Last week, Endeavor Insight released the NYC Tech Report, the result of more than a year of research into New York City’s fast-growing tech ecosystem. One of the most exciting results of this research isan interactive map showing the influence of female tech founders. Some of the most influential women represented on this map are well-known: Arianna Huffington advanced online publishing with the website that bears her name, while Heidi Messer pioneered affiliate marketing on the World Wide Web as a co-founder of Linkshare, which eventually sold for nearly half a billion dollars.
To conduct its research, Endeavor Insight interviewed more than 700 tech founders and compiled a data set consisting of more than 2,500 companies, allowing the research team to explore the development of the ecosystem from a number of different perspectives.
In 2003, only 10 percent of New York tech companies had at least one female founder. The number of companies with a female founder grew nearly tenfold over the course of the following decade. Today, these firms make up 15 percent of New York City tech companies; 90 percent of these companies were founded since 2003, and 75 percent of them since 2008. Companies with at least one female founder today employ more than 7,000 people in New York City, and have attracted nearly $3 billion in investment.
Another fascinating result of this research is the importance of connections between entrepreneurs, and the disproportionate, positive impact they can have on the tech ecosystem. A connection from a highly successful company like Linkshare more than doubles another company’s chances of becoming a top performer itself (from 10 percent to 22 percent). These connections—mentorship, inspiration, angel investment, serial entrepreneurship and former employee spinouts—are the means by which successful entrepreneurs give back to their communities.
It’s this willingness to pay it forward that has turned New York City into the world’s fastest-growing urban tech ecosystem. The number of connections between companies has expanded by an average of 25 percent per year since 2003, and the ecosystem continues to flourish with the contributions of New York’s ever-growing number of successful female entrepreneurs.
................................................
Endeavor Insight is the research arm of Endeavor that seeks to deepen understanding of how high-impact entrepreneurs contribute to job creation and long-term economic growth in order to educate key constituencies, such as policy makers. In addition, Endeavor Insight seeks to serve as a knowledge center for high-impact entrepreneurs, VCs and others in order to provide useful information and tools that assist high-impact entrepreneurs as they grow their business.