I've been thinking about it and realized our whole tech entrepreneur/ startup/investor community is mighty friggin small. The whole internet industry at this point is huge but if you look past the support staff and salespeople, how many founders and investors are really out there? I think about the NYC tech community and i realize I know most of the people in it and ya know what? There aren't very many impressive startups, sure there's a bunch of impressive people but I really haven't run across that many really good ideas and companies in development. Maybe if we look nationwide there are 20,000 founders and potential founders and 5,000 professional investors. Now, eliminate most of them for not coming out of their shells and we're left with only a few thousand people that serious and want to contribute to the community. Most of these people are out west. Now let's look at NYC - there are 10 startup themed networking groups with about 15,000 total members. Now let's eliminate the hangers on and crossovers and we're down to around 2000 people. Now eliminate the people that never come out to play and we're down to probably 800 people. Dam it's tiny. So what's the lesson? Don't fuck around, we all know each other. (I'm starting to myself here because I fuck around a lot)

Richie