively investing on his own and as part of Founder Collective. His own startup, Hunch, raised $12 million.

CEO, Associated Content -- acquired by Yahoo

Patrick’s company, Associated Content, suffered a huge disappointment in 2009 when an acquisition by AOL was nixed at the eleventh hour.

Patrick bounced right back and got his home run exit in 2010, selling to Yahoo for around $100 million.

He opted not to follow his company to Yahoo, so he's presumably available.  Act now, while you still can!

Managing Partners, Lerer Ventures

Father and son duo Ken and Ben Lerer teamed up to form Lerer Ventures early this year.

It almost immediately became one of the top early stage VC funds in New York, with investments in top startups like GroupMe, Venmo, BankSimple, and Fluidinfo.

Both Lerers also kept having success with their own companies. Ken chairs The Huffington Post, Betaworks, and BuzzFeed, and Ben is cofounder and CEO of Thrillist.

Mayor, New York City

Yes, Michael Bloomberg is the mayor (the real one--not the Foursquare one). He's also New York’s most successful digital entrepreneur, by a mile (Bloomberg LP).

In 2010, he dramatically ramped up the city’s efforts to foster innovation. Under Bloomberg’s leadership, the city has begun building startup incubators, and even invested in an early stage venture fund exclusively focused on New York companies.

Partners, Union Square Ventures

The hits kept coming for USV in 2010.

Foursquare is crushing it. Tumblr keeps growing. USV led a series A in Twilio at the end of last year; now there is a VC fund dedicated exclusively to startups building on Twilio.

And, of course, Twitter and Zynga are doing pretty well too.

Cofounder and Editor-in-Chief, CEO, President, Huffington Post

The Huffington Post is fast on its way to becoming the biggest news site on earth.

The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal are already in the HuffPo's rear-view mirror, and even The New York Times isn't far ahead.

Even better: the publication is starting to make money, thanks to a sales force brought together by ex-Yahoo Greg Coleman.

CEO and Chairman, AOL

Tim Armstrong still has a lot of work to do turning around former titan AOL, but the company now at least has a strategy.

In recent months, AOL bought three companies – 5min, TechCrunch, and ThingLabs – to help it execute on that strategy.

Founder and Publisher, Chief Operating Officer, Gawker Media

Gawker Media shook the tech world when it got its hands on a lost prototype of the iPhone 4.

That, and a few other home runs like the infamous Brett Favre scandal pics, led to another year of rapid growth.

Images: Dave Winer /  Ron Hogan

Founders, Lima Sky

The Pusenjak brothers’ iPhone game Doodle Jump sold like hot cakes this year, bringing them close to $5 million in revenue. After Angry Birds, it's the best selling iPhone game ever.

The Pusenjaks represent a new wave of developers building businesses in mobile.

Cofounder, Invite Media -- acquired by Google

Nat Turner started Invite Media as an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania's business school, Wharton. The demand-side platform took off in the past year, and Google acquired the company for $70 million in June.

Cofounder and CEO, The Receivables Exchange

The Receivables Exchange is possibly the least sexy startup idea we’ve ever heard: a market for businesses to auction off their accounts receivable as a way of improving their short term liquidity.

The company has managed to stay mostly under the radar, despite a rapidly expanding business, $17 million raised this year, and The Wall Street Journal’s Technology Innovation award, which it won in September.

Executive Director of Digital Magazine Development, Condé Nast

Wired's iPad was such a critical and commercial success that the New York Observer wrote a profile of Dadich -- the man behind it -- calling him "the savior of Condé Nast."

Dadich was promoted from his job at Wired to Executive Director of Digital Magazine Development, teaching Condé Nast's other magazines how to recreate his success.

Founder and CEO, Knewton

Knewton’s adaptive learning test prep courses continued to impress this year. It attracted another $12.5 million in venture capital, and earned Knewton recognition as one of The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers.

