On a frozen Friday night in Manhattan, a line of eager party-goers snaked around the lobby of an unassuming office building and out the block, waiting to get into the hottest tech gathering of the new year (This reporter, transparently, was waylaid by new parenthood, but I received dispatches from some intrepid Fortune attendees.) Entrance was so coveted that many found themselves stymied in the frigid atrium, clutching their coats amid a one-in-one-out policy, with the organizers ultimately issuing refunds.
The event was not hosted by new tech royalty like the boys of TBPN, but instead by New York’s old guard: legendary figures including AlleyCorp’s Kevin Ryan and Union Square Ventures’ Fred Wilson, who in the 1990s had sought to build New York’s answer to Silicon Valley. Now, three decades later, they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of Silicon Alley, dubbed for the stretch of early startups in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, like Ryan’s DoubleClick (an ad tech pioneer that Google acquired in 2007 for $3.1 billion).
“Money follows entrepreneurs, not the other way around,” Ryan told me, recounting the difficult early days, when West Coast investors were hesitant to fund the nascent ecosystem. (All of them have, of course, since set up New York offices.) That began to change before the Dot-com bubble burst of 2000, with DoubleClick’s 1998 IPO of $60 million, at the time, seeming like a massive figure. Ryan recalls hosting a Willy Wonka-themed party the following year with a ballooning guest list that rivaled Friday’s, replete with a dance floor that had candy beneath it.
