New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what Chris Dixon or Ron Conway or Paul Graham say

August 3rd, 2010 by Antonio

Last Tuesday, legendary tech investor Ron Conway addressed the glop-eating masses at Y Combinator during our usual Tuesday illustrious-speaker dinner. The question was asked about the New York tech scene, and it’s relative strength vis-à-vis Silicon Valley. Paul Graham took up the question with Techcrunch TV recently, as a follow-on to Conway’s remarks. Chris Dixon, a respected New York-based VC, has also chimed in on the tech renaissance going on there.

They’re all wrong.

New York will never be more than a tech sideshow1.

Thinking the New York tech scene will ever equal Silicon Valley is as foolish as thinking San Francisco’s puny theater district will one day take on Broadway. Both Silicon Valley and Broadway are unique products of the cities that spawned them, and every attempt to create a Silicon Alley/Silicon Sentier/Skolkovo/whatever in various parts of the world have failed. So far, no one’s managed to do it, and New York sure as hell won’t either.

The hero with, well, a couple of faces

As Matt Mireles incisively points out in his related blog post, the mythology in New York is all wrong for startups.

Let’s face it, young ambitious men have two goals in life: getting laid, and impressing other young ambitious men. You do neither in New York by saying you’re starting a startup. That slinky young thing you’re chatting up at Schiller’s turns around to the investment banker next to her when you drop that bomb.

In the Bay Area, you drive through Atherton or Woodside and see the mansions that Netscape, Apple, and Oracle built. On the Upper East Side you see houses built thanks to the depredations of previous generations, and owned by the predators of today (probably their children).

In the Bay Area, new money is better than old. In New York, it’s precisely the opposite. The mythology is all wrong.

$2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment.

There, that’s how much my first apartment in New York cost (in 2005).

Living in New York, you hemorrhage money, and don’t see much in return. My career salary high-water mark is still working as a quant on Goldman’s credit desk, and I lived worse, from a quality-of-life perspective, than I did as a Berkeley graduate student. ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere. If YCombinator existed in New York, they’d have to dish 5x more than their already slim initial funding to keep new startups in Cheetos for three months.

Basically, startups flourish in the Bay Area the same reason the homeless do: decent weather, relatively cheap living, and no stigma attached to your lifestyle.

The cathedral and the brothel

Every yuppie I knew in New York worked as either a Wall Street guy, a lawyer, or an agent of some sort. Basically, there were all subtly screwing someone else for a living.

As an academic exile, my passport to this foreign world was my then live-in girlfriend, an embodiment of her socioeconomic cohort: Bryn Mawr School for Girls, followed by Harvard, followed by med school. This was a person who could open the Sunday Styles weddings section2, instantly identify a half-dozen couples, and rattle off the juicy gossip dating back to their time at Eliot House.

At cocktail parties with these people, the “ambitious ass-kickers” Paul Graham thinks will save the New York tech scene, the second question you’re asked is inevitably what do you do? And so begins the not-so-subtle binning of you into your social echelon, more ritualistic and damning than any Japanese business card exchange ceremony:

+2 for working at Goldman Sachs
-1 for being a quant rather than a banker or trader
-1 for living on the Lower East Side
-2 for not being Ivy League
+/- 1 for being Gentile (depends on the cocktail party).

And you’re socially in the red at that point. The rest of the conversation is as vacuous as interstellar space.

These people aren’t builders, they’re hustlers. And hustlers don’t have the patience or skill to create the next Google or Facebook3.

Open vs. closed source

New York’s entire economy is based on monopolies of information. Wall Street banks make a mint trading because they have inside information on the market flows of the products they trade.  Literary agents arbitrage scarce access to book publishers against a mass of hopeful authors. Real estate brokers (and these are brokers on rental properties, not properties for sale) routinely make a 15% commission when you sign a lease, pocketing a good two-months salary (read, upwards of $5000) for the privilege of telling you where there’s an apartment free.

In New York, those monopolies go unchallenged.

In San Francisco, people don’t pay two months’ rent to a real estate pimp: they create Craigslist and make the pimp obsolete.

The intellectual candle-power isn’t there

Harvard and MIT anchor Boston’s startup scene, and have midwifed countless startups. Berkeley and Stanford were the birthplaces of everything from BSD Unix to Google.

New York has no comparable sources of intellectual firepower. NYU is an arts school. Their only world class science is the Courant Institute and its applied math program, which serves as a feeder school for Wall Street. Columbia is not a top-notch engineering school, and anyhow, it’s way the hell up and gone in Harlem, and no one who isn’t a student or faculty ever goes up there4.

No place for Trotsky to sit down

One of the biggest shocks upon moving to New York was realizing it had no cafés5. You can’t have startups or revolutionary political movements without cozy cafés to dawdle, work, and plot in. Every day I step into the Red Rock Café in Mountain View, I see 2-3 startup founders I know, see about half a dozen hackers working on something on their Macs, or overhear some entrepreneur’s pitch to an investor. Every day. Assuming you teleported all those people to New York tomorrow, the system would fall apart, as they’d have nowhere to meet.

Katz’s pastrami is the only thing I miss

As a random but illustrative tangent, the food culture in NY vs. SF explains much of the attitude toward work and money as well.

The reality is, the food culture in New York mostly sucks. Sure, people there know how to go to Nobu and drop $300 on sushi, and every headliner chef needs to have some New York outpost, but most New Yorkers couldn’t fry an egg if their lives depended on it (plus, most don’t even have decent-sized kitchens).

In San Francisco just about everyone I know is an über-foodie. Over plates of home-cooked and home-grown asparagus, I’ve had endless, meandering conversations about heirloom tomato gardening or where on Twin Peaks to find the blackberry bushes. My ex-girlfriend keeps a backyard chicken farm, in posh Rockridge. People here go abalone diving in Bodega Bay. There’s a herd of goats in a vacant lot in West Oakland I drive by, kept by an urban farming hippie. Most of the veggies I eat come from our backyard garden. Even the skeeziest convenience store in Daly City or Oakland has a drinkable collection of California wines on offer.

On the flip side, New Yorkers don’t know anything about actual food. They know how to queue for two hours at the fashionable brunch spot they read about in New York magazine, and then opine haughtily about whether the hollandaise sauce on the Eggs Benedict compares to Balthazar’s or not. In three years of living in New York, I never ate someone else’s home-cooked food even once.

The lesson when it comes to tech is this: New Yorkers like bling. They like the establishment. They go Gucci and let you know it.

