Entrepreneurial

– Connie Loizos is a contributor to pe HUB, a Thomson Reuters publication. This story originally appeared here. –

How hot is the New York tech scene? Maybe a little too hot, suggests Owen Davis, managing director of NYC Seed, a three-year old seed fund that provides up to $200,000 to New York startups via a partnership with the New York City Investment Fund, the New York City Economic Development Corp, and other local organizations.

Davis said seed rounds are up 50 percent from where they were a couple of years ago, and that valuations are up as much as 30 percent over the last year. “A startup says we want an X amount for our valuation, and all it needs is to get a few people to say yes to it. Then it can say to everyone else, ‘Look, this is what the market is supporting.’”

Davis said pricing is being driven in large part by West Coast and Boston-based firms now bathing the city’s fledgling startups in cash. “It’s no longer like one or two guys are qualified to be your seed investors. (Now) it’s like there are dozens of people (who are qualified), so the size of the cap tables is ridiculous.”

So is the quality of the deals, in some cases, suggests Davis. Because “there are a lot of large funds doing seed deals (to create options for themselves later), the bar for investing in seed deals has lowered in many ways,” he said.

Erica Shea (L) and Stephen Valand. REUTERS/Julie Gordon

As the jobless rate climbed toward 10 percent this summer, Erica Shea and Stephen Valand, quit their advertising jobs, took $10,000 in personal savings and started selling their 1-gallon home brew beer kits from a stand at the Brooklyn Flea Market, testing the theory that beer is recession proof.

“When you go from an actual salary down to $0 an hour, it’s quite an adjustment,” admitted Shea, who got the bug for beer making after she stumbled across her dad’s old home brewing kit. But when Shea and Valand went to brew their first batch they discovered there was no place in New York to buy the ingredients, so they created the Brooklyn Brew Shop. The kits take up only a foot of floor space and come with everything needed to brew your own beer.

Shea said they opened their stand, which they rent for $100 a day, on the July 4th weekend, but sold just five kits. By the end of the month they had moved 40 kits, which go for $40, or $30 without grain. The kits, which make about 12 bottles through a four-week process, include a 1-gallon glass jug, some tubing, a racking cane, a thermometer, sanitizer and the yeast, hops and grain. (read the full story here)

The Web is full of user-generated video, but for Sanjay Raman’s tastes most of it is too bland and poorly produced to actually watch.

That’s why Raman launched Howcast (http://www.howcast.com) – a high-quality, how-to video-sharing website – last year with former Google colleagues Jason Liebman and Dan Blackman.

While at Google the three Howcast co-founders noticed how popular do-it-yourself content was, but how little of it was in video format.

Organic dairy farmer Dante Hesse is hoping the customers who lap up his milk by the quart at local New York farmers’ markets will also invest in his future.

What started as a series of “low key” one-on-one conversations with customers at local farmers’ markets near his Ghent, New York farm, has escalated into a serious attempt to raise $850,000 – in as little as $1,000 increments – directly from his dairy-loving consumers.

“I learned pretty quickly that there was a lot of interest, but I also needed to find some council who could tell me how to do this legally,” said Hesse, who founded Milk Thistle organic dairy farm with his wife, Kristin, three years ago. He intends to use the bulk of the money to build an onsite processing plant that will help him ramp up production and diversify into making other milk-based products like yogurt, butter and ice cream.

Last December, Reuters reported how one innovative New Yorker's desperate search to find a job had paid off big. Joshua Persky, known to many as the "Sandwich Board Guy," found employment at accounting firm Weiser LLP in midtown Manhattan. Persky, who wrote for Trading Places about his search for work last year, explains how he ended up leaving Weiser to start his own business:

When I received the offer from Weiser, my wife and I were ecstatic. I had been unemployed for 10 months. We had quite a sincere Thanksgiving celebration in Omaha where she was living with our children, but they decided to remain in Omaha to finish out the school year. It was difficult to leave my family, but I returned to New York to get my feet on the ground and focus on my new job as Senior Manager, Valuation & Corporate Finance.

When I started working in December, I was treated to a second round of viral publicity and became a feel-good “Happy Ending Holiday Story.” Whereas before I had been the “Face of the American Economy”, a “Sign of the Times” and the “Sandwich Board Guy,” suddenly I was an inspirational and extreme job hunter who could give expert job hunting advice – and I did: