New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a surprise appearance at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and gave a half hour pitch – often quite funny – for startups to set up shop in NYC.
Bloomberg said that he owns and loves his iPad, and that “every time I play with it I discovered something new.” Giving his social media credentials, Bloomberg said that this morning he “updated my status on Facebook, tweeted, checked Digg, checked into Foursquare & posted on Craigslist for an NBA superstar to move to NYC [i.e. Lebron James].”
The mayor then spent about 20 minutes going through the various advantages he feels that startups can have by being located in New York, including a diverse and educated workforce, that the city is launching a media lab “at a major university” later this year, that they have an incubator fund of over $22 million dollars and that they recently made their first investment in a startup with $300,000 in capital.
On the other side of the equation for startups, Bloomberg admitted that NYC doesn’t offer a lot of physical space for startups and that the city doesn’t really offer any tax breaks. Bloomberg said it straight out: NYC is not the place for everyone.
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Bloomberg also basically gave his support for the Startup Visa movement, saying that “We need more visas for people to come to this country, not less.”
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