“You have these network effects where Spark Capital and Polaris from Boston, First Round Capital in Philly, and a bunch of others are flying to New York because they’re investing in companies in New York,” said Galant. “Once they make one investment, they have to keep coming back for board meetings, which makes them more apt to do additional investments.”

Ironically, considering New York’s stature as the world’s financial center, early-round investors in New York startups largely come from other cities, although First Round recently joined Union Square Ventures, DFJ Gotham, and RRE Ventures on the list of NY-based venture capitalists investing in small startups. When really large New York firms invest in technology, according to Galant, they tend to choose larger companies on the West Coast.

To encourage fledgling startups, various New York-affiliated organizations launched the NYC Seed fund earlier this year, which has so far injected investments of $200,000 or less into five companies based in the city.

Some local entrepreneurs and their early employees are themselves refugees from the financial sector. Before founding the New York-based UpSkil, a job retraining site for accountants and the like, Faraz Qureshi was a project manager and consultant for “large investment banks, a credit card firm, and a property and casualty firm.” Now, he’s building a business around teaching laid-off or underemployed workers new skills using webcasts tutorials from experts (he teaches the accounting class himself).

We ran into Qureshi at a recent networking event for startups, where we also met the founders of the following Big Apple-based companies:

• Aviary, like a more advanced version of Picnik or Snipshot, allows people to edit images, audio files and other media online. “A lot of students and small businesses that don’t want to splurge on Photoshop but still want to create flyers or banners” have been using the site, according to co-founder Michael Galpert. Its freemium business model leverages privacy: You can use Aviary for free as much as you want, but unless you pay for a private account, the rest of the community will be able to access your creations too.
• EkoVenture has signed up 450 of the estimated 40,000 (updated) “experiential travel” operators around the world to create a network of trusted destinations (many but not all of which are eco-friendly) where tourists can travel without worrying about being scammed. Out of the over 700 operators that applied for inclusion, about 35 percent of them were rejected.
• Ganxy proposes that readers pay a small fee in order to read full-length articles online, offering them a full refund if they didn’t like the story. The problem with paying small payments for individual pieces of content, says founder Alekx Jakulin, is that “you still have this risk—you still worry, is it going to be worth it? We have this functionality that lets you get your money back if you didn’t like the article.”
• GiveReal, which started as a Facebook group and is partially funded by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, allows people to give each other gifts at “nearly a million merchants” across the country over the internet, including bars, restaurants, bookstores, spas and clothing stores. “The way we were able to build such a big network is by piggybacking on existing credit card networks,” said co-founder Adam Ludwig, who worked at McKinsey Consulting for two years before founding the company in 2007.
• Ivy Exec, like an even more velvet-roped version of Ladders.com, lists jobs for “top-tier professionals,” according to founder Elena Bajic, who doesn’t want the site to grow too much or too fast. “They join because they don’t want to belong to these huge job sites—people are looking for a community of their peers.” She says employers are inundated with “hundreds or thousands of applicants for jobs they post online,” so some are gravitating toward this smaller network, the majority of whom she says have an MBA from a top-20 school.
• Klickable.tv lets video creators and distributors designate certain objects in their videos as, well, “clickable,” so that viewers can interact with or find out more about the elements displayed. One advantage to the approach, according to Klickable CEO Roger Wu, is that people tend to watch videos multiple times if they can click on elements.
• NiteFly allows nightclub owners and restaurant owners to offer special deals to patrons who would query the system from a mobile phone for a micropayment of 5 cents. “There are any number of nights when I’m willing to spend 50 or 100 bucks on going out, and I can’t find the exact place that I want to be,” said founder Evan Rose, who said he probably would have gone into finance rather than founded a company, had the market not crashed.
• ProperCloth offers handmade dress shirts to your exact measurements and design specifications, with voting enabled so that the crowd can surface the best designs. Founder Seph Skeritt, who was probably the best-dressed guy in the room, pointed out that by eliminating retail overhead, the company is able to offer customized bespoke clothing for similar prices to what high-end off-the-rack stores charge ($100 and up in most cases).
• MeetingWave is like a real-time video version of Linked In, that allows people to find or hold public meetings with other professionals about a given topic. “You post an invite and describe who you want to network with and when you’re available, and you go out and meet with people in your industry,” explained MeetingWave founder Jon E. Boyd, adding that the meetings can also take place in person.
• LetMeGo, a long-tail entry into the travel space, allows the owners of any mom-and-pop hotel, bed and breakfast or vacation rental to bid on reverse auctions offered by consumers—like a noncorporate version of Priceline, which founder Alex TorreNegra said does not allow small businesses to bid on its customers’ lodging requests because it buys blocks of rooms from large chains.
• Unigo’s Jonathan Goldman, who we didn’t meet but who was at the event, announced a deal on Monday with the Wall Street Journal to distribute the publication’s content to users of its network of student-written university reviews. According to NPR, the site, founded just over a year ago, already has “50 times the college content of any book or website that already exists.”
• UpSkil offers video tutorials to retrain workers in accounting and other skills. A classic example, said founder Faraz Qureshi, would be a secretary learning to balance the books for a boss who can no longer afford a full-time accountant.