I’m happy to report that when cancelled flights threatened to turn The Big Apple into forbidden fruit, Team HYPERDRIVE was fully prepared to pivot and find any way they could to reach New York.
Fun as it might have been, a rental-car road trip was rendered unnecessary by ace Communitech EA Kathy Thomson, who found us fresh flights and got us to NYC Wednesday morning in time to hit the ground running.
For some, it meant practising their pitch in the cab ride into Manhattan, dropping their gear at the hotel and heading straight to Google’s jaw-dropping NYC headquarters.
With stellar September sun lighting up the skyline outside, we gathered in a trademark-quirky meeting room for a video chat with Bridgette Sexton, Google’s Global Entrepreneurship Manager, who rose (and early; she’s based in the Valley) to the occasion.
Sexton talked about how Google has managed to maintain a culture of innovation among more than 50,000 employees, which seems impossible until you hear about its internal programs – and see how far it goes to keep those workers happy.
As elsewhere in the Googleverse, it means three free meals a day from an impossibly diverse set of hot and cold options. And, in New York, they’re served up in the second-largest office building in the city, 111 Eighth Ave. in Chelsea, where Google fills more than 500,000 of its 2.9 million square feet.
The company bought the building for $1.9 billion in 2010, wowing a New York tech scene that has been on fire since Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched an aggressive bid to wean the NYC economy from dependency on financial services and support innovation.
We found another symbol of that change at General Assembly, a technology campus housed on the sunwashed fourth floor at 902 Broadway. GA is NYC’s hottest address for startup education and business development, as well as a frequent stop for curious celebs like Jon Bon Jovi and Kanye West.
The GA staff has grown from four to 75 people in a year and a half – one of the many crazy metrics that New York is amassing in pursuit of tech supremacy.
From there, Team HYPERDRIVE headed south to the Morton Street home of the BMW i Ventures incubator, another well-lit collaborative workspace in a classic building.
Christian Noske, senior associate, told us BMW’s investment fund is particularly interested in tech companies innovating in the urban mobility field – and as a proud German, seemed seriously tempted by our suggestion that he join us for Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest.
Hey, any excuse to escape an office with a stunning river view, right?
We wound down Day 1 with a private dinner, including pitches from all seven of HYPERDRIVE’s first cohort of companies, among friends from the Canadian Consulate in New York, the C100 and other guests with Canuck tech connections.
It was a long day that began, for some, before 5 a.m. in Toronto, but there’s something irrepressibly energizing about New York.
As the gathering wound down at the sparkling Riverpark restaurant by the East River, the group contemplated another pivot as they headed off into the night.