San Franciscans are more subversive: they get obsessed with creme brulée, quit their jobs, sell their obsession from a cart, tweet about where the creme brulée cart will be next (12,000 followers and counting),  and create a whole new food paradigm: the socially-networked food cart.

The latter is a bootstrapped startup culture at work. It permeates everything in SF life, including the food. And it’s why SF will dominate tech for the foreseeable future6.

Happiness is a warm Sawzall

Another tangential but illustrative anecdote: Manhattan didn’t get a Home Depot, or any sort of proper hardware store, until 2004 (!). The boys at Home Depot know their market though. The place is mostly indoor gardening supplies and little home toolkits to tighten that loose door hinge that keeps popping out.  So, if it’s the 18V DeWalt Sawzall that cuts through quarter-inch steel rods like a warm knife does butter that you want, well, then, like the signs on the BQE say, fuhgeddaboutit.

The Bay Area, by contrast, is a hacker’s paradise. I’m fairly sure that between the big Oakland Home Depot and the geek paradise of Fry’s Electronics in Palo Alto, I and a band of hardy souls could re-build all of 21st century human technological life on some barren island if need be. Good luck doing that with what you find on Fifth Avenue.

And that’s precisely what’s wrong with New York: it’s filled with hyper-stressed, aggressive, social climbers who are actually kind of effete and helpless at the end of the day, and probably need to outsource their software development, because they’re not, like, technical and all that. Except there’s one problem….there aren’t that many hackers in New York, and the few there are (I know because I used to be one of them) won’t leave their $300,000 jobs on Wall Street to work on your hopelessly risky idea.

Which brings us to the other reason why New York will never be Silicon Valley…

Greed is God

While that odd mélange of Las Vegas, the Mafia and the Marines that we call Wall Street has taken a bit of a beating of late, rise again it will. And when it does, the tech scene in New York will evaporate like a puddle of water in the desert.

Time for the full disclosure: I spent three years on Goldman Sachs’ credit trading desk as a pricing quant, which is what brought me to New York. The job paid well. The hours and stress, no worse than a startup’s. The social vindication of what I was doing, absolute and immediate.

When the credit markets started looking dicey at the beginning of 2008 and I told my GS deskmates that I was moving California to join a startup, they looked at me as if I had just proposed shaving my head and joining a Buddhist monastery in Burma. It was complete and total incomprehension. And these were the quants, most of them Ph.D.’s, the geekiest Wall Street gets. Most of the sales and trading guys probably couldn’t find California on a map7.

None of those Goldman Sachs quants, most of whom were precisely in the Spolskyian ‘smart/get things done’ category that you’d want in a startup, really knew about or understood the startup scene, and how you could get just as wealthy with a startup, having lots more fun along the way, than warming a seat on a Wall Street trading floor. You, potential employer, will have to sell that person not just on your startup, but on startups in general. And that is a hard sale indeed. You’ll only do it if that quant has lost his seat on the trading floor. That’s been the case for some recently (including your faithful correspondent), but last I heard, Goldman is hiring again. So best of luck to you, aspiring New York entrepreneur8.

Money talks, but bullshit walks

Since I suspect this post may get a flame or two from some diehard New Yorkers, I’ll lay down this gauntlet in the face of regional jingoism

I promise to wear one of those ridiculous ‘I <heart> NY’ shirts you buy for $3 from the Nigerians in Times Square for an entire month if the total amount of New York-based startup funding, as reported in Crunchbase, exceeds that of Bay Area-based startups in any financial quarter during the next five years.

So…bring it, New York. ‘Cause I say the hippies from California will continue to eat your lox.

  1. Matt Mireles of SpeakerText has a wonderful piece on why New York tech is subpar. I won’t tread on his well-covered ground. Consider this post a whimsical compliment to his more hard-nosed piece [↩]
  2. As an outsider to the New York social registry mosh pit, one can scarcely imagine the importance of making it into the New York Times wedding announcements. Some marriages have threatened to break up over whether they were accepted or not. The best deconstruction of this NYT wedding arms race is still David Brooks’ hilarious Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. [↩]
  3. The astute reader will point out that there’s no more representative a person of this presumed hustler culture than Zuck himself: Phillips Exeter followed by Harvard. The exception that proves the rule, gentle reader! Also, note that while Facebook maybe have been conceived on the East Coast, it was built in California. I submit that Facebook would have been stillborn had Zuck not moved things West. [↩]
  4. Three years in New York, and I went north of 14th St maybe three times. Trips to the Met excepted, of course [↩]
  5. The only possible exception being Esperanto, near NYU (since closed) and Tea Lounge in Park Slope. The Starbucks on Astor Place, despite the corporate bad karma, maybe comes close to replicating the look-and-feel of a California hacker café. The cannoli-and-coffee tourist traps in Little Italy aren’t worth discussing, of course. [↩]
  6. As a final ding on the New York food scene, I’ll say this: the produce in New York is a joke compared to California. Go East, young man, and forget forever about seeing the endless cornucopia of God’s green Earth that is California. The farmer’s market in Union Square, the only serious one in Manhattan, is so-so during the summer, but deteriorates for the rest of the year into a few depressing apple cider and maple syrup stands, manned by scruffy Vermont hippies. To continue the orgy of whining, the ethnic food in New York, unbelievably, is pretty crappy too. As Manhattan, and parts of Brooklyn, devolve into a walled playground for the wealthy, the city becomes, like a Los Angeles gated community, a sterile comic-book version of its historical self. As an example, there’s only one decent Indian restaurant in Manhattan, far as I can tell (Vatan in Murray Hill). The chinese food, outside of Chinatown, never rises above the chain-y Grand Sichuan level of things. Lastly, and the whining will stop here I swear, Mexican food! About as unheard-of in Manhattan as mango chutney is in Lubbock, Texas. The burrito tunnel between SF and NY should be a national priority of vital concern. [↩]
  7. That’s the other weird thing about New York life, most people haven’t been west of the Mississippi. Hell, they haven’t been west of Baltimore. California is as remote and unknown to them as Siberia. [↩]
  8. In case it’s unclear, the phrase “best of luck” is polite Wall Street-speak for “you’re fucking crazy and it’s never gonna happen.” [↩]
  • http://chart.io Daniel Levine

    I can assure as former CrunchBase research analyst, you will have no chance whatsoever of having to wear that shirt. It’s not even remotely close and the growth in NY funding might be prolific but SV is rising too. That said the one caveat is if VCs have a difficult time raising, which is actually one thing NYC has going for it. Way more LPs in or near NYC and the Northeast.

