Brian Eno is the musician (and genius, candidly) that coined the term “Scenius” by which he meant “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.” (Eno is also responsible for ambient music, where he imagined a future musical genre in which melody and rhythm were not required, and then he started making it.)
Scenius is what I think is happening in New York’s tech scene. There is a sprawling and awakening scene of exactly the sort that Eno was alluding to, a scene that is larger than we can comprehend, but which involves hundreds of thousands of people in an inchaote, swirling mess of interactions, chance meetings, and formal agreements, adding up to a great thing in progress, producing things larger than the individuals involved.
Recent analysis of social networks suggests that we are most strongly influenced by the third circle out: not our hundred or so friends, or the tens of thousands of friends-of-friends that they connect us to potentially. No, it is the hundreds of thousands or even millions of people that form the entire social scene, the huge ocean that we are a tiny minnow in: that is what creates the inexorable influences on us. As the social scientists Christakis and Fowler discovered, the likelihood that we are fat, or smoke, or listen to death metal is most correlated with the ‘third neighborhood’, not our immediate friends.
I believe that the critical mass for a social scene to take off in some innovative direction is a function of density, and the right participants coming into contact with each other. It’s like a local version of chaos theory: I don’t need to know that a particular entrepreneur met a specific musician today, and started to think about websites for musicians, or that across town a marketing guy gave a talk on the future of music distribution, or that a VC read a report about music streaming services. No single mind has to comprehend the gradual shift in the third neighborhood toward webifying music, but if enough people begin to invest time and energy in it, the effect is dramatically self-reinforcing.
New York tech scene is large and sprawling, but my corner of it is social and media oriented, so it is unsurprising that I hope to be interviewing entrepreneurs in that corner of the market. In the next few weeks, I plan to interview folks like Caterina Fake (Hunch), John Borthwick (Betaworks), John Rourke (BantamLive), Andrea Spiegel (True/Slant), Anthony Casalena (SquareSpace), Nate Westheimer (AnyClip), Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) and dozens of others.
On one hand, the tech scene is so large that many of its subcommunities interact infrequently, and indirectly: it’s truly unknowable. But I intend to tell a hundred stories to get at trends that are emerging, to find out who’s talking with who, and get a rough compass heading on which way the herd is moving.
I even considered naming this project Scenius, but I didn’t want to spend my life spelling it for people.
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Matt Miereles commented on my initial post that in his view entrepreneurs are the one that is making this scene take off, and that I was glorifying VCs too much:
What the NYC scene needs, quite frankly, is more of this outside capital to flow inward. As it is, I myself am in California for 10 days for this very reason.
Also, umm, Fred and Chris are cool peeps and all, but startups happen because entrepreneurs make them happen. Entrepreneurs are the real fucking heros in this story, not VCs. We lead, they follow. Don’t forget that.
-Matt Mireles
Founder/CEO, SpeakerText
I intend to interview Matt, too, to dig into this a bit. But I hoped that we need all parts of the tech ecosystem, including the VCs, who I compared to manure in the agriculture world. Yes, it is the plants that do all the growing Matt, but they can’t do it without the sun, rain, and worms in the dirt.
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[Disclosure: some of the companies mentioned in this column are now, have been, or may, someday, be clients of mine. Mentioning them is not intended as an endorsement. They are being singled out as representative members of the New York tech scene.]