Founders, GroupMe

In the few months since it launched this summer, GroupMe has taken off, becoming the most talked about early-stage startup in New York.

The use-one-number-to-text-a-group service attracted an A-list group of investors, and millions of texts have already been sent through the service.

Chief Product Officer, Forbes

DVorkin returned to his old stomping grounds at Forbes when the company acquired his site True/Slant.

As Chief Product Officer, he has begun completely overhauling the publication's online and offline presence.

Founder and Managing Partner, IA Ventures

After years of investing as an angel, Ehrenberg raised a fund and formed IA Venture Partners this year.

The new fund is off with a bang, getting in on some great early funding rounds, including BankSimple, Fluidinfo, and Yipit.

Founder and CEO, Kickstarter

Kickstarter, a platform for creators to fund projects without giving away equity, made a huge splash back in May when it helped a group of NYU students raise $200,000 to take on Facebook with an open-source alternative.

But this wasn’t a one-hit wonder. Over $20 million has been pledged to Kickstarter projects over the past year and a half.

Founder and CEO, Buddy Media

Buddy Media's platform for Facebook marketing took off this year.

The company started the year raising $2.26 million; this month, it raised ten times that.

Buddy Media has many of the top advertisers world-wide on its platform, and says it will be profitable on over $20 million in sales this year.

Cofounder and CEO, 5min Media -- acquired by AOL

5min's video syndication platform was already serving up 130 million views a month when the company was acquired by AOL for $65 million. Plugging in to the majority of AOL's media properties will vastly expand the platform's reach.

Founder and CEO, MediaMath

MediaMath is one of the biggest demand-side platforms, and it is getting rich off the rise of real-time bid advertising.

The company now has over 100 employees, and acquired Adroit earlier this year.

Zawadzki is also an angel investor in some of the other New York companies killing it in this space, including AppNexus and AdSafe.

Cofounders, Betaworks

2010 was an exciting year for the incubator/VC hybrid.

Just a month after the company raised $20 million, Twitter began directly competing with the developers in its ecosystem, in which Betaworks is heavily invested.

So far, it seems to be weathering that storm pretty nicely; banner company bit.ly just raised $10 million, and is still growing fast.

Founder and CEO, Etsy

Kalin took back his old job as CEO in December of last year, and things have been humming at Etsy since.

The company raised another $20 million at a $300 million valuation, and claims to be profitable, taking in revenues of $30-50 million on gross sales of $400 million.

Founder and CEO, SecondMarket

SecondMarket raised $15 million from Asian investors with an eye toward expanding its platform for trading illiquid assets east. The company was named one of The World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers.

SecondMarket also teamed up with StockTwits to introduce ticker symbols for private companies, to help aggregate information about them online.

Cofounder and CEO, Meetup

Despite dropping ads from its site, Meetup kept growing its business this year. Revenue is expected to be around $12 million for 2010. The company also introduced the popular new Meetup Everywhere.

Cofounder and CEO, President, AppNexus

The real-time bid market for display advertising absolutely exploded in 2010, and AppNexus was one of the companies at the forefront of that.

The platform now auctions over 4 billion ad impressions a day, and raised $50 million from VCs and Microsoft.

Founder, Makerbot

Makerbot is one of a handful of companies at the forefront of what Wired has called 'the next industrial revolution': 3D printing. These devices let individuals 'print' plastic objects cheaply.

Image: Joi Ito

CEO, SVP of Multimedia and Distribution, MLBAM

This duo helped preserve Major League Baseball's spot as the most tech-savvy of the major sports leagues this year. MLB's iPad app has racked up over 100,000 downloads despite a $15 price tag.

CEO, Hot Potato (Facebook)

Facebook bought Hot Potato for around $10 million, then promptly shut it down.

Which is to say, Facebook paid $10 million for Shaffer and his team. Shaffer was put in charge of Facebook’s new groups feature, which could be a huge development for the social network.

