“When I came back I found 150 emails and a website,” Goikhman says.
In true entrepreneurial fashion, the 80 startups that were turned away from the NYC Startup Job Fair combined their resources to lay the foundation for their own job fair. Various startup founders have contributed logo mockups, press and PR contacts, a Twitter account and a sign-up website for the effort.
NYU-Poly’s Varrick St. Incubator offered meeting space for further organizing, and both NYU and Pace University have offered to rent the job fai r event space at low rates, says The Hotlist co-founder Gianni Martire, who helped organize the meeting at the incubator.
The group’s sign-up site launched with the somewhat bitter title “The New York City Unfair,” but it has since evolved to “The Silicon Alley Job Fair.” The participating startup founders I spoke with also seemed less bitter, and more optimistic, about what the impromptu job fair says about the startup scene in New York City.
“I didn’t realize how active all the startups in New York really were, and how much they all have to offer — even if they’re small, everyone has something to bring to the table,” Martire says. “It makes me happy that I didn’t move to California.”
Alex Horn, the author of the cc/bcc mistake, feels the same way about the spin-off job fair. Horn started the NYC Startup Job Fair after he graduated from Columbia in 2009 and realized that startup jobs weren’t...
