Tristan Snell wants Brooklyn leaders to do more to support the tech scene

Tristan Snell had a choice.

While living in Brooklyn, he was working on a new company called Snakt with his Los Angeles-based cofounder, CEO Gaetan Bonhomme. After three years of working on the company, the two decided that it was time to decide where their headquarters should be. They toyed with the idea of Los Angeles and San Francisco before finally deciding to unpack their boxes at WeWork in Dumbo this past January. (Bonhomme remained in Los Angeles, though.)
“We work with a lot of big media companies and ad agencies so New York City and Los Angeles seemed like the most logical cities for us to be in and in the end, Brooklyn came out as the winner,” Snell said.
That’s because he loves the borough so much, despite what he sees as its flaws when it comes to the startup community, but we’ll get to that in a second. First: Snell, originally from Texas, was a lawyer for tech companies for a couple of years before getting bit by the startup bug and launching Snakt. He was part of The Made in NY Media Center’s incubator program in 2014.

He moved to New York City over six years ago. He’s lived and worked in both Brooklyn and Manhattan and has found himself building roots, both personally and professionally here. He is confident and stern, yet also relaxed when he tells me over the phone that Brooklyn is where his heart is.
Snakt, a video platform that allows you to play with video bites of seven seconds each and stick them together to make longer videos, is launching as an iPhone app later this month. Snell says that while the official headquarters for the business is now in Brooklyn, there will still be a significant presence in Los Angles and the Bay Area.
Snell is the first to admit there is a lack of support for startups in Brooklyn.
“New York City has such a long way to catch up to Silicon Valley,” he said. “There’s a lot of talk but no action to make it happen.”
There is a small boom of startups here, he said, but it’s nothing near what you’ll find in the Bay Area or a city like Boston, Seattle and Austin.
He believes that there’s only a startup scene in Brooklyn because of individual entrepreneurs and investors who have made it happen. Not because of any effort led by local leaders or any public or private partnerships. (Though we will shout out the Brooklyn Tech Triangle, a partnership between the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and the DUMBO Improvement District aimed at spurring the borough’s innovation economy.)
“Entrepreneurs and startups get used a lot as talking points and props for politicians, but then the leaders rarely do anything substantial to help,” he said. “I’d like to see some kind of effort, whether it’s a private partnership to offer space to startups for a subsidized cost or a partnership with a college or university. Those are things other cities have done, to my knowledge. Regardless, there’s an action that can be taken instead of just a lot of talk.”
But he still loves Brooklyn. The true lesson he’s learned, he said, is that startups seem to get by here in spite of sub-par leadership.
“I love Brooklyn and New York City, not because I’m making an effort to build a startup scene there,” he said. “I think the biggest reason to be here is the people, the energy, the cliché things that people say about this place that just happen to be true.”
Despite the lack of growth in startups or the city support, Snell said that what he loves about Brooklyn is its “amazing community of small business in Brooklyn.”
“I think it has a greater density and array of small businesses than anywhere else,” he said.
So will Snell and Snakt be tempted to pack up and go in a few years if Brooklyn doesn’t get its act together when it comes to supporting startups? Snell said no way.
“New York City is my home,” he said. “I don’t have any plans to leave here. I love it here.”