    • admin

      Thanks Daniel. I was kind of worried there for a while, after I made that bet. But you’ve got the inside track…whew!

      • http://nick.is Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock

        I think it’s safe to say you won’t lose that bet, but I don’t think it’s a particularly good test. The options aren’t just beating Silicon Valley or being a tech backwater. New York can have a vibrant and successful startup scene without displacing the valley as the world leader.

        I’ll try to respond mor thoroughly/thoughtfully some point later. There’s much to digest in your post :)

        Also, one data point: My living expenses in NYC were *cheaper* than they are in Mountain View right now.

  • Matt

    I dunno man. We get by at NYC Resistor.

    You seem to forget that NYC is an artistic and design hub unrivaled in the United States. They have every opportunity to seize a foot hold in the hardware market.. and with that a controlling interest in technology.

    I think you might have a bit of bitter old man syndrome clouding your judgment.

    • admin

      You’re right. There is a bit of bitterness there. ;)

      You’re also right about the design scene. More artists per square mile than any city in the US probably.

      I’m actually not so down on NYC…I loved it as a city, and think it outpaces the Bay Area on many measures. Part of me plots about getting back there somehow (just not as a Wall Street guy).

    • http://youngandbrilliant.net Nina

      Interesting. Except that hardware also requires engineering talent (not software engineering, but mechanical and manufacturing), and I don’t know, but I’d be curious if NYC has much of that. I know a lot of the design world in Silicon Valley has built up a design industry that supports production of hardware for startups.

      • http://www.bubblesound-instruments.com david

        as a start up synthesizer manufacturer in NYC I can testify to what a pain in the ass NYC can be. Just in practical terms of getting components it is rather hopeless. When I lived in Los Angeles there were a half a dozen stores I could run to and grad a few resistors or caps that I forgot to order and be back at the bench working in an hour. Here in NYC that simply can not happen. I love living here for a lot of reasons, but I could do with a few less shoe stores and a few more hardware stores.
        On the plus side there is a ton of fairly cheap commercial loft space in Brooklyn. So I pay a lot more than I would in the Bay Area or LA for rent, but it almost balances out when I consider how much more the workspace would be.

  • NYC Sucks

    It will always be a testament to all that is wrong with the human race.

    • nyer

      Sorry that you’ve had a bad experience here – this city can be pretty wonderful if it hits you in the right way, and I encourage you to give it another chance!

      • admin

        Hey, I actually love New York. Just not as a place to start a tech company.

        • http://lolhard.com Durden

          New York won’t *always* be a tech backwater—haven’t you watched Life After Humans?

          It seems to me that New York is a hard market infotech market to penetrate. But with the right strategy, its possible to fill those cracks in.

          The overall impression of your article alludes to a social atmosphere of firms that go big or go home. Sometimes even giants go too big—hands too clunky to replace the broken cog, and thus they need an expert—often a small relatively agile expert.

          I also find it curious that so many skills/traits that originate in New York can translate excellently into other regions, but rarely the reverse—seems ironic given the roots of New York.

  • James

    Currently moving from NoLita to Brooklyn and hoping that these comments don’t ring true. I only see cool things going on in Brooklyn (of course I’ve never made it because why leave Manhattan?), but if all I hear is not true this will be my last NYC lease.

    • NYAnonymouse

      Have you spent much time in brooklyn / know the general layout of the neighborhoods? If not youll need to spend a decent amount of time scouting, the quality of living and general feel of a neighborhood can change drastically by crossing the street, and change again after 2 blocks. If you dont spend a few hours preferably on a saturday afternoon just wandering and checking out the neighborhood of an apartment youre interested in youre just rolling the dice.

      In my experience you can find an affordable brooklyn apartment in a great neighborhood with neighbors that are relateable and friendly regardless of background / tastes / etc, as long as you invest the time required to scout.

  • Jon

    Seems like you were hanging around the financial district at midtown a little too much.

    See: NY Night Owls. Resister Labs. Alpha One Labs.

    For good food: See: anywhere not mentioned in Time Out.

    For good company: See: anywhere the wallstreet banker d-bags aren’t.

    For good food: See: anyone who doesn’t live in Manhattan (that’s, well, a majority of us NY’ers)

    For good “open source” tech that isn’t banking or quanting or trading: see the enormous Google offices

    Seems like you were insulated from everything awesome about this town. And never stepped out of your shoe-shined, street-shined comfort zone.

    • admin

      New York Google office is mostly sales. The development happens in MV.

      None of those Labs places existed when I was there. I’m the first to admit my knowledge is probably dated. I don’t think the attitudes I saw on display in NY change in the span of a few years though.

      • Nick

        That is ludicrously comically untrue. Maps+Local is run out of NYC. Health is run out of NYC. Large large chunks of Google Apps is run out of NYC.

        Google NYC is two buildings. The Port Authority building (111 Eighth Ave) is TWO FLOORS of *DEVELOPERS*. Those floors are the largest floor plate in the city (each floor is 200,000 SQFT — not a typo.) There must be a thousand+ developers in Google NYC (and certainly way more than sales folks — even after the DoubleClick acquisition.) The Sales folks are in the smaller office across the street in Cheslea Market.

  • Cujo

    I just had to laugh at “relatively cheap living” in the bay area. Relative to NYC, yes, but not relative to just about anywhere else.

    • stevefrench

      Do you know what relatively means, when in the context of a comparison between two things?

  • http://www.w3matter.com Ericson Smith

    See, this is precisely why New York City is not even near to the top of worst foreclosures in the United States (most cities in CA are). I’d drop a link, but the spam monitors would take me down, so google it.

    You’re thinking of startups in terms of how much VC funding people get. As someone who lived in New York for perhaps 10 years, we focus on how much profits our startups can get. That’s the benchmark, not how many funding rounds we received.

    In my book, getting funding rounds is a HUGE failure.

    Of all my years of working in NYC, It’s not easy to find companies that lived nearly their entire lives on money from venture capital.

    As the old ad back in the nineties went (JP Morgan I think before their misdeeds), “We make money the old fashioned way, we earn it”

    Exceptions abound of course (Foursquare anyone?), but in general, people back east are strong on bootstrapping and building up their businesses by sheer dint of will, salesmanship, chutzpah, and hard work. Because, for the most part, we didn’t have a Sand Hill road to turn to.

    That being said, I love the Valley and the culture therein, and will probably move out there one of these days to harness some of that can-do spirit, but the kind of culture that New York City has, is by no means a negative, it is in fact the strongest positive that you could ever have.

