http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/silicon_alley_now_gold_st_sMjjeGAE6BJEBB7UI52WZP
New York City’s young tech stars are bracing for nasty weather — it’s starting to rain cash.
Thanks to the absurdly high $1 billion Facebook paid for the social and mobile-app maker Instagram — a company with no revenue and just 13 employees — Gotham’s successful tech firms in the mobile space are bracing for a deluge of big-money buyout offers.
“Fasten your seat belts, the social-mobile land grab of 2012 has officially begun,” said Lou Kerner, an expert on private-company valuations.
Last week, the CEO of one the city’s standout tech firms, David Karp of Tumblr, a blogging 2.0 platform, attended a meeting hosted by Evercore Partners as part of its Disruption Speaker Series, where some of the city’s top startup players discussed valuations.
Tumblr’s backers at Union Square Ventures said the company, which raised $85 million last September, has been heavily courted for an acquisition but has resisted selling out, a source with knowledge of the talks said.
All around New York, bankers and venture capitalists were flipping through their portfolios last week and wondering what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s billion-dollar check meant for local startups they advise.