Spling founder Billy McFarland: our investors are in New York City [Exit Interview]

This is Exit Interview, an occasional interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

New York City was always the plan for content-sharing site Spling, says founder and CEO Billy McFarland.

Spending last fall at DreamIt Ventures was an important step that helped McFarland fundraise, launch a private beta and hire a handful of team members, he said, but the incubation still amounted as more a detour than a destination.

On April 1, the Spling team plans to be officially based in Manhattan, McFarland, 20, specified to Technically Philly after announcing generally this month. He was among those DreamIt Philly alumni who took a road trip to NYC last week.

Before then, later this month, Spling will launch “a beautiful new version of our product in March,” says the Short Hills, N.J. native, an effort that requires talent that he says is more available northbound.

McFarland started working on Spling last year during his freshman year at Bucknell, where he was studying computer engineering. He left school last May to work on the project full-time with plans of moving to the 67th ward then.

“However, I quickly realized it was pretty unrealistic to leave school one day and expect to have the resources and network to succeed in a city like New York the next,” he said. Instead, he worked from home, raised some early funding and earned at spot in DreamIt. This is the next step in the plan, he adds.

Below, McFarland talks about why he is moving Spling and why he could build a business here in the future.

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CityRyde leaves for Cambridge: we “just did not fit the investment style of the investors in the region,” says CEO

This is Exit Interview, an occasional interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

CityRyde leadership is making some big changes.

The bike sharing consulting practice is due to relaunch under a new brand and, as of next week, the startup’s co-founders will be leaving University City to make their headquarters elsewhere.

CEO Timothy Ericson and COO Jason Meinzer, the startup’s two co-founders, have decided that if their six-person startup is going to continue to grow traction, the Quaker City isn’t the place to do it.

“Philadelphia claims that they want to be the greenest city in America, however they are the only major city in the Northeast that does not have direct plans to launch a bike sharing initiative,” said CEO Ericson, 25, a native of Fair Lawn, N.J. who says he fell in love with his new city while studying at Drexel. Despite both having Drexel ties, he met his co-founder Meinzer, 28, while they were in London. The pair visited Paris to see the launch of that city’s bike-sharing program, which prompted their venture.

The departure of an entrepreneur named Meinzer may sound familiar, considering that just in September Jason’s brother Ryan, who was behind language learning tool PlaySay, told Technically Philly that he was leaving and taking his startup with him to D.C.

Next week, Dec, 1, CityRyde leadership, too, will officially move, setting up shop in Cambridge, Mass. — which is to Boston about what Conshohocken is to Philly, if Conshohocken was home to two of the most respected universities in the world.

Below, Ericson discusses why this is the right move and if there’s anything Philadelphia could do about it.

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Justin Giza: Drink Philly editor, nerd rapper leaves for NYC to pursue music career

This is Exit Interview, an occasional interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

At the Philly Geek Awards last month, the Geekadelphia crew behind the event included an ‘In Memoriam’ segment.

Pictures of a dozen former members of Philadelphia’s technology community who had moved in the past year, many of them Exit Interview alumni, were shown on the large projector screen, set to ‘It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday’ from Boyz II Men. The bit was funny and well received.

In the audience was Justin Giza, then editor of DrinkPhilly.com, which was founded in 2009 by Adam Schmidt and Technically Philly profiled in June. At next year’s Geek Awards, Giza could be on that ‘In Memoriam’ screen.

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Joanne Cheng Exit Interview: “I wasn’t satisfied with the direction the city was heading”

Exit Interview: Former Startup Leaders President Jameson Detweiler says capital, mentorship are gone

This is Exit Interview, an occasional interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

It happened in a weekend.

Four days after Jameson Detweiler and his team at LaunchRock opened the doors of its launch campaign and analytics platform for startups, artists and others — created over 48 hours during Startup Weekend this winter — it was getting ink in Silicon Valley.

“In case you needed another ‘you know there’s a bubble when …’ tech post, LaunchRock, a startup that builds viral launch pages for other startups, is launching today via its own product,” TechCrunch wrote. Tech sage Robert Scoble brought Detweiler, who at the time, was President of Philly Startup Leaders, in for a long interview on Scobleizer.

It was very quickly clear where the company was headed. Recently, the company has hooked up with 500 Startups, a Valley business incubator — with a $50,000 accelerator investment — and the rest is history. The company is now based full-time in Mountain View.