    • Rurik Bradbury

      Yeah but that reinforces his argument. You have to bet big upfront to win big later. Google, Facebook, Twitter etc all burned millions (for Facebook hundreds of millions) before breaking even. VCs are gamblers with an air of sophistication — and the best gambling is still to be had in the Valley.

    • http://scobleizer.com Robert Scoble

      Hahahah. My grandma lived in Jersey City (right across the water from NYC) and she loved to show me the papers that had all the foreclosures in them. They had a lot more long before the housing crisis. Don’t know where you get your facts, but I wouldn’t pimp my area based on having fewer foreclosures than any other. Not a way to make your area seem better.

      And, anyway, Google, Facebook, Cisco, Intel, HP, etc all generate a good deal of cash flow and profits. You might look into it.

      • admin

        Hey Scoble.

        Welcome to adgrok.com, and thanks for posting.

        ~Antonio.

    • TheKm

      “Three years in New York, and I went north of 14th St maybe three times. Trips to the Met excepted, of course”

      There. Now everything you said makes sense. You lived in a place in the city completely incompatible with who you are and what you think. Oh, and you hung out with people that everybody – not just you – hates. Somebody dig up Johnny Carson and hand him the swami hat.

      That is…everything makes sense except for the “no cafes” bit. The Village is full of them. Not like the ones in SF, but they’re still there.

      • admin

        Oh yeah? Name one….cafe in the Village that is. That you can sit in. And work in. All day.

        • http://www.megantaylor.org Megan Taylor

          One: http://www.groundedcoffee.com The food is a little pretentious (organic and whatnot) but free wifi and hang out all day. I could name a dozen others.

        • http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/ Michael O. Church

          New York cafes are underwhelming: too crowded, often lacking in WiFi. Starbucks is everywhere and actually has some space, but it’s Starbucks.

          • Jeremy

            As a Bay Area native I appreciate the article, but as someone that went to Columbia for grad school I have to point out your article is limited to your time in the Wall St bubble. Having many friends in finance I can see how you would think there is no food culture, but I have to say you have missed out. In every trip back to NYC I have to pencil in some time for a trip to Dinasour BBQ (which has no equivalent in the Bay), Pio Pio (I will figure out what is in that amazing sauce…. one of these days…..) and of course Kornet ($3 for a slice this big, how can I pas that up?). The pizza culture alone dominates anything we have in the bay. Toss in the hot dog and street meat vendors and you are left wondering why these things aren’t here. Next time you are in NYC hit a neighborhood or two that your ibanker friends do not live in and get some good grub (ok, there is a Pio Pio in murray hill on 34th between 2nd and 3rd). Harlem has a ton of great finds, you just need to leave your comfort zone….

            As for your comments on produce, produce ANYWHERE outside of California sucks. Yes you get one or two good things here or there, but there is nothing like the produce here, especially in the Central Valley where you can buy fruit picked that morning.

          • http://bronxilla.blogspot.com/ bronxilla

            Somewhat ironic that someone with such a myopic viewpoint can rank on others’ myopia:

            1. Columbia is not in Harlem, it’s in Morningside Heights. If you’ve paid any attention to what’s going on “way up there”, if anything, Harlem, which borders Columbia, is being Columbianized.

            2. If you spent time in other communites you may have enojoyed some unbelievable home-cooked food: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Colombian, Guyanese, Indian-you name it.

            3. New York apartments are also listed on Craigslist (did I really need to point that out?)

            You make some valid points, but if you were a policy advisor to Mayor Bloomberg on how to make New York more competitive in this area, what would you suggest – open more cafe’s, have New York State duplicate California’s agriculture?

          • http://blog.shanebrucejohnston.com Shane Johnston

            Fuck me, Kornet! That and Murrays Bagles were almost worth the willy-burg rent.

          • Uptownguy

            This guy just mentioned Dinosaur BBQ. Are you serious? talk about insulated. It’s the single worst BBQ place ever created yet people rave about it as though its a holy grail. That’s really a microcosm of what ails both SF, or the “coast” and NYC. They have no clue about anything beyond their individual burghs. Newsflash, I realize it’s cool to look at the rest of the country as a “flyover” zone on the way to a “better destination” but please try BBQ in other parts of our great nation and DInosaur will be akin to Mickey D’s.

            As for the “What’s better” its all preference. I’ve lived a bi coastal lifestyle since the 90s and I get tired of NY, SF and LA whenever I’m there for too long.

            Oh and Columbia is in Harlem just because you don’t want to call it that doesn’t make it so. To say Harlem is being “Columbianized” would be dramatic as there are about a gazillion projects and public housing developments up there that make it impossible to “Columbianize” Harlem. Unless you mean that small strip btw Morningside Dr and Riverside from 110 to 135th.

          • BB

            New York is than anywhere else. Why? Because we’re f’n New York! Go back to the west coast if you don’t like it. We don’t care.

          • Bill

            New York is than anywhere else? Huh? You left out the adjective there, bud. Ah, but you’re f’n New York so adjective lovers like me can just stay away because you don’t care.

          • BB

            An unfortunate typo, Bill. Fill it in with whatever you want, it’s true, I dun give a fuuuuuck!

  • Baited

    Damn… I couldn’t resist this nugget of link-bait. I actually fell for it too — having written a retort and then realizing that it’s just comment-bait. :-)

  • NYer

    You’re so angry and bitter .. you must be from NY!

  • Not an NYU grad

    NYC aside, I wouldn’t be so quick to knock NYU as being only and art school. They do have the Courant Institute, which is probably the premier mathematical sciences school in the country.

  • DUH

    You seem to be assuming that silicon valley is the “city” part in the bay area, SJ is not SF. So you need to be comparing SJ to upstate NY where IBM lives, not NYC. Also you seem to be grossly underestimating the costs it takes to live in palo alto, mountain view and where all the techies live. Otherwise comparing geeks to hobos, genius.

  • Not an NYU grad

    sorry I missed that second sentence there.

  • Rurik Bradbury

    Mostly true, what you say, but don’t forget:
    - NYC is the ‘creative’ capital of the US. Artists, ad creatives, etc. Basically all the Brooklynites with beards and ironic t-shirts.
    - There are plenty of programmers, but they are toiling in the basements of finance firms and other behemoths, like the coal shovelers in the Titanic.
    - Most startups nowadays are a simple idea, executed well and gaining buzz because of it. They are not big engineering projects. No Stanford PhDs are involved.

    • John

      You say,

      “There are plenty of programmers, but they are toiling in the basements of finance firms and other behemoths, like the coal shovelers in the Titanic.

