First Credit Corporation Of New York: Fill & Download for Free

TL;DR Most of the credit goes to the interplay of global forces and New York City's traditional strengths, with an assist from an effective tech-entrepreneur mayor and a scrappy, dynamic, local startup community.The Long Answer: The larger a city or region, the tougher it is to deliberately move the needle on anything, for better or worse. Conversely, the smaller the area, the bigger an impact can be effected by specific human actions. For example, Seaside, FL is a global showpiece of the New Urbanism...but, visionary as it is, the whole darn thing is only 80 acres and was built from scratch in a few years. By contrast, New York is one of the five largest cities in the world, with an entrenched population and accompanying industries that dates from 1609.Since New York City didn't have any of the first generation, 20th century technology bases (chip fabrication plants, bio/pharma labs, etc.), it was late to the tech startup party. During the dotcom boom at the turn of the century, the sheer number of people and exuberance about the future sparked the emergence of New York's first generation tech community from a standing start. Bob Stein's Voyager pioneered 'new media'; Craig Kanarick and Jeff Dachis's Razorfish created the concept of a 'digital agency'; Jason Calacanis' Silicon Alley Reporter provided the color commentary; Brian Cohen and Carol Suchman's Technology Solutions anchored the East Coast technology PR industry; Kevin O'Connor's DoubleClick was the iconic, breakout NYC tech company:[Back then there was so little startup history in the city that Red Herring magazine dubbed me "patriarch of Silicon Alley" because I had founded a software company in 1988...but it's easy to be a patriarch if there's no one else in the family!] However, because there was no infrastructure surrounding it, and no history of the unique vibe around a startup community, when the Great Crash came, the nascent tech startup world nearly evaporated.But that 'nearly' was just enough. The few survivors struggled through the nuclear winter that followed, and when the world righted itself a few years later, there were just enough entrepreneurs (Kevin Ryan, Scott Kurnit, Scott Heiferman, Andrew Weinrich, et al), investors (Fred Wilson, Howard L Morgan, Stuart Ellman, Alan Patricof, et al), pundits (Esther Dyson, Henry Blodget, David Pogue, Lou Kerner, et al) and active community members (Dawn Barber, Charlie O'Donnell, Hank Williams, Howard Greenstein, et al) who had been through it at least once, earning them the "serial" adjective. This seeding of the entrepreneurial forest (see Fred's essay on The Darwinian Evolution of Startup Hubs) was ingredient #1.Meanwhile, the exponentially decreasing costs of starting up a company, combined with the exponentially increasing applicability of technology to every facet of business, meant that all businesses now were (or at least could be) "tech" businesses ripe for new startups, and the barriers to entry came crashing down. That was ingredient #2.For the first time, New York City's history and place on the global stage were finally able to be applied to "startups". For those outside of the City, it is sometimes easy to forget that when it comes to markets, NYC is the world capital of finance. The world capital of advertising. The world capital of media. The world capital of fashion. Arguably the world capital of food. When it comes to education, it is easy to forget that unlike Cambridge, New Haven, Palo Alto and Princeton, New York City has more college students than Boston has residents! As for infrastructure, don't forget that because of its geography and density, New York has extraordinary broadband connectivity, mass transit, office space at every level, and is the world's unquestioned cultural capital. And now all that concentrated power and knowledge, with all of their attendant players and pocketbooks, came into play: Ingredient #3.At this critical juncture, a confluence of politics and circumstance brought New York City something unique: the world's only Mayor-who-just-happens-to-be-a-self-made-tech-billionaire. Mike Bloomberg knew intuitively and independently the power of the tech startup world, and charged his team with making the NYC tech world his legacy issue. He created NYC Digital to showcase New York's activities in the area, charged the NYC Economic Development Corporation to engage with the community and do whatever it could to help, established the NYC Big Apps competition to encourage mobile applications based on newly opened city databases, started recruiting technical talent to come TO New York rather than flee it...and created the world's most ambitious competition for over $100 million to create a world-leading technical institution in the heart of the City on Roosevelt Island.: Ingredient #4.Put all these together, accelerate all of them (community, technology, markets and mayoral activities) at the same time, and the result is the world's fastest growing startup community, whose growth will only continue to accelerate. In closing, I can't think of anything better to leave you with than a few words from New York City's biggest tech cheerleader.

