Unlike a post made on this blog on April 1 of last year, this post actually does confirm I have indeed moved on from investment banking to pursue new opportunities. Specifically, I decided earlier this year to join a venture capital firm here in New York City and just had my first day on the job yesterday.

My new firm is called the New York City Investment Fund, which often leads people to ask if I am now a public servant of sorts (answer: no). The answer is that NYCIF is a private fund, but that it was formed with a civic mission in mind. In particular, it pursues the goal of strengthening and diversifying New York City’s economy in addition to seeking financial return. This might take place through promoting burgeoning high-tech industries in NYC, like biotech or cleantech, or it could come through investing in a non-profit bakery that provides jobs and teaching skills to low-income women. Yes, one could say that it fits right in with the title of this blog — where social entrepreneurship and venture capital meet!

While my roles and responsibilities will be ones that I figure out over time, I do know that one of my primary tasks will be to help manage the FinTech Innovation Lab, which you may have read about on TechCrunch back in December. I’m looking forward to joining the city’s innovation economy in earnest (instead of just attending meetups and events on the side) and hope to be meeting many more tech and social entrepreneurs going forward.

For more info on what NYCIF does, you can read this brief piece on my CEO Maria Gotsch, who was recently named as one of the “People to Watch in Silicon Alley” by Crain’s, or watch this interview with her on Bloomberg TV. Also, feel free to email me at any time!

Finally, a big thanks to everyone who helped me and encouraged me during the year-long process of recruiting. You know who you are!

Have you ever wondered what your network looks like? Wouldn’t it be cool to see a visual representation of not only how you’re connected to members of your social or professional network, but how those connections themselves are connected?

LinkedIn has done a great job at bringing this data to life in a way that is both easy to understand and also fun to explore. Take a look at my LinkedIn connections below, and you can quickly see the sub-networks present. Pretty cool, huh? (I love how the StartingBloc family is so tightly clustered, by the way!) Click here for a detailed look.

Also check out the introductory video that LinkedIn made right here:

Also, I know a lot of LinkedIn information is publicly available, but if you see your name or picture up here and would still rather not have it be featured, just let me know!

Interesting development in the online flash sale space today! We’re no longer just talking about vanilla sales of off-season or otherwise “new-old-stock” merchandise, or even the introductions of upcoming lines, like the recent Gilt x Brooks Brothers collaboration. Rather, we’re now seeing in today’s Gilt Man offering a carefully curated selection of men’s vintage watches, brought to Gilt’s customers by Ben Clymer of Hodinkee, one of my favorite watch blogs.

Obviously this process can be a rather time-consuming one and not quite as scalable as simply re-selling off-season goods, but I’m very interested to see how Gilt’s offerings will continue to evolve and develop in the future, and whether we see more deals in the “Gilt Man Finds” series. Gilt Man Finds will hopefully allow us to see a decreasing the number of “What were you thinking?” type offerings, as documented in the hilarious blog “Worst of Gilt.”

Check out the watches starting at 1 PM Eastern (pushed back from the regular noontime release)!

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EDIT: Check out Hodinkee’s thoughts on their Gilt collaboration, one day later.

They need to raise about $900 more in the next 9 days to reach their fundraising goal on Kickstarter, so please consider supporting this project, especially if you’re also interested in education and education reform!

Since that time, Restore NYC has raised over $40,000 of their $50,000 goal, and $1,048 of that has come from your donations to my page.  A huge thanks to all those who have donated to the campaign! It’s been great to see a diverse spectrum of supporters rallying behind Restore’s effort to support women in New York City who have been the victims of sex trafficking.

Just as a quick update, to celebrate my 24th birthday this month, I have also decided to match ALL contributions made to my fundraising page up to $2400, to help Restore can reach its fundraising goal.

If cumulative donations hit $50k, an anonymous donor will actual throw in an additional $50k for a total of $100 grand, so please consider donating to this campaign (which, by the way, is being run by an awesome NYC startup doing great work in the non-profit fundraising space). Thank you!

The fundraising campaign I’m participating in for my birthday is called “Brick by Brick,” and the funds raised will go towards an organization called Restore NYC, which fights sex trafficking in New York City. The Brick by Brick campaign will specifically be funding a safe house that Restore is building for sex trafficking survivors, the first of its kind in the city.

Every $30 raised will fund one day of operations for the Restore safe house, and every dollar *you* contribute will be matched by an anonymous donor. The goal is to raise $50,000 by the end of September.

Will you join me in helping to raise $2,400 for Restore NYC to celebrate my 24th birthday? To support this campaign, just click here:

Also, be sure to check out CauseVox, which is a NYC-based startup that has created a brandable platform for small and medium-sized non-profits to facilitate their fundraising. This Brick by Brick campaign for Restore NYC is run on the CauseVox platform, so big props to the co-founders, my friends Rob and Jeff. If you are involved with a non-profit and are interested in using the CauseVox platform for your fundraising, email them!

Below you can see all of New York check-ins since October of last year, when I started using Foursquare. Interesting in making your own Foursquare map with Weeplaces? Click here.

See a demo here:

FourSquare Visualization by WeePlaces.com from Eric Wu on Vimeo.

Take Foursquare, for example. It is useful in New York for me because there are a large number of venues that I can check into, and also because I have  a large number of Foursquare friends that also live in NYC. Also, the density of Manhattan / NYC (in terms of both people and venues) further increases the usefulness of Foursquare. Why? Because there is a greater probability that when I see a pop-up notification of a Foursquare friend who is checking in, it’s actually in a close enough range that it makes sense for me to find the friend to say hi. In suburban Birmingham, where getting anywhere usually requires at least 10-15 minutes of driving at a minimum, the ability for Foursquare to help provide that same connection diminishes greatly. Plus, given the lower penetration rate of Foursquare usage down here, if I even chose to check in, I would have to add a new venue myself.

I think it’s this critical mass of New York users and New York venues, as well as the partnerships that Foursquare has made with NYC-based companies, that has greatly helped it to become the location-based application of choice compared to, say, Gowalla. Earlier this year, around the time of SXSW 2010, I was chatting with a friend from Austin Ventures about location-based services, and it seemed pretty clear that we each had our regional alliances. My friend was a backer of Austin-based Gowalla, and I was a supporter of New York-based Foursquare. This was not surprising, since you’d expect greater adoption and penetration in each startup’s founding city, leading to a critical mass of users in that location.

During SXSW 2010, it seemed as if Foursquare and Gowalla were still neck-and-neck in terms of their potential to become the dominant location-based mobile app, but if you had been a limited partner giving me money to invest, I would have put that towards Foursquare, something I mentioned to my friend. Why? Because the pure size and density of the New York user base, as well as the potential connections to media, advertising, and finance in NYC are a huge advantage in terms of customer acquisition, all other things equal. I think that that boost towards critical mass is a huge value add for many startups (though not all) and should encourage more entrepreneurs to base their companies in New York.

Agree? Disagree? Please add a comment!

P.S. Current stats (as of July): Foursquare is now over 5 times larger than Gowalla and growing 75% faster.

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In other SocentVC-related news, 40 billionaires have now pledge to give away 50%+ of their wealth as part of The Giving Pledge. The number keeps going up! Read more about The Giving Pledge here.

For a slightly less gritty spy show (maybe more like a spy comedy, if you will) check out USA’s new show Covert Affairs.