      Most startups nowadays are a simple idea, executed well and gaining buzz because of it. They are not big engineering projects. No Stanford PhDs are involved.”

      That is probably the biggest reason why the Bay Area will always be favorable to tech startups. To start a new tech company, you need to know where the bleeding edge is and how to find what part of that edge is worth investing in. This requires a MBA-Engineer. From what it sounds like, the engineer isn’t involved in the design of a company in NYC. In fact, they’re really the ‘nerds’ are treated as … well, nerds.

      Example, if ‘Lloyd Craig Blankfein’ (had to google who that was, no one in California will know), walked into a CVS and stood in line behind you, you’d probably twittter it. A friend of mine just twittered Steve Jobs was in line behind him. (Probably Lloyd wouldn’t got shop for his drug store purchases himself though)

      Steve Jobs got a job designing games for Atari in the 70s, back when that was 99% hardware EE stuff. Certainly he has Wozniak to help him out, but are you going to say you can grab a ‘off the shelf’ marketing based business man and have him solder chips together?

      Cisco, co-founded by DEC engineer from Wharton.
      Google, standford comp sci
      Intel, founded by CalTech Chemistry major
      Sun, engineering founders
      Yahoo, engineering founders
      Ebay, Compsci major

      look at the names who founded the VCs
      KPCB, founded by Shockley semicondctor scientists and other techies

      the list goes on and on.

  • Housing What

    Housing in the Bay Area is cheap? Maybe relative to New York…

    • http://ScottSocialMediaAllen.com Scott Allen

      As I was sitting here reading all the things that make the Bay Area so conducive to tech startups, I kept thinking, “Austin has that. Oh yeah…Austin has that too.”

      And then I saw you describe the Bay Area as “relatively cheap living” and began to seriously doubt your frame of reference. The price of rent / real estate in Austin is about HALF what it is in most of the Bay Area. Now I know why all those Bay Area folks are moving to Austin! Can you say “brain drain”?

      Guess that’s why Kiplinger named Austin “Best City for the Next Decade”. NYC and the Bay Area are both #NPTVBIWWTLT (nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there).

      • Atane

        @Nobseque

        The business/work culture of Manhattan is that of greed. The other boroughs are nothing like that! I feel like screaming this at the top of my lungs. The neighborhoods are communal, people know each other, kids play in the street, we tend to gardens, play stickball etc. NYC gets a bad rap because of the sharks in Manhattan. 9 times out of 10, those sharks giving New York the bad name aren’t even New Yorkers. Cab driver ripping you off on the fare? I bet he’s not even a New Yorker, but a transplant or from a different country altogether. Getting pinched an extra buck or two on a sandwich? Same deal. All these douchebags come here and act this way because they think it is the “culture” here. They also do it because transplants are gullible & expect to be treated like shit. New Yorkers don’t get treated this way at all, because they don’t accept being treated like crap. Who else but a transplant would pay $2500 a month to live in a closet?

        Come to Staten Island where Italian grandmas will make you Baked Ziti & Lasagna for mowing their lawn or shoveling snow. The St. George neighborhood on SI is New York city’s best kept secret. Everyone greets each other on the block. And the beauty of it is that it is 25 minutes from Manhattan by ferry. The ferry is also free & runs 24/7, 365 days a year. Tons of artists, culture, museums, Middle Eastern, Indian, Pakistani, African, Chinese, Mexican & Caribbean cuisine.

        I always laugh when people say there is no good Mexican food in NYC. They have clearly never been to Port Richmond, Staten Island. It is a largely Mexican neighborhood with tons of great food. Of course, I don’t expect all the transplants to make it out here, and I’m glad, because once they do, they will bring all the crap that they bring along with them everywhere they go. (gentrification & displacing the people who lived there for ages, high rent, lack of diversity, chain establishments that cater to their palettes i.e. Starbucks etc)

        So when I read crap like the author writes, I just know we have someone who literally did nothing & went no where for a few years in Manhattan. It’s like going to Hawaii, then staying in a hotel room for a week, then coming to the brilliant conclusion that Hawaii sucks, & the atmosphere is one of cold “room service”.

        Once you venture past Manhattan, you’ll see that they are no strangers here. Go to Astoria and shoot the breeze with older Greek gents who will welcome you kindly. I could go on and on. This is the New York that most New Yorkers know, but we are a silent majority. However, every upstart who moved here from a different town that got sucked in to working in Manhattan for a few years wants to tell the world what life is like in New York City, and how depressing it is. Guys, you never experienced New York City.

        This blog post by the OP is clearly traffic bait, congrats it worked.

      • admin

        Indeed, there’s nothing actually cheap about SF, but with money as in everything else, it’s all relative.

  • Tech Valley

    New York State’s Tech Valley http://www.techvalley.org/

  • http://www.keku.com Where is Keku?

    Even though I came into this article a little biased, I realy did have to laugh. I don;t want to say that some of this is true but for the most part it is. That’s New York for you. I really have no pity because you know what your getting into when you come so stop complaining and move on right?

    • admin

      I know, I know. It’s basically the deal when you sign a lease on your New York pad. I shouldn’t whine…

      • carol

        did you ever, ever leave manhattan in your three years or so in NYC? Probably not. Anyone who has really lived in NYC will be more than happy to show you what it truly means to live here. queens is the most amazing place for any kind of food your heart could ever desire. Flushing has better Chinese food tha Chinatown. Astoria is Greek capital. anything else can probably be found in woodside.

        Brooklyn has the most amazingly diverse subset of people, from hippies to young professionals whhp are not willing to pay an extravagant manhattan rent (sth you could have avoided). Coffee houses, bars, beer gardens abound.

        It’s such a pity you lived in what is truly one of the greatest cities in the world but never bothered to experience it.

        wait, scratch that. you never lived here. You were merely a visitor for a few years.

        I volunteer to be your tourguide if you ever come back.

        • admin

          Thank you Carol. I’m about due for a trip back actually. It’s been too long.

      • Dalby Ross

        The Americans have many “Silicon Valleys” that are never mentioned, the largest may be the military intelligence “ultrathinktank” they have securely buried in the sprawl of their US Southwest, which is also Area 51 territory. They’ve been shaping the Western Hemisphere forever including the computer growth evolution and so many of the corporate seeds of the planet that it defies analogy in the literal sense. New York seems to be nothing but a lobby facade with that exact purpose in mind when you force yourself to think of the really big picture of the existence of the American Hemisphere.

