A very different version of this article appears in the March 12th edition of Forbes Magazine.
If you’re looking for New York tech’s center of gravity, try riding the elevator up to the fourth floor at 902 Broadway. When the doors open, dodge the shaggy coders chatting in the hall and casually plug your name into the iPad at reception. A 180-degree turn will take you to General Assembly’s South Wing, a trapezoid-shaped room crowded with long tables and silvery MacBooks, each manned by the present and future stars of New York tech. For our purposes, you’ve reached the core of the sun.
Nineteen of New York’s most promising startups work out of General Assembly, a 20,000 square-foot co-working space opened in January 2011 in the Flatiron District of Manhattan. Neverware, a company that sells servers for juicing up out-of-date computers, and Art.sy, which recommends artwork by analyzing users’ tastes, are two of the companies paying $600 a month per employee for chunks of the long tables that serve as desk space. A kitchen, conference rooms, a lecture hall, and even a small library flank the main work areas.
“It’s just a great place to go to work,” says CEO Russell D’Souza, 26, whose SeatGeek, a website for buying secondhand tickets, grew too large for General Assembly last June. “It’s a fantastic space with all of the amenities that you’d want for a very affordable price.”
It’s so fantastic that another 250 individual techies pay $300 a month for access to communal desks and discounted entry to the dozen or so classes held on site each week. The end result is a dense, diverse jumble of characters in various stages of productivity – an echo of the city itself. While some sit blank-faced in front of lines of code, others chat amiably. Forbes even found one young CEO casually sipping a glass of wine (from a 9$ bottle) at 3pm on a Wednesday.
Don’t let the cordial atmosphere fool you: General Assembly means business. Four young partners - Brad Hargreaves, 25, Matthew Brimer, 25, Adam Pritzker, 27, and Jake Schwartz, 33 - constructed the space with funding from a host corporate sponsors, including Rackspace, Skype and the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The New York Economic Development Corporation blessed it with a $200,000 grant. In September, the partners raised another $4.25 million in venture funding from the investment arms of Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner and Howard Schultz among others.
With an infusion of smart money, General Assembly is expanding rapidly. A new outpost is scheduled to open in London later this year, along with an additional 10,000-square-foot space across the street from the Broadway headquarters.
After opening last year, General Assembly briskly transformed into a campus of sorts with multiple nightly classes and additional programming on the weekends (not to mention a beer-soaked happy-hour on Friday afternoons). Generally $30 gets you into a local guru’s 90-minute lecture on almost any topic relating to startups. Web design, public relations, and startup law are some sample offerings.
To solidify the campus resemblance, GA offers courses comparable in price and length to those held at a private college. For $5,000, aspiring programmers can take an Intro to Web Development course spanning 16 weeks and 96 hours of instruction. Expensive offerings like these occasionally raise suspicion in a community raised on open-source software, free online resources and cheaper in-person alternatives like Skillshare, a New York startup that helps organize informal classes.
Pritzker, responding through email, argued, “Our instructors are some of the most respected practitioners in their fields. They work closely with our in-house designer to develop a range of courses that reflect the diverse needs of our community–our pricing reflects this range.”
Although that range rarely goes below $30, few seem to mind. General Assembly’s classes, including courses that cost thousands of dollars, routinely sell out. The new space opening across the street will consist almost entirely of classrooms and the program already runs several classes each week in London, even without a dedicated facility.
And now, corporations are getting in on the fun. This summer General Electric will send 100 employees to General Assembly for a course surveying startup practices and culture. The message is clear: Education is no longer on the periphery of GA's operations.
Regardless of priority, as the hub of a New York tech community rapidly moving out from under Silicon Valley’s shadow,the co-working South Wing still feels ionized.
“It’s just an amazing crossroads of investors, developers, marketing and sales people,” says Jon Hefter, the 26 year-old CEO of Neverware. “To me it’s like New York tech’s town square.”
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