It’s most notably the story of how the newly elected president of a local organization dedicated to encouraging entrepreneurship in the Philadelphia region now says that Philadelphia “might not be the best thing for your business.”

But at the end of the day, Detweiler says, Startup Leaders is about encouraging smart entrepreneurship. Smart entrepreneurship that means business comes first, not your location.

More with Detweiler after the jump.

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Philly was never in play for Wharton’s Coursekit

This is Exit Interview, an occasional interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

The Wharton School of Business is something of a mixed blessing for Philadelphia technology community. One one hand it has produced some of the region’s most successful startup companies such as Invite Media and Ticketleap.

However, most Wharton grads end up taking their business elsewhere. Invite Media largely relocated to New York. Diapers.com split for New Jersey. Now, Philadelphia can add Coursekit to the ever-expanding list of Wharton startup brain drain.

Coursekit, founded by three Penn students aims to replace BlackBoard and the standard for educational collaboration in higher education. After their school year was over, the company relocated to New York City, the hometown of founder Joseph Cohen. After raising $1 million from a highly-respected venture funds in a seed round , the company has no plans of returning.

We interviewed Coursekit CEO and Co-Founder Joseph Cohen just before his funding round was announced about Wharton brain drain and asked what Philadelphia could do to better keep its Wharton startups.

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Colin Weir: “there’s no startup culture around video” in Philly

This is Exit Interview, a weekly interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

In a few weeks, Colin Weir will be gone.

The Toms River, N.J. native video producer is leaving April 19 to work for TWiT.tv in Petaluma, Calif. A Rowan University alumnus, Weir, 25, is leaving a job as a video production specialist for a Center City hospital to chase dreams westward.

Though he wants to stay in Philly, he says there just isn’t a culture around video like Philly is developing in other creative fields. Below, Weir talks about how he sees Philly on his way to the airport.

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MindSnacks moved to Bay Area for the best environment to build a startup: Andy Mroczkowski

This is Exit Interview, a weekly interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

Andy Mroczkowski tells an important story without meaning to do so.

“Honestly I’m not that critical of Philly,” says Mroczkowski, 31, who moved mobile educational game development startup MindSnacks. “I just had an opportunity for adventure, and we thought the Bay Area was the best place for our company.”

A theme in the Exit Interview series has been a lack of competitive advantage for business in Philadelphia. Today is the last in the weekly series, though we’ll always seek perspective from those who leave — and those who come. In a fitting close, Mroczkowski notes that he’s actually rather fond of Philadelphia, he and his team felt that to give themselves the best shot at success, they planned to migrate westward.

Mroczkowski, a South Jersey native and Drexel alumnus left in January. The founder of local Mac programming group CocoaHeads, he had worked for the Neat Company and freelanced out of Indy Hall.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that MindSnacks, a DreamIT ventures startup that now has five full-time staff, raised $1.2 million in funding on the West Coast. So far, the plan is working.

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David Lifson: “I would definitely consider Philadelphia over San Francisco”

This is Exit Interview, a weekly interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

When deciding on the headquarters for Postling, co-founder David Lifson said he had only crossed one city off of his list of possible locations: San Fransisco.

“The West Coast is so much of a tech bubble, it’s really easy to forget who your customers are,” says Lifson.

When Postling, a web application that allows small business owners to streamline social media campaigns, graduated from DreamIt Ventures, the company took some time to decide where to move next. After some thought, the company chose to leave Philadelphia for North Jersey and New York City.

We ask Lifson, why he decided to leave Philadelphia and why the state government impresses him.

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Jesse Middleton: “The best thing about Philadelphia is the closeness of the whole community”

This is Exit Interview, a weekly interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

Jesse Middleton tells his story like small town boy makes good.

He went a small high school — graduating class of about 70 people — an hour north of Philly and got his first taste of city life when he attended Drexel University and then stayed a half dozen years.

“I found an amazing co-op job, traveled a lot and went on to do network security consulting, technology writing, SaaS implementations for enterprise companies,” Middleton says, “and finally moved to New York City.”

It was strictly about a job, he says, traveling where the money was good at the time but still harboring all the intentions to come back to the place he first made his home.

Below we talk to him more about what pushed him to leave and why he is so sure he’ll come back.

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