      • Brent

        This is…cute. NY, which is outrageously expensive and bleeding population, arguing with Cali, which owes $10 more than God Himself could pay and has almost every natural disaster known to man.

        Now that I’m done reading, I’m going back to work in Texas – which has an increasing population, an 8 billion dollar emergency fund SAVED, a ton of jobs, a low cost of living, and probably won’t fall off into the ocean anytime soon. :)

        • pencilears

          yeah, from what I hear the ocean comes to visit Texas all on it’s own.

  • will

    whoa, someone’s bitter they didn’t “make it” in new york…

    • richard

      so according to your standards, quant @ GS = fail.
      you must be a real hotshot then, huh? we’re graced by your presence

  • JC

    Youre right. Where’s engadget again?

  • http://www.wisepublicrelations.com HWISE

    All things considered, just sounds like you could use a home-cooked meal here in NYC… There’s plenty of foodies and a really solid food culture here. real food, real people. next time you’re back here, give me a holler, I’d be glad to show you some of the best food NYC has to offer and without breaking the bank…

  • Me

    Come to Brooklyn, k thanx bai

  • A NYC startup guy

    I came from Florida, spent time in Mountain View, and moved to NYC for a start-up. In many regards, it was a mistake. The support structure for start-ups in NYC just isn’t there. It’s not. Almost every single point that AdGrok is 100% valid, and this is coming from someone who is completely unbiased in terms of geo-location. If I had to do it over again, I would have stayed in CA. Now, that’s not to say that startups can’t exist or make it here. They most certainly can. I’m making it and will make it. However, it’s just not condusive to a healthy start-up environment, where you have a good chance of succeeding. Anyone reading this trying to decide between CA and NY, give yourself a fighting chance…take the CA route.

    • admin

      Thanks for the thumbs up, doug!

  • http://nyhooiser.com Steven

    Not going to argue on the start-up culture, but two quick points I want to make about NYC in general.

    1) Rent has significantly gone down since 2005. I’m paying less than you did for an apartment more than double the size of yours on the Upper East Side (in the mid 80′s; not Spanish Harlem). Yes, rent is still more expensive than most places, but you are living in New York City. What do you expect?

    2) Re: no one cooking for you. You either a) just had crappy friends or b) didn’t know the right people. Next time you visit NYC, contact me and you’ll get a nice home-cooked meal.

    • admin

      I might just take you up on the offer. It’s been ages since I’ve been back to NYC….I think it’s just about time for a SF detox actually.

  • http://www.cloudspark.com J Schmitt (@cloudspark)

    Antonio -

    You nailed it with “… Both Silicon Valley and Broadway are unique products of the cities that spawned them, and every attempt to create a Silicon Alley/Silicon Sentier/Skolkovo/whatever in various parts of the world have failed.”

    Each city must look at their unique offerings and how they can open up/encourage collaboration and entrepreneurship. Silicon Valley was a place of convergence of open environments, collaboration, support, money and smart, driven people. Because of its success, it attracts more talent, more money and more people who are willing to risk it big for great ideas. Trying to duplicate the footprint of its success is to be set up for failure. Focusing on “how they did it” means you overlook the potential for your own city to cultivate tech-based success. Broaden your horizon but cultivate the distinct culture of innovation that matches the distinct qualities of that your city offers.

    Lest anyone forget, the world never revolves around one city.

    • admin

      Hey,

      Thanks for the comment.

      A voice of reason among the din of bias here.

      As others have pointed out, New York probably has advantages when it comes to mobile startups, and some aspects of social networking, being the dense city it is. So I fully expect them to produce a lot in those sectors of the tech economy.

      My post wasn’t really supposed to be such a ding…I actually do love New York. I’m scheming half the time about how to get back there without having to work on the Street (again).

      Cheers, Antonio.

  • http://www.cognation.net dean collins

    i thought you were full of crap until you mentioned cafes and hardware sores….. Home depot is a joke of a hardware store, the salespeople there are useless.

    • admin

      I agree, the salespeople are clueless. At Fry’s too, sadly.

      I still think they’re both great stores.

  • tylernol

    wait..SV is affordable? Where? I dont think so. And how about the commutes?
    I’ll stick with Austin,TX thank you very much.

    Hold on , I have to ride my bicycle 3 miles home to walk my dogs. What a rough commute. .

    • admin

      Note, I said relatively affordable. It is not cheap by any more broad definition, you’re quite right.

      Somehow…I’ve never managed to get to Austin. A gap in the resume.

  • http://thebln.com/blog/ Mark Littlewood

    Good, thoughtful and entertaining post. Wherever I go in the world people seem to think that there is important for their bit of the world to become the next Silicon Valley, Silicon Fen, Silicon Fen, Silicon Bog, Silicon Whatever. The big idea hubs of the future will come up with their own USPs, not try to steal one that has already been established.

    http://thebln.com/2010/05/vc-prozac-thoughts-on-the-scottish-entrepreneurial-ecosystem/

  • http://textsfromlastnight.com Lauren

    someone is trying to stir the pot so they can get some hits on their blog…

  • http://fiddlyio.com justin

    The Sawzall you have pictured is actually a Milwaukee brand Sawzall, not a DeWalt. But you’re right, a Milwaukee will saw through just about anything.

    • admin

      Yes!

      I should have recognized the red vs. yellow. Thanks for correcting.

      Either way, you won’t find either at the Home Depot on 23rd Street.

  • new yorker in a startup

    I’m part of a startup that just finished a YCombo-esque program in New York, NYC SeedStart. Our funding was the same as if we had gone to YC, and we’ve been able to live comfortably, and will for a bit more, on the money.

    Aside from the financial world mentioned in this article, the city has a strong history of people living cheaply for the sake of ideas of various sorts, whether their political, artistic, scientific, or entrepreneurial. The summer months aside, we are fundamentally an indoor people, more inclined to work than play. We’ve got these things going for us; what this means is that we probably won’t be (and already aren’t) a backwater. It by no means means that you will lose your bet, though.

    • admin

      Hats off to you, sir. One of the questions I kept asking myself in New York, is how’d I’d ever live there on the shoestring grad student budget I used to subsist on. I don’t know how people do it there. I suspect it’s pretty brutal.

  • http://iamnotaprogrammer.com Colin Nederkoorn

    It was a fun rant to read, but here’s the problem:

    You have no expertise by which to compare the tech scene in New York relative to San Francisco. Your experience is in finance in New York and a startup in San Francisco.

    • admin

      :(

      You’re absolutely right.

