Thinking about this a bit more, I realize that in the decade I've been in NYC, the majority of the time I've been working with or for startups. On the tech sid

Thinking about this a bit more, I realize that in the decade I've been in NYC, the majority of the time I've been working with or for startups. On the tech side there are companies like Morningside Analytics, who do incredible data visualizations of the blogosphere. MA was bootstrapped by three guys from Columbia University. Perceptive Pixel was founded by Jeff Han, based on his work at NYU (you might have seen his TED talk). Fog Creek was founded here. Peter Shankman founded AirTroductions and HARO. UrbanDaddy is a block away from where I'm sitting. Foursquare is here and so is Boxee. On the creative/advertising side of things, where do I start? The company I'm currently at was bootstrapped by three guys back in 2006. Now we have 25 employees in our NYC office and satellite offices in Amsterdam, Stockholm and Sao Paolo. There are a ton of creative start ups in NYC. WDDG (MochiMedia, while based out of San Fran, was founded by Jameson Hsu and Bob Ippolito, both former DDGers (hi Jameson and Bob)), Big Spaceship, Barbarian Group, Enjoy User Experience (whose founder was co-founder of Kioken)... This stuff is off of the top of my head; I don't even hang out in the NYC startup scene. There's plenty of stuff going once you get away from Wall Street.