Fred Wilson, as usual, had some valuable insights on his blog yesterday. The topic this time was particularly interesting, how the government can stimulate the startup ecosystem. He started by saying that there are at least two ecosystems in NYC, one around BioTech and one around Software/Internet/Digital Media and that the two are seperate. While this seems obvious to those of us who live this day in and day out, politicians tend to be a little dense.
Fred points to two primary ways that public funds and energies can be applied to nurturing the NYC tech scene. The first one is the chorus that resounds through just about every community trying to build a tech scene, WE NEED MORE ENGINEERS! This of course applies to Pittsburgh as much as anybody, but I think there are plenty of engineers (at least more then the Pittsburgh tech scene can currently handle) to be had coming out of CMU. This is why I think it is so awesome that Google confirmed today that their offices are going to be twice as large as we previously believed. This, and a growing startup community, can form the basis for a community that’s attractive to the top engineering talent.
The other one of Fred’s points is less often referred to, bandwidth. The following excerpt from Fred’s post underscores just how critical he believes bandwidth can be:
The other area is bandwidth. I mean data bandwidth. I mean fiber to every school, institution, business and home in the five boroughs. Other localities have built community owned fiber networks. A good example is Lafayette Louisiana. NYC needs to do this and it needs to do this now. The fiber plant should be owned by us, the citizens of NYC, not some company that will charge us a fortune for using the network and potentially restrict what we can do on the network.
There is a company I know of that is one of the most exciting new startups in NYC. They are locating their new office in the emerging area in Brooklyn between DUMBO, Fort Greene, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. This is a cool new neighborhood that could be home to a lot of startups looking for great workspaces at low rents. But there is no commercial grade Internet service in this neighborhood. TIme Warner Cable wants this young startup to guarantee them $80,000 in revenues so they can afford to dig up the street and lay the cables.
That is nuts. We need to wire up this city from Staten Island to the Bronx, from Harlem to Rockaway Beach. And we need to own this fiber plant and we need it to be the best in the world.
I know that we have our fingers crossed that we will win the Google Fiber Competition, but what if we don’t? I would like to see a fiber infrastructure project added to Luke and Council’s list of potential projects. Could it not improve Pittsburgh as much or more then at least a half dozen other stimulus/construction projects?