      The thing is, those world intersect, in that they’re both bidding for tech talent.

      I agree though, I never spent much time in the tech scene outside of finance. To be honest, didn’t really feel like New York had one, but then again, I never really went looking for it.

  • http://www.victusspiritus.com Mark Essel

    Wonderful read, couldn’t disagree more but you made solid points.

    Why do I disagree, because I’m an optimist. I’d much rather see NY full of startups and techies (and foodies!) than bankers and quants.

    Good move going to a startup. I do prefer SF to NY but only because I can walk comfortably outside more days of the year. What area do you live in, maybe you prefer the burbs to the concrete jungle of Manhattan, that can certainly take a psychological toll.

  • http://www.brainewave.com/ Mike Caprio

    Wrong on every single count. You definitely don’t know much about what’s happening in NYC these days.

    “The mythology is all wrong.”
    What part of starting a business has anything to do with getting laid and impressing people? Are you talking about Los Angeles, or the Bay Area? Or did I miss a bit of a Valley transformation where startups became more about smoke and mirrors and being rockstars than about making money? Well, I’ll ignore that for the moment and actually talk about the mythology needed for creating a startup: having a dream, having ambition, having talent. New York is all about starting – starting new lives, the immigrant dream! Starting a career and following a dream on Broadway! Who isn’t inspired by the canyons between the skyscrapers of New York City?

    “Living in New York, you hemorrhage money, and don’t see much in return.”
    You’ve got this one backwards, friend. This is incentive to be MORE creative, MORE entrepreneurial, MORE efficient. People work their asses off to make it here, multiple jobs, hustling any way they can. They live 5 people to a 2 bedroom/1 closet apartment, they constantly look for deals and free and cheap things. This fosters the growth of startups and founders that are economical and innovative as hell. Quite a long way away from the stratosphere of fancy chairs and of well-funded Valley startups headed by privileged not-brown dudes who don’t know much about hard work. And what’s the return, you may ask? Well see there’s your problem right there: you have to ask, so you’ll probably never know.

    “New York’s entire economy is based on monopolies of information.”
    See, this is a clear sign that your worldview is pretty narrow and skewed, but that’s understandable seeing as how you came from the financial world. That’s certainly true of Goldman and much of the big financial business that once ruled Manhattan, but you don’t take the long tail of small and mid-sized businesses into account. New Yorkers don’t take shit from anybody – and they will absolutely start a competing business just to spite someone. New businesses are thriving everywhere in New York and the city’s economy continues to turn in spite of the loss of revenue from all the loser banks who had information monopolies and STILL failed anyway.

    “+/- 1 for being Gentile (depends on the cocktail party).”
    Not even going to touch that one dude. Pretty uncool.

    “The intellectual candle-power isn’t there”
    New York draws the intelligentsia of the entire WORLD my friend. I’ve met brilliant people from all over: Europe, Canada, Asia, Australia… we’re not limited to the immediate geography, we’re drawing smart people to the most vibrant city on the planet. Ask a smart person from anywhere else in the world where they want to live, and I guarantee you they’re going to say “New York” and not “Palo Alto”. And I think the NYU ITP program might take a tiny bit of exception to you calling them an art school.

    “One of the biggest shocks upon moving to New York was realizing it had no cafés”
    DUDE, there’s a Starbucks with free WiFi every five feet in Manhattan, and there’s an uncountable number of independently owned coffeeshops, bakeries, cafes, and bars with free WiFi all over Brooklyn. I can work at d.b.a. Williamsburg, a craft beer mecca that serves $3 draughts, until 4:00a.m. if I want to! On Graham Avenue I can go to my choice of at least a dozen different places – many of which are frequented by all manner of artists, craftspeople, thinkers, filmmakers; I’ve often overheard MTV exec meetings, film production meetings, and YES tech startup meetings happening everywhere and flashed my business card whenever appropos.

    “The reality is, the food culture in New York mostly sucks.”
    I just ate an heirloom tomato and basil that my neighbor grew in a community garden four blocks away for my lunch today, and it was luscious and sweet as hell. Food carts and trucks are exploding so fast in the city that stodgier elements are trying to legislate them out of existence. CSAs are everywhere and many have waiting lists, greenmarkets accept EBT. Nearly every new restaurant or food establishment has an artisan chef behind it who is making his or her own stuff from scratch, organic, with local ingredients. Oh, and can you get a really kickass slice of pizza at 3:30a.m.? What, you don’t have subways that can take you anywhere you want 24 hours a day? Go drive to your nearest California Pizza Kitchen and wait until they open for lunch, I’ll take the train to Di Fara’s in Midwood for the best pizza in the world.

    “The Bay Area, by contrast, is a hacker’s paradise.”
    So you’ve never heard of NYCResistor, home of the MakerBot (which has been covered by nearly every major news outlet) and darling of every Maker fair? You probably also haven’t heard of Bug Labs, HTINK, AdaFruit, Alpha One Labs, or heck, 2600? Maybe you should take a look at the hackerspaces wiki and count how many are existing or building in NYC right now? You know about the HOPE conference that just happened here, right?

    “[Goldman quants won't work for you]”
    As far as I’m concerned, that’s a huge plus. Weren’t they the same folks who plunged our country and the rest of the world into a recession? They don’t sound too smart to me. I’d rather hire a bunch of Harvard and MIT geeks from Camberville than frat boys who think they’re smart.

    You == pwnd. BK represent.

  • http://techme2.eu bcurdy

    Just out of curiosity: did you write this article specifically to get attention on HackerNews ? I couldn’t get rid of this impression while reading it. I like a good rant though and this was distracting. But next time, add some content too. There are loads of great startups in NY and you know it. As we all know that it will never become bigger than the Valley…

    Congratulation for generating traffic to your site ;)

  • Nick

    Jeez… Did you ever leave Manhattan and venture out to Brooklyn? This post’s San Francisco equivalent would be in the context of never leaving PacHeights.

    Bankers +2? Gentile +1? Ivy League +1? Jesus christ, cross over the bridge to Brooklyn and try telling the techies in Dumbo or hipsters in Williamsburg you work for Goldman Sachs and see how many “points” you get.

  • http://indiancode.net Jeff

    I left the bay area and moved back home to NYC to launch a startup. We’re doing really well and we don’t need VC. woot!

  • Tech girl

    I’m not sure I agree with this assessment – let’s start with a list of great startups to come out of the NYC area recently – anyone ever heard of Etsy? FourSquare? Squarespace? Tumblr? Yipit? Clickable? And I’m just naming a few! Not a single one is close to Wall Street.

