It's been a crazy year for the New York tech scene.
We saw the Draw Something craze take over the world, startups get acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars, and entire offices get shut down in Hurricane Sandy.
February: OMGPOP created Draw Something, and it sold to Zynga for $180 million two months later
In early February, New York game shop OMGPOP launched a mobile game, Draw Something.
The game grew faster than any mobile app ever before. In its first ten days it was downloaded 1.2 million times. After five weeks, it was downloaded 20 million times.
By week six, Zynga swooped in with an offer to buy the company for about $180 million. By then had been downloaded 35 million times.
March: Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai departed suddenly
On March 5, Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai departed the startup.
Gigaom uncovered the news when it started investigating employee stock options that investors were buying up. It turned out a good chunk of the options belonged to Selvadurai.
May: Facebook had a disaster of an IPO, and the aftermath affected the entire startup ecosystem, even on the east coast.
On May 18, Facebook went public. It priced its IPO at $38 per share, valuing the company at about $100 billion.
But the stock didn't pop. Instead, it fell a lot. Today, its stock is trading $11 below the opening price.
The Facebook Fallout affected the entire tech ecosystem, especially startups, and it spooked a lot of investors.
Paul Graham warned all of his Y Combinator founders of the fallout in an email:
The bad performance of the Facebook IPO will hurt the funding market for earlier stage startups. No one knows yet how much. Possibly only a little. Possibly a lot, if it becomes a vicious circle....What I do worry about is (a) it may be harder to raise money at all, regardless of price and (b) that companies that previously raised money at high valuations will now face "down rounds," which can be damaging.
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