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1993: Our story begins at Prodigy, a big hit to those new to the online world, as it provided access to the World Web via a dial-up connection. Throughout the 1990s, Internet companies like Razorfish, DoubleClick, Yoyodyne, Total New York and The Mining Company (which later became About.com) dominated the dot.com landscape in New York.
1995: The New York Times began to experiment with placing content on the Web when Pope John Paul II visited the U.S. In January of 1996, the New York Times launched a permanent online presence, eponymously named The New York Times on the Web. *On October 5 2015, the New York Times announced that it had passed one million digital-only subscribers.
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1996: Venture capitalists, Fred Wilson and Jerry Colonna, cofounded Flatiron Partners, which quickly became New York City’s leading venture capital firm. In the same year, Jason Calacanis founded the Silicon Alley Reporter (renamed to the Venture Reporter in 2001 and sold to Dow Jones in 2003), a trade publication that covered the burgeoning Silicon Alley scene.
1997-1998: Internet companies like Razorfish began to consolidate and quickly acquired several companies, while big players AOL and Yahoo! acquired Total New York and Yoyodyne.
1999: New York startups were prospering in industries such as advertising (DoubleClick), media (About.com), online recruitment (HotJobs) and finance (Datek). Many offline companies developed a Web presence, smaller Internet startups went public or were acquired and over 500 startups were founded in New York over the course of a year. Share prices of Internet companies dropped, the dot.com market collapsed and the tech bubble burst, taking down many giants in Silicon Valley. Subsequently, Silicon Alley disintegrated.
2002: Media, a historic and prominent industry in New York, started to rejuvenate the city’s tech scene. New media came in the form of tech blogging, with sites like Gizmodo and Engadget launching in New York. The city’s successful track record in media, publishing and entertainment lifted tech startups by their bootstraps, paving the way for media giants like BuzzFeed, Vice and Vox Media to eventually make their home in New York City throughout the following decade. Following this trend, New York startups began to find success in other industries that were native to the city—namely retail, finance and fashion.
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2004: New York Tech Meetup was founded as a nonprofit organization that unites professionals from all parts of the New York technology community. Since its inception, NY Tech Meetup has developed into a prominent and unique space for New York techies to meet, talk and disrupt industries together.
2005-2010: These five years were important for New York tech. Peer-to-peer e-commerce website, Etsy, came on to the scene in 2005. More recently, the company IPO'd with a $3.5 billion valuation and scored a $5 million tax break to stay in its Brooklyn headquarters. Luxury flash-sales startup, Gilt Groupe, launched in 2007 and has since raised $286M in funding and currently anticipates an IPO in the near future. In 2009, the online art giant, Artsy, launched in addition crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter. Beauty subscription service, Birchbox, and e-commerce eyewear site, Warby Parker, both launched in 2010, elevating the tech scene even further. Between 2007 and 2011, the number of tech jobs in New York increased by 28.7 percent, while sectors such as finance, publishing, legal services and manufacturing saw a decrease in jobs. During this time, venture capital investments in NYC-based startups grew by 32 percent. The New York City tech scene was booming.
2009-2014: Over the course of five years, the amount of capital invested in New York’s tech companies jumped from $799 million to $3.1 billion.
October 2014: New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, unveiled Digital.NYC, an accessible, one-stop digital platform that aims to provide the city’s technology ecosystem with tools to accelerate growth. In October, the city also officially launched .nyc, allowing organizations or people with a physical address in New York City to purchase a web address with the top-level domain. The choice to opt for a .nyc web address comes out of a city initiative to promote New York as a high-tech hub, as it is the first U.S. city to have its own top-level Internet domain.
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May 2015: The De Blasio administration committed $70 million to bring affordable high-speed Internet to New York City’s residents. The financial commitment towards universal broadband has the potential to impact how children use technology in the future and how working city residents will gain access to online job postings.
June 2015: WeWork, a company that rents office space to startups, became New York tech’s poster child after it raised a whopping $433M funding round. The hefty investment combined with the company’s popularity among New York City-based startups is currently adding fire to the city’s thriving tech landscape.
Today: While Silicon Valley is still predominantly at the core of the tech industry, New York City’s exponential growth has produced dozens of innovative companies that are living up to Silicon Alley's original hype. This type of growth has only come over the course of the last decade, setting New York apart from the majority of other tech hubs, including its West Coast counterpart in the Bay Area. To that end, it seems as if New York City’s tech renaissance is only just beginning.
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