To read more, check out Gothamist’s coverage and check out pictures from today’s announcements on Citi Bikes’ Facebook page. To suggest a bike share station close to your office or apartment, click here and you can help determine the location of the first 600 bike share stations!

Edit: It looks like the first batch of bike share stations may be close to finalization already. Check out Transportation Nation’s coverage of the Community Board meetings.

Unfortunately, all of the work for me in managing the program’s day-to-day logistics has only just begun. The next twelve weeks will include a Leadership Program with various panels and dinners, face-to-face meetings with VCs and bank CTOs, as well as newly-launched office hours with our all-star group of Entrepreneurs Network mentors. Lots to do, so apologies in advance if the rate of blogging decreases somewhat.

In any case, we have six amazing companies selected for the program this summer, and while I unfortunately can’t tell you their names just yet, keep your eyes peeled! The Investor Day / Demo Day, which will conclude this year’s FinTech Innovation Lab, will take place on July 18th, so stay tuned for the big reveal.

“I am a huge fan of allowing every person, not the just super wealthy and institutions, to participate in the funding of startups. Frankly its a shame that the average Facebook user has not been able to own shares in Facebook during its increase in value from zero to $100bn. The same kind of thing can be said about Twitter and many other of our portfolio companies. The changes to securities regulations in the JOBS bill are fundamental and important and very much needed.“

So if the “accredited investor” requirement was so unfair, why was it even implemented in the first place?  The general idea was to protect the public (who aren’t necessarily sophisticated investors) from being taken advantage of. As it currently stands, though, the JOBS Act has incorporated protections “to help insure that equity crowdfunding of startups doesn’t become a fraud infested sector of the capital markets.”

Now, “regular folks” like you and me can invest in startups, even if we don’t make $200,000+ a year or have over 1 million dollars in assets. Traditionally, startup investors would have to fill out an “Accredited Investor Questionnaire” like the one below, which is an excerpt of the type that my fund fills out for investments I work on. Scroll down to bullets (e) and (f) to see what the restrictions were like for individual investors. Scary, right? Aren’t you glad that the JOBS Act was passed?

Well, with the crazy amount of coverage since Instagram announced it was being acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, even people with the very barest amount of interest in the startup / venture world have asked what the big hubbub is about. If the $1 billion price tag were not enough, the media also revealed that just last week a group of investors led by Sequoia also invested in Instagram at a valuation of $500 million, only to exit a week later with a 2x cash-on-cash return! I won’t try and dissect and analyze the deal itself, since that’s already been done ad nauseam, but I’ll take a stab of breaking down IRR, which is one of the primary ways that VCs like Sequoia calculate returns on their investments. Hopefully this will provide some color to those friends asking IRR questions.

The IRR, or “internal rate of return,” is the rate of return / discount rate that makes the NPV of a stream of cash flows equal to zero. You can read in more detail here. In the case of Instagram’s Series B financing from last week, the cash flows would be a $50,000,000 cash outflow (invested amount) and a $100,000,000 inflow (sale proceeds) from the Series B investors’ perspective. Now, a 50% IRR is pretty good. A 100% IRR is fantastic. How does ~500 quadrillion % sound? (That would be 500 plus another 15 zeros). Well, that’s the IRR that the Series B investors received on their investment, assuming April 5th as the day they wired their money to Instagram and  April 12th as the day they get their cash back.

But does a 497,237,713,464,852,000% IRR (to be exact) make any sense at ALL? Yesterday, I was chatting with Edlyn Yuen, an associate at StarVest Partners, and she got the same absurd-sounding number in Excel, too. Hmm. Let’s dig in a little deeper then… As you can tell below, the IRR decreases exponentially as time passes (the graph below in blue looks almost meaningless given the extreme drop). What was a 500 quadrillion % IRR (over a one week span) decreases to a measly 450,000% IRR once you get to a 1 month investment horizon.

By the time your length of investment increases to 3 months, you’re down to a “tiny” 1,500% IRR.

If we then zoom in a little closer and graph the expected IRR assuming a length of investment ranging from 3 months to 1 year, the graph below is what you get. As you can see, the IRR approaches 100% and hits 100% exactly on the 1-year anniversary. That much makes sense to me at the very least — on an annual basis, a 100% return equals a doubling of value (e.g., $50mm to $100mm).

So as you can see, while the 500 quadrillion % IRR seems completely absurd, once you examine how an IRR is calculated, it begins to makes sense, at least mathematically. Practically speaking, though, a quadrillion % still doesn’t make much sense in my head, much less 500. In any case, congrats to the Instagram team, as well as Sequoia, Thrive, Greylock, and Benchmark on a great exit!

So I mentioned last week that I’d be giving a bit of insight into the day-to-day happenings in the life of a young VC, or as my business card would say “Associate.” Now, making an investment is pretty exciting, right? You’re putting money into a company, hoping that all of your analysis (whether in your gut or in Excel) turns ultimately into an exit of some sort, either through an acquisition or IPO. Well, what exactly happens when an exit occurs?

I got my first glimpse of that yesterday, when TxVia, one of New York  City Investment Fund’s portfolio companies, announced that it had been acquired by none other than Google! Congrats to Anil and the rest of the team. Now, I can’t divulge too much in the way of the financial details, which remain closed off to the general public, but hopefully I can shed a little bit of light into the other REALLY EXCITING DETAILS for you!

…it’s funny, though. At least on my end, there wasn’t really anything too different about my day. Sure, I saw a few extra emails in my inbox yesterday morning and had a few discussions with my CEO and General Counsel about the deal, but business pretty much just proceeded as normal. At the end of the day, I calculated our IRR based on the closing docs I received from our General Counsel (sorry, I cannot disclose that number!) and… that’s about it. I went on to finish the summary of an investment memo that was due, prepared some materials for the FinTech Innovation Lab and, well, went about my business as usual. What’ll happen next? Well, I’m sure I’ll have a bit more work to do in the coming days, and the funds will be wired to our account sometime this week, but that will pretty much be that.

Kind of a letdown? Perhaps. But at the end of the day, it’s essentially just a transfer of ownership, right? The real excitement, at least for me, is really in those initial meetings with the entrepreneurs, talking with company management about how their product or service is going to disrupt an industry or change the world. Maybe being removed from direct financial benefit of an exit as a junior investment professional changes the perspective some, but getting the opportunity (in whatever capacity) to help an entrepreneur as they build something out of nothing — now that I can get excited about every day, exit or not!

Now, without further ado, congratulations again to TxVia and here’s to many more successful New York startups in the future!

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Note: I work at a bit of a non-traditional venture firm as you may have noticed, so YMMV. If you’re a junior VC at another firm and get million dollar bonuses at each exit, please comment below with your name and number, and I’ll be sure to contact you ASAP. Also, the above describes a strategic acquisition. If you’re looking for deets on what happens in an IPO, you gotta look for another blog.

I guess it makes some sense, given that junior guys have less experience and insight to offer (on average) compared to someone who’s been in the industry for awhile. Blogs from venture veterans like Chris Dixon, Fred Wilson, Mark Suster, and Bijan Sabet were very eye-opening for me when I first started exploring the VC world, as were blogs of “rising stars” like Rob Go. But what about the perspective of venture life from someone who’s 25 years old?

It’s kind of funny that I blogged more here prior to making the move to venture capital and post only once every few months now, but hey — now that I’m a bit more acclimated to the new job now, why not pick it up again and provide some perspectives into venture capital from an associate’s point of view?

Now, I’m not claiming by any means that I’ll have thoughts that are as smart or insightful as the folks I mentioned above, but I’m going to shoot for a post a week about the associate life / perspective that will hopefully be entertaining to you all! Apologies to all my readers and subscribers who’ve been left hanging over the past 6-12 months, but I’m going to try and make it up to you. Cheers.

P.S. If there are any topics you’d be interested in knowing about from a junior VC’s point of view, please feel free to post in the comments or contact me.

Take 30 seconds and click here to write your congressman.

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!

StartupDigest has actually consolidated several great threads / blog posts in one place, so click here for a primer on “Getting Started as a Non-Technical Founder,” including one by Vin Vacanti, a former Wall-Streeter who co-founded Yipit. And if you do happen to be a developer who’d be interested in a side project, please do let me know, and I can put you in touch with my friend.

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As a side note in case you’re wondering, Whartonite Seeks Code Monkey is an actual site started by a couple of Penn engineering students as an inside joke about “silly Whartonites” looking for Penn developers to help them with their amazing multi-billion dollar start-up idea. Follow them on Twitter.