    As for cheap rents there is Hoboken, Jersey City, and Brooklyn. Anyone who is resourceful can find decent rent. . .

    Maybe there aren’t cafes where everyone meets, but I’ve met some amazing entrepeneurs at co-working spaces. . . and I’ve never met a guy in Manhatten that’s had a hard time getting a date regardless of where he worked!!!!

    And last but not least – to have a successful startup culturue you need people who are smart and willing to work hard. New York’s got both. . . . and I think there’s nothing more inspiring then running with a city full of bright hard working people, keeps you on your toes. . . .

  • Jason Morrow

    Almost all of these assertions are bullshit and here is why: Brooklyn.

    Almost everyone I worked with at Google & Yahoo! in NYC lived in Brooklyn. (big tech community) The rent is half of that in Manhattan, so quality of life is equal to SF. The restaurant/foody scene is the most progressive in the country. The “intellectual candle-power” comment is just, well, retarded.

    I get the sense you spent way too much time in either the upper east side or lower manhattan when you should have been kicking it in Ft Greene. I would think New York sucks too if I hung out with suits all day.

    • admin

      I’m sure you’re quite right about Brooklyn. The place always felt kind of SF-y to me.

      Not so sure about the rent being half though. It sure wasn’t in the nicer parts, when last I looked (mind you, that was 2005). I think people have figured out the Brooklyn arbitrage, so I don’t see why rents would be particularly cheap (for example, lots of my colleagues on the street lived in Brooklyn Heights…subway ride was actually shorter than most of Manhattan).

      And I’m sure you’re right that I spent too much time with suits. Sadly, didn’t have too much choice at the time.

      I stand by the candle-power comment though. The day I see VCs prowling the basement labs of NYU looking for startups, the way VCs do at Stanford, then I’ll print out my blog post, make paper soup out of it, and eat away.

      • Jason Morrow

        Brooklyn heights is just an extension of manhattan, so that’s why the prices are more. I used to rent a full floor of a brownstone in cobble hill for $1800, so nearly half what you were paying. Either way, closer to SF prices, which are not cheap by US city standards.

        Berkley and Stanford are amazing schools but we have almost all of the ivy leagues within spitting distance of NYC. All of them have CS departments. If we cultivated tech more those universities would follow suit one would hope.

        • Jjub

          Dude. I pay $1800 for an entire Brownstone here in St. Louis, Mo.

  • Rusty Scupper

    >> shaving my head and joining a Buddhist monastery in Burma.

    You have no idea of the profound peace and happiness you have missed my friend.

    • Mark M.

      Um, California’s not just broke, it’s dead broke for decades. So’s NY. I suspect neither region will be innovating anything other than schemes to flee before that tsunami of taxation/social collapse that is coming your way. Only a dreaming fool or a billionaire with powerful political cover would want to move to California today.

      Then you break into a spat of intellectual snobbery about “intellectual firepower” that is the mirror image of the NY social scene you deride. I’m pretty sure Gates, Jobs, or Paige and Brin, and certain billionaire mayor of NYC wouldn’t assume that the next big thing comes the “right” schools. And unlike Bloomberg, there’s nothing groundbreaking about facebook or craigslist, they were just one of hundreds of identical startups that rose to dominance because they executed well. Web 2.0 is not an example of technical advancement so much as it is about the social acceptance of old technologies.

      And as for the idea that there are no cafes in NY? Did you ever walk around at street level? And did you seriously question the food that is available in NYC vs. San Fran? Do you always smoke crack prior to writing?

  • Felipe

    For Mexican food you have to go to Brooklyn. The best restaurants are between 50th Street and 59th street 5th Avenue Brooklyn. In the Sunset Park Area. I know because I’m from that area and that is where a lot of Mexicans eat. The restaurants are run by 1st generation Mexicans (that is, they were not born here in the USA) which means that the food will not get more traditional than that. There is actually one specific restaurant I’m thinking about which I go there all the time, unfortunately I don’t remember its name. . The taquitos (real tradional taquitos like from my home town, not the crap you get at Taco bell) are delicious. And you can also order fresh squeezed juice.

    • admin

      Felipe, where were you when I needed you?

      I had to make do with Chipotle while I was there….can you imagine what lengths a man is driven to in order to do that???

  • DKNY

    This is a fantastic piece of writing. I’m moderately stunned this sort of high style was composed by a former quant.

    I mean that entirely as a compliment.

    The only weakness is that there’s a bit of straw in the man you’ve set out to demolish.

    Chris Dixon, et all, have not (that I’m aware of) argued that NYC will become a tech hub of Silicon Valley’s stature. I’ve never seen anyone make the case that the amount of investment pouring into the Manhattan/Brooklyn/DUMBO complex would ever surpass that of the Valley.

    The thesis put forward by Dixon/Conway/Graham seems to be that relative to its history, New York City is becoming an increasingly meaningful generator of clever entrepreneurship and is worthy of greater investor attention. I think that in the wake of Tumblr, Hunch, Boxee, Gilt Groupe, etc, it’s hard to argue that this is not the case.

    It’s probably true that the city would have a harder time nurturing a Facebook-scale entity than would the Valley. And yes, old money has more status than new money, but that’s because there’s a lot more of it in NY. It really only takes one or two extraordinary successes to plant the seeds of a new mythology.

    • admin

      Hey Dan,

      Thanks for the props. I think I make a better writer than quant, actually.

      I think you’re completely right, and NY has made huge strides in fostering a culture of innovation. In fact, in areas like mobile I expect it to lead SF, since it’s such a dense city with a walking culture. It’s funny, I hear more about the NY tech scene now that I’m in SF, than I ever did while I was there. But I suspect the din of the Street never let me hear it (sadly). Had I heard it, I might have stayed.

      Ok, I’l put my straw man away….

  • http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/ Michael O. Church

    New York is fucked for one and only one reason: the absurd cost of real estate. We don’t have a fair market; we have an oppressive landed aristocracy that doesn’t do anything productive, but drains the financial resources of productive people and sets a negative tone across the city. It’s them-versus-you from the very beginning. For the longer view, there’s the cost of raising a family, which most people want to do eventually: the only occupations that reliably pay enough to do so in New York are the parasitic ones. Startups can pay out immensely, but that’s not reliable.

    You can avoid douchebags who care about New York Times wedding announcements. They don’t want to be friends with you; don’t be friends with them. The fact that such idiots exist and set a social tone about their world is no more of a mark against New York than final clubs are against Harvard or a few creepy weirdