The Early Days of Silicon Alley – Some Random Quotes
I’m in the middle of doing some research for a blog posting I’d like to write this weekend and came across some articles written about my favorite zine of the 90s – Silicon Alley Reporter. For those unfamiliar with SAR, it was the newsletter/magazine that the entire trade read and helped fuel much of the industry throughout it’s birth. Jason Calacanis was the brainchild behind the magazine which morphed into a magazine called Venture Reporter (2001) and then ultimately sold to Wicks Business Information.
One of the articles I want to share was written in 1998 by the NY Times which featured Silicon Alley Reporter (amongst others).
I like many of the quotes/lines in the article and in no particular order, here they are:
”The industry here is driven by people,” Mr. Calacanis, 27, lectured a magazine job applicant recently over breakfast at Balthazar’s. ”On the West Coast there are a handful of celebrities — Bill Gates, Larry Ellison,” Mr. Calacanis said, referring to the chairman of the world’s two largest software companies. ”Those people are boring. They don’t take good pictures.”
Mr. Calacanis’s irreverence is either refreshing or hopelessly sophomoric, depending on one’s point of view. Yet his shameless boosterism of Silicon Alley — New York’s downtown multimedia hub — has helped create the aura of community and even home-team spirit for a disparate group of colleagues and competitors who otherwise might have little more in common than being located in Manhattan and trying to find some sort of profitable business on the World Wide Web.
‘There are two Silicon Alleys — the one where people go to the parties and the one where people actually do the work,” Mr. Shannon said.
The Alley’s derivative nickname first caught on in 1995, with the explosion of Web and the conviction that its ”content” — the techie catch-all for magazines, newspapers, music, movies, TV, advertising and various vaguely defined interactive stuff — would be produced in the world’s media capital. But of all of those things, only advertising has shown a propensity to make money on the Web. Moreover, the truly successful Web content — at least this month — appears to be the information tools or ”portals” aggregated by major search engines like Yahoo, Excite and Snap, which are all located on the West Coast.
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