Manager, AOL Ventures

Along with partner Jon Brod, Brown founded AOL’s venture arm, which invested in startups like Betaworks, Solve Media, and Sailthru.

He is also a personal investor in Qwiki, which won TechCrunch Disrupt. 

Brown is an overnight fixture in the New York tech community, hosting a variety of meetups to help bolster AOL’s startup bona fides.

Founder and CEO, GroundLink, Cofounder, Transit Wireless

Mashinsky is on a mission to make sure New Yorkers are never without Internet access again.

He is part of a joint venture that is wiring the city’s subway stations for cellphone and wifi. Above ground, he is working on transforming livery cabs into a giant, mobile, free wifi network.

Founders, SeatGeek

SeatGeek is like a smarter version of Kayak for secondary markets in sports and music tickets.

The team raised funding and signed a distribution deal with Yahoo which is helping traffic take off.

Chairman, CEO, Gilt Groupe

Gilt is set to do $400-$500 million in revenue, up from $175 million in 2009. Ryan and Lyne switched roles, with Ryan taking over as CEO.

(Kevin Ryan is our chairman, but we didn't hold that against him.)

President and CEO, Vice Chairman and Head of Worldwide Strategy and Planning, Priceline

Priceline has made an astounding recovery after just barely surviving the dot-com bubble.

Now the stock is soaring, blowing past $350, a 128.8% increase from last year.

Founder, Instapaper

Arment recently stepped down from his role as CTO of Tumblr to focus on ‘independent projects’.

One independent project in particular, Instapaper, has investors drooling, but Arment might be keeping it all to himself.

Business Insider

Founders and Managing Partners, RRE Ventures

RRE had an active year both in early stage investments (Venmo, AdStruc, Yipit) and in bigger B and C rounds (Betaworks, bit.ly, BuzzFeed).

The firm also led a round in something called Business Insider.

Founder and CEO, President, Tumblr

Ultra-simple blogging platform Tumblr is on a roll. This year it blew past 1 billion posts from over 6 million users. Tumblr raised $5 million in April and already has VCs lining up begging to invest more.

Founder and CEO, President, BuzzFeed

Peretti and Steinberg are using the destination site BuzzFeed as the core of a new kind of ad network and analytics platform based on the virality of content. Peretti is also an advisor for the newly formed Lerer Ventures.

Founder, Trisiras Group

Kal Vepuri's newly-formed Trisiras Group invested in SeatGeek, BankSimple, AdStruc, Topguest, and Rapportive, among others.

Founders, Rent the Runway

The 'Netflix for dresses' continued to impress, boosting its inventory up to 12,000 dresses and generating around $20 million in sales. The company raised $15 million in February.

CEO, Media6Degrees

A pioneer in 'socially targeted advertising', Media6Degrees is growing fast. The company is on track to do over $20 million in revenue this year.

Founders, Yipit

In early 2010, people thought it was crazy that roughly a dozen companies were making clones of a fast growing company called Groupon.

Vacanti and Moran made a huge bet that this wasn’t a bubble, but rather just the beginning, and turned their company Yipit into an aggregator for Groupons. Now there are hundreds of Groupon clones, and Yipit has $1.3 million from Ron Conway, RRE, IA, and others.

Founders, BankSimple

BankSimple raised $3.1 million for an exciting idea: the company will provide simple front-end banking services, while depositing your money in FDIC-insured wholesale banks.

With no physical branches to support, it plans to get by without hidden fees.

Managing Directors, FirstMark Capital

FirstMark teamed up with the mayor's office to form the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, a seed fund focused exclusively on startups creating jobs in the city.

FirstMark separately introduced its own seed fund, and made investments in companies like Knewton, CollegeOnly, and AppFirst.

Founder, Freeverse

The roll-up in mobile gaming kept Ian Lynch Smith busy updating his stationary this year.

In February, Freeverse was acquired by Ngmoco, which was itself acquired by DeNA earlier this month.