Twenty years ago my wife and I saw an ad in the New York Times travel section. Round trip from JFK to Barbados on the Concorde, plus a week at the hotel of your choice (there were 5 hotels to choose from).The Concorde? Let’s do it.We called British Airways Holidays. (It was still the early day of Internet commerce. Back in 2000 you picked up the landline.)“We’re flexible on dates,” I told the agent. “But the hotel has to be the Fairmont Royal Pavilion.”No problem. The agent found a date that worked and took our money (about $13,000 all in). Pricey, but hey — the Concorde.Two nights before our departure date there was a message on our home answering machine. “This is British Airways Holidays. We’ve had to make some adjustments to your itinerary. You will now be staying at the Royal Pavilion’s sister property, Glitter Bay.”Sister property. It sounds like kind of the same thing. Except it’s not. Royal Pavilion is for adults only. Glitter Bay is for families with kids. Lots and lots of kids. We love kids. We raised two. But the reason we picked the Royal Pavilion was because we wanted to spend a week without kids.I called British Airways Holidays. No answer. They’re not an airline. They’re just the travel planners for the airline and work from 9 to 5. We left a voicemail.The next morning we called the Royal Pavilion and spoke to the General Manager of both properties. He said, “British Airways does this all the time. They take your money, and then they switch your hotel. Here’s what I can do. For the same price I can put you up in a large one-bedroom private villa at Glitter Bay. It’s off the beaten path, far from the kids, an easy walk to the Royal Pavilion, and you’ll have complete access to all our facilities and amenities. I’ll send my wife over to take photos of the villa.”An hour later I got the pictures. It was incredible. We decided to take it.British Airways never called back. The guest relations guy who met us at the airport in Barbados never told us we’d been switched to another hotel. He drove us to Glitter Bay. Or as we called it all week, Glitter Bait and Switch.Let me sum up that week-long vacation: The Concorde was a once in a lifetime experience. Our villa was spectacular. But still, it wasn’t what we’d signed on for.The General Manager was a total sweetheart. He suggested that I write to British Airways, but warned me not to get my hopes up for a refund.We’ll just see about that decided the man who writes for a living. I spent days crafting the letter. A week after I sent it I got a call from a British Airways rep in London. She apologized for the “misunderstanding,” and asked how she could make it right.I told her I wanted a public apology. An ad in the New York Times travel section telling the world what they had done and promising not to sucker in any more people. She said, “Sir, we can’t do that.”I told her if she didn’t I would go public on this Internet thing that was still just taking hold and tell the whole world wide web what a bunch of crooks they were.She said, “I’ll get back to you.”A week later she called back. “We’d like to offer you and your wife an all-expense paid trip from New York to London,” she said. “We’ll fly you there on the Concorde, put you up in a five-star hotel, and fly you back first class on a 747.”If she had seen the look on my face, she’d have known she had me. But she couldn’t see me. So I doubled down.“Absolutely not,” I said. “You already flew me to a hotel I didn’t want to go to. Why would I want you to fly me to another place I don’t want to go to? I want a public apology. An ad in the New York Times.”“Let me talk to my management,” she said.Another week passed. She called back. “Sir, we absolutely can’t print a public apology. The best we can offer you is a full refund. Airfare and your entire hotel bill including meals and other amenities and services you may have charged. If you say yes, we will credit your American Express card with the entire amount.”I grumbled, and told her that it wasn’t what I wanted, but she’d won. I begrudgingly accepted the more than $13,000 refund.Then I hung up, did a happy dance, and told my wife the news.The next day I called the General Manager of the Royal Pavilion and booked their best villa for a week the following spring. Three bedrooms. Perfect for me, my wife, my son, my daughter and their significant others. The cost of the villa, along with airfare (non-supersonic) for six people — a little over $13,000.Best all-expenses-paid vacation ever.—————————————————————EDIT — Sometimes I post and hear crickets. But this one — over 100k views and 9k upvotes in less than 24 hours. That’s like Mach 2 in Quora terms. Thank you. Several people asked if they could see the letter I sent.I’d have thought that after 20 years it would be lost to the ages, but I was amazed to see that it was still buried in my archives. It’s 1700 words, and I’d be embarrassed to reprint it. My recounting of the event on Quora was written with a smile on my face. The complaint letter is me at my pissiest.But I can give you the highlights. Basically, the letter stated the facts. Re-reading it after 20 years, it’s clear that British Airways was even more underhanded than I remembered, so those facts were pretty damning. The manager of the Royal Pavilion taught me some of the tricks of the trade, and he explained why they waited till I was 48 hours away from departure, even though they knew they had overbooked weeks before. He also assured me that BA overbooked, not the hotel. I made sure they knew I was a very knowledgeable consumer.My closing was this: “I feel violated and am angry enough to take my complaint to the FAA, the appropriate consumer fraud departments in New York, the travel press and travel newsgroups on the Internet. I also feel justified in pursuing legal action where I would seek compensation for both the cost of a lost vacation and for being the victim of dishonest business practices.”But my best line was this: “Under no condition would I have considered a vacation at Glitter Bay, much less pay $13,186.90 for the privilege of living in the middle of a high rent day care center.”It’s hard to go up against a corporate Goliath and win. But every now and then… I hope this is the kind of encouragement you need to never quit trying.

Manhattan, New York, 1979. I’ve been contracted to work on the IBM Series/1 for a major US retail chain. My spell in New York was to finish a program for archiving credit card transactions to a tape drive and I was told “It should just take you a few weeks as your predecessor worked on it 3 months and said it was almost finished but they had to move onto another project”.I read the program specification so I understood what it had to do and then checked the almost completed program.Thought 1: “That’s a really small amount of code to deliver all that function!”Thought 2: “I’m sure I’ve seen that code before?…”I picked up the manual for the Tape Drive and sure enough only the author’s name had been changed in the sample code to spin the tape drives back and forth, like you used to see on old sci-fi movies, so the author could demonstrate the “almost finished program” was doing something.It did take me only a few weeks to complete the program according to spec but I learned one of my first corporate lessons: Be discreet when blowing the whistle otherwise management will move you to the backwaters in Columbus, Ohio to mitigate their embarrassment level.