The Ongoing Battle: NY vs. SF Tech Scene(techendo.co) |
The Ongoing Battle: NY vs. SF Tech Scene(techendo.co) |
Further, I've literally never, ever, heard a person who is actually running or employed at a startup consider it a battle.
But it does seem like a good headline for getting lots of clicks...
eBay's 6th Ave office costs $2-3 million per month (what's a million dollars between friends?).
(This isn't really relevant though. I just like reminding people huge sums of money are in play. Your little "$50k to $200k angel round" isn't as big a deal as you think.)
Maybe its just closer to Europe?
More seriously, agree with the article. SF's strength is also its weakness: a huge concentration of bright like-minded people focused on similar objectives.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/us/backlash-by-the-bay-tec...
There are little blobs of heat map down by San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo. There's a little dollop of color up at Portland. There's a half-SF color sized blob in Seattle for Amazon. There's a small, but solid color around Bellevue and a faint twinkle over at Redmond for the fading empire.
Microsoft has an enormous capacity to innovate, mostly thru brute force of the billions of dollars they have sitting around, but still, innovation is innovation.
“you’d have to be out of your mind to live in Palo Alto.”
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/david-karp-is-...
The tech scene is healthy and not frothy. Google Venice is a large presence, as is Factual (my employer), Hulu, Snapchat with their sweet Venice boardwalk office, and assorted others (http://siliconbeachla.com/). I like it here because being in a tech startup is very different and cool, unlike in SF/SV where it seems a ridiculous number of people are doing identical work.
I moved to San Francisco last year and settled in a nice apartment on Dolores Park; I was hired at Factual to work remotely but came to the L.A. office for the first month to train up. After a week I told them I wanted to stay, and I love SF. It is just . . . really nice here.
Edit: nvm, I didn't know what Silicon Beach stands for. LA obviously has way better climes than SF.
Immediately reminded of "Money talks, wealth whispers."
Also, yes, I was lucky to be in a great co-working space (New Work City). I'm sure they're not ALL like that. Just as in SF, there are "bright spots" and "meh spots".
And let's not forget Boston / New England ... which is STILL #2 in total Venture Capital investment. [4]
See where I'm heading? This idea of an ongoing battle between two locations as being the core of the IT / Startup ecosystem belies the fact that a considerable amount of activity is happening outside these two regions.
I love NY and I love SF. And I think good entrepreneurs should do their best to network in both of those scenes. And YES there's a ton of VC in SF / Silicon Valley and a huge amount of activity in NY. But entrepreneurs outside of NY and SF can do just fine too. Ask Tony Hsieh from Zappos (Las Vegas) or Jeff Bezos (Seattle). I say, let these two cities battle it on while everyone else focuses on making their company and their local entrepreneurial scenes better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc.
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-23/cisco-agrees-to-buy...
[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/03/29/millennial...
[4] https://www.pwcmoneytree.com/MTPublic/ns/nav.jsp?page=region
Edit: Apparently humour needs to come with captions now.
This is a play on the "hammer/nail" truism, observing that folk love to frame things as X vs Y zero-sum games. Possibly because of the human fondness for associating the status value of markers (places, brands) with the status value of our own selves. Thus arguments over NYC vs SF or iOS vs Android or Facebook vs Google or Node.js vs Go are not really about X vs Y at all. They are about establishing status in a troupe of great apes.
Indeed, this edited text is about status.
For the record, I did hear someone refer to it as "the ongoing New York/SF debate". This isn't something I just invented. I had personally never thought there was any comparison to be made until I heard that people out there make it all the time.
(Of course, this all applies to meeting women through friends. I don't do the bar scene so can't really comment on it.)
But the numbers clearly suggest that NYC is the way to go. The ratio of men in their 20s to women in their 20s is one of the highest of large US cities in SF and one of the lowest in NYC. If you're a guy, NYC is the place to be.
Edit: when you can, take the 280. It's a little less direct but it's a lot prettier.
That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Would this be like living across the bay in Oakland or something? The flipside of such a situation would be that you get back home from SF at midnight before the last BART or you would have to be stuck when BART decides to strike.
Heck, when the MTA decides to strike (which is occasionally, but less frequently than BART) you can walk to Manhattan from Astoria. Try that from Oakland-to-SOMA.
That said, I think there's good stuff going on in all three places, and all three have their problems.
In every one of their traditional markets they have blasted every incumbent away and largely kept any new competitors from entering in any meaningful way, That said, from about 2001 - when entering new markets they've been like a rudderless ship sailing around in circles. However, there is a changing of the guard coming shortly, one that I think could change the direction of the company in ways that could cause sea change in any new market is chooses to enter. Once Microsoft can figure out how to work with itself again - god help any part of the technology sector they choose to target.
...which was entirely a result of their abusing monopoly power.
god help any part of the technology sector they choose to target.
With the march onward past Windows 95, they set in motion a plan that kept progress in personal computing from advancing for about 15 years.
Now, I don't believe they sat down and actually said "We are going to halt progress for 15 years." They just sat and grinded on their install base without any reason or motivation to innovate.
Let's not let that happen again.
Microsoft is in no way a good thing for the world. The only saving grace at this point is they are full of silly old people who can't think in a world where everybody has an iPhone in their pocket and an iPad at home.
All of which is to say that limiting your statement to "NYC proper" doesn't mean much because that covers a lot of ground. If you had made your orginal statement about "Manhattan south of 96th street", it would have meant what I think you were going for. Within in those parameters the East Village is middle of the pack.
Also in reference to your comment above the subways run 24/7 in NYC (albeit on a reduced schedule).