Image: Jon Jordan

Photo by Elena Olivio (c) NYU

Founders, HackNY

Korth, Wiggins, and Mason – professors at NYU and Columbia and lead scientist at bit.ly, respectively – formed HackNY to place college students in summer internships with New York startups.

The group is also sponsoring regular hackathons and other events to foster engineering talent in the city.

Director, TechStars New York

Startup accelerator program TechStars is expanding to New York, and David Tisch was tapped to direct the new program.

He’s put together an all-star team of mentors and investors for the program. He also remained active as an angel, adding startups like GroupMe, AdStruc, and CollegeOnly to his portfolio (which already featured companies like Boxee and Flavors.me).

CEO, Tracked/Hashable

Michael Yavonditte started 2010 as the CEO and founder of Tracked, a struggling would-be competitor to Yahoo Finance.

Yavonditte and his team radically changed direction, putting Tracked to the side, and launching a new social product that is taking over twitter feeds all over Silicon Alley.

Cofounder and CEO, Solve Media

Solve Media’s big concept this year was a complete overhaul of CAPTCHA boxes, turning them into valuable ad units.

They now work with big-name clients such as Toyota, Microsoft, and Expedia.

Founder and CEO, Deep Focus

Deep Focus was acquired this year by global marketing agency Engine.

Ian Schafer will remain with the company, working closely with executives Martin Puris and John Bernbach.

Founders, Stack Overflow

Quora is the Q&A site everyone is talking about, but Stack Overflow has been quietly killing it in its niche -- programmers.

The company raised a $6 million series A, and is building out similar sites in other verticals in its Stack Exchange network.

CEO, Tasting Table

The Pilot Group-backed email newsletter for foodies is up to around 500,000 subscribers, and will bring in $3-4 million this year.

Image: Melanie Dunea/CPi

Founders, How About We

How About We’s novel twist on online dating -- focusing on the actual dates and minimizing the online interaction -- attracted a lot of attention and favorable media coverage, as well as investors for a series A.

CEO and Chairman, Medialets

Medialets raised $6 million this year as they geared-up for iPad advertising development.

The company has already secured partnerships with CNN, Washington Post, and The New York Times for use of its mobile advertising and analytics technology.

Cofounder and CEO, Cofounder and CMO, Fashism

Fashism is a site that lets you post photos of your outfits to get feedback from the community.

It's received a lot of positive press coverage from major mainstream media outlets, interest from big name investors, and is starting to take off.

Founder, NYU ITP

The Interactive Telecommunications Program at is a major supporter of innovation in the city, and has produced a number of big successes in NYC tech, including Foursquare's Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert.

Business Insider

Founders, VillageVines

VillageVines' private sales for restaurants model is an interesting upscale alternative to the wave of Groupon clones.

Managing Director, New York City Economic Development Corporation

NYCEDC spearheaded many of the Bloomberg administration's pro-tech initiatives, including the BigApps competition and the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund.

NYCEDC is also investing in several startup incubators, starting with the Varick Street Incubator, built in partnership with NYU-Poly.

Founder and CEO, Go Try It On

Marissa Evans's site for crowd-sourced fashion advice was the runner-up at Startup 2010, and has been gaining traction since.

CEO, MediaBank

Bill Wise left his post as VP for ad platforms at Yahoo to take over as CEO of MediaBank.

He also remained an active angel investor, and saw some earlier investments like AdSafe and Media6Degrees take off.

Founder and CEO, ADstruc

ADstruc went through TechStars in Colorado this year, raised a round of funding from top investors, and launched its online marketplace for outdoor advertising.

Founders, Paperless Post

Paperless Post offers an ad-free, sharper-looking alternative to Evite.

It's tough to charge for something the others are giving away for free, but Paperless Post is growing nicely, and has raised $2.5 million so far.

Founder and CEO, LearnVest

Von Tobel launched her site, which offers financial advice and management tools for women, at the end of last year.

It took off with a bang, and she raised $4.43 million in April.

