Announcing the Permanent NYC Startup Bus

by Matt Langer and Choire Sicha

Now that the SXSW start-up bus has landed, it’s time to take things to the next level. In case you missed the fun, buses full of buspreneurs departed the four corners of the country (and Cleveland), bound for Austin, and along the way they built companies that were then besieged by incubators and investors. The winning companies were TripMedi and WalkIn, which, respectively, collect information about medical tourism (oh my God! Finally we can find the cheapest plastic surgery + safari package in South Africa!) and allow you to “check in” to not have to wait in line at places that have lines. Like I guess FedEx or something? More likely Shake Shack. For which there’s already an app! So it’s time to take hackathons and coworking to their logical conclusions: we’re going to hire a bus to circle Manhattan permanently.

It goes down the Henry Hudson and up the East River Drive and it never, ever goes to Brooklyn. On the bus, engineers and and social media specialists and useless hangers-on form companies in two-day bursts. The bus offers realtime streaming secondary market data for up-to-the-minute valuations of every startup on board. Then the bus stops twice a week (at the corner of Madison and 25th and then at Mott and Spring) to let VCs and angels and incubator scouts on. Checkbooks only! And then no one gets off the bus until they get $15,000 per company or give away 12%, whichever comes first.

The back rows of the bus have mandatory pair programming, the New York Observer has a dedicated seat on the aisle and the punchline is that the bus has no toilet.

But wait! In six months we’re going to pivot this model, and instead we’re going to put the investors on the non-stop startup bus, and let the startup folks get on twice a week to pitch. (That means the bus will have to go to Brooklyn.) Soon we’ll roll out a train of warring investor buses. Like, Union Square Ventures will have this tricked-out John Madden-style bus with purple-tinted windows. The Betaworks bus will be called the RSS Real Time and will serve high tea every three hours. This sounds nice except the buses will all have gunnery. Like in Mad Max. And at the back of the line will be the remora investors, in a little short bus, which doesn’t even have MiFi.

And maybe then the bubble will explosively pop.