Local entrepreneur Dan Silverman had a cryptocurrency hobby; he also had a reliable job at a full service real estate company, where he managed his father’s Hoboken real estate portfolio.
When he saw a chance to combine the two — doing what no one had done before — by moving real estate transactions onto the distributed ledger backbone used for cryptocurrency, he wanted to capture lightning in a bottle. When he went to explain that in a long-winded email to his skeptical father, the response was no longer than five words, but that’s all it took to sum it up for Silverman:
“Don’t quit your day job.”
Silverman would go on to do exactly that, turning his idea into Balcony Technology Group Inc., a startup he launched with other real estate industry transplants that has raised $6 million from investors.
Not all would-be entrepreneurs make it that far. The tension between sticking to careers in established industries and venturing into the unknown with novel startup plans can prove to be a stumbling block.
And if you’re asking Michael Johnson, president of New Jersey Institute of Technology’s New Jersey Innovation Institute, he’s inclined to add: Especially in New Jersey.
“In New Jersey, what we’re focused on is career progression,” he said. “Everyone wants a six-figure job at a Fortune 500 company. If I go to Thanksgiving and I tell my family I quit my job to launch a startup, they’ll laugh and maybe shout at me. In San Diego or San Francisco, they’d praise you and say how great you are for that, and they’ll mean it. In New Jersey, maybe they’ll say that, but think you’re an idiot.”
It’s not a knock on the Garden State, Johnson said, but rather a fact of life. New Jersey has a different culture, he said. It’s far from Silicon Valley, literally and figuratively.
“I think about it this way: We go to the Shore and we’re always miserable with the traffic, the crowds, how expensive it is,” he said. “But we love as Jerseyans to be unhappy going to the beach and having our vacation down there. I don’t know why, we just do.”
That unique New Jersey attitude makes it hard to say how quickly a maturity of the state’s entrepreneurial environment might happen, even with the right pieces in place.
And there’s no question the pieces are in place. Ten years ago, when Johnson co-founded a drug discovery contract research services business called Visikol, he said there wasn’t the same level of business interest and available incubator space as there is today for a startup.
“When we started that company, which was later sold to a Sweden-based firm, back in 2014, if you wanted even a 1,000-square-foot lab space, there weren’t a lot of options,” Johnson said. “We’re in a different spot as a state now. Space isn’t a pain point for startups.”
Kathleen Coviello, chief economic transformation officer of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, traces the growth of incubator, coworking and other startup-friendly spaces in the Garden State to NJ Ignite. That NJEDA-funded program, launched early into Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration, provided grants to get collaborative work-spaces off the ground.
When it comes to the innovation hubs Coviello is excited about, the list goes on (and on): North Brunswick’s New Jersey Bioscience Center, the Rutgers EcoComplex, the venture capital firm SOSV’s HAX in Newark, the Liberty Science Center-linked SciTech Scity, Princeton’s AI-focused accelerator, the public-private partnership-supported NJ FAST.
“I think thematically we’re seeing the growth of these centers in the state and we’ll continue to build out more of them,” she said. “There’s a lot of momentum … behind joining like-minded folks in industry together with academia and organizations with a larger strategic focus.”
State officials have also been supporting programs that replace income for first-time entrepreneurs with two-year grants. That’s just another way of building a culture that lends itself to founding companies in the Garden State, Coviello said.
“And I’m seeing a trend shift,” she said. “At the graduation of our first NJ FAST cohort, a number of students we heard from said they didn’t think about this being a career path for them until they learned this (program) existed. There’s more awareness about these opportunities now.”
Silverman, whose team was part of that initial cohort at NJ FAST, said the state’s resources helped in envisioning a path forward for his blockchain-driven real estate data startup.
It didn’t take long for his father to see the vision as well.
“He may never fully understand what I’m talking about when it comes to the tech,” he said. “But he told me, ‘Listen, when I started, Hoboken wasn’t a great area for real estate. I had a vision that others couldn’t see. And if everyone did — there wouldn’t be an opportunity, because someone else would be doing it. It’s the same thing in your case. This is something that just hasn’t been done already, so go for it.’”
Conversation Starter
Reach Balcony
Technology Group Inc. at: balcony.technology or call 201-534-1344.