CEO, Smartling

Smartling raised $4 million for its fast, cheap, crowd-sourced translation service.

Editor, Dealbreaker

Bess Levin's work for Dealbreaker is so central to the publication's success that she has been able to single-handedly hold up acquisition talks with the New York Observer -- because Dealbreaker isn't worth buying without her. Attagirl!

Founders, Activate

Anil Dash and Michael Wolf launched a new media consulting firm this year, after leaving high-profile positions at Six Apart and MTV, respectively.

The company is based in New York, and plans to expand to Silicon Valley by year’s end.

Co-Founders, My City Way

After this team's NYC Way app won the city's inaugural BigApps competition last year, the team decided to create similar apps for cities around the world. 

The newly formed business picked up the first investment from the NYC Entrepreneurial Fund, announced by Mayor Bloomberg at Disrupt.

Founder and CEO, Small Planet

This digital agency specializing in iOS apps has had an amazing first year, with a number of the highest grossing iPad apps and clients including Disney, GM, Paramount, and Hearst.

Angel investor

Kushner founded Thrive Capital just a year and a half ago, and has already invested in 15 companies.

They including hot New York companies like GroupMe, Paperless Post, and Sailthru. He already has his first exit in Hot Potato, which was acquired by Facebook earlier this year.

Cofounder and CEO, OpenSky

OpenSky offers celebrities and other ‘taste makers’ an easy way to sell high-end products directly from their blogs and websites.

The platform launched this year, and OpenSky raised $6 million.

Cofounder and CEO, Chief Product Officer, Boxee

Boxee's set-top box for delivering web video to your television finally ships out early next month, in time to compete with Google and Apple over the holidays.

Director of National Sales, Facebook

All the attention and glory for Facebook goes to Mark Zuckerberg and the Palo Alto team, but someone has to pay for it all.

That's the job of Kevin Colleran and the sales team here in New York.

CEO, Yodle

Yodle is one of the fastest growing private companies in the U.S.

This year it raised $10 million, and is set to generate around $70 million in revenue.

Founder, Mediaite

News aggregator Mediaite has turned into a serious player in the digital media field, and traffic continues to grow.

Abrams will soon launch three new sites, and his media company as a whole is expected to be profitable by January or February of next year.

Managing General Partners, Village Ventures

Portfolio company Everyday Health filed for a $100 million IPO in January.

The "vertical media thesis" that drove Village Ventures' investment in the company is already starting to pan out elsewhere with up-and-comers like Babble and TechMediaNetwork.

Software Engineer, Square

Buzz Andersen is the senior iOS developer for Jack Dorsey's Square.

He also sold his Twitter client, Birdfeed, to Thing Labs (which was later acquired by AOL.)

Image: Mai Le

Co-Editor, TechCrunch -- acquired by AOL

Erick is the New York City face of TechCrunch, the leading blog in tech, which sold to AOL this year.

Founder and Publisher, Curbed

The popular real estate news network went National this year.

Site traffic followed suit, surpassing 1.3 million unique visitors a month, according to Quantcast. Lockhart’s other verticals-- Eater and Racked also expanded to the National level this year.

Columnist, Reporter, New York Times

The New York Times doesn't always seem comfortable with the rise of the digital age, but a few bright lights like Brian Stelter and David Carr are cause for hope.

This duo is constantly making waves online.

Co-Founder, Introspectr

Introspectr came out of the inaugural class of SeedStart, a new incubator run by NYC Seed. Introspectr searches all of your online accounts -- Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. -- at once, and even searches behind links and inside attachments.

Chairman and CEO, WebMediaBrands

WebMediaBrands had a busy year of acquisitions, buying-up the assets to Semantic Technology Conference, SemanticUniverse.com, Social Times, RotorBlog, and the social media trade show firm 3rd Power LLC.

Revenue soared as a result.

Cofounder, Babble

Rufus Griscom’s parenting site grew into one of the top parenting sites on the web, and saw revenue growth of 570%.

The company also raised $3 million.

Founder and CEO, AdaptiveBlue

AdaptiveBlue's entertainment check-in app GetGlue has been on a tear recently, signing partnerships with HBO and the NBA.

Image: Andrew Lee

Cofounder, Hard Candy Shell

The web design and development firm had another busy year, working with big-name clients such as Gilt Groupe, Rent the Runway, SNL, Newsweek, and Gawker.

via gawker.com

Publishers, The Blaze

Glenn Beck and his point man Chris Balfe stepped up their online presence last month by launching The Blaze, a general news site.

Like everything Beck touches, it is getting popular fast.

Image: David Shankbone

Cofounder and CEO, Yext

Yext -- "the next Yellow Pages" -- saw solid growth and launched a new product this year called Yext Rep.

It is a one-stop location for local businesses to keep track of their reputation across numerous consumer review sites.

Founder, Drop.io

With more and more media outlets coming around to the idea that no one wants to pay for content, Sam Lessin started a contrarian movement.

Top notch bloggers (like him) shouldn’t be giving it away for free. So he started Letter.ly, a service for setting up paid newsletters.

Business Insider

Cofounder and CEO, Tremor Media

Video advertising network Tremor Media is reporting more than 190 million unique visitors per month.

SAI recently estimated that the company's revenue for the year is likely to be in the $60-70 million range.

Cofounder and CEO, Howcast

Howcast continues to maintain a dominant position as the top mobile how-to video provider in the world.

Over 2 million people have downloaded their apps thus far, over 300,000 of them on the iPad.

Founders, SocialFlow

SocialFlow's software is an attempt to "marry science with etiquette."

It uses real-time analytics to tell companies how and when to tweet to keep their Twitter communications in-line with the natural flow of Twitter.

Associate, DFJ Gotham

Mark’s Get Ventures is one of the most influential VC bloggers after Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon.

He’s also played an active role fostering the venture communities at Columbia and NYU. He was active in DFJ Gotham’s investments in AdStruc, Yipit, and Sailthru.

Entrepreneur-in-Residence, First Round Capital

By day, Charlie O'Donnell works on expanding First Round Capital's New York City presence.

By night, he is dedicated to advancing New York tech in general through nextNY. His @ShakeShack III event was one of the best tech parties of the year.

Founders, AppFund

Wendle, a cofounder of CNET and IFILM, and Klaus, former CEO of Music Nation, teamed up to launch this fund for investing in apps for the iPad and other tablets.

Editor-at-Large, Mediaite

Rachel's "Change the Ratio" campaign to address the lack of women in tech has set off a firestorm of debate throughout the industry.

Founder and Editor-in-Chief, President, Daily Beast

Bottom line concerns notwithstanding, The Daily Beast is something of a miracle.

That a two year-old website could be in serious talks to acquire a major brand link Newsweek says a lot about where media is headed.

Executive Director, New York Tech Meetup (NYTM)

New York’s biggest regular tech event is finally too big to stay an informal organization.

At the last monthly Meetup, Westheimer announced that NYTM was incorporating as a 501(c), and would open up half of its board seats for public elections by the community.

President, Editor-in-Chief, Patch (AOL)

AOL bought Patch in June of last year in the early days of its efforts to recreate itself as a content company.

Since then, AOL has doubled down on content, and Patch has grown like wildfire.

Cofounder and Chairman, Internet Week

Internet Week has become an institution in the New York digital community.

More than 150 events took place at this year’s celebration, sprawled out over dozens of locations throughout the City.

Image: Flickr

Cofounder, Zelnick Media

Zelnick Media purchased Alloy, co-producer of Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries, for $126.5 million. Co-Founder Strauss Zelnick continues to entertain high-profile media execs with his rooftop digital soirees.

Freelance

The cofounder of Medialets found herself a new job that simply wouldn’t have been possible a year ago: iPad DJ. She also wrote a book about app marketing, forthcoming from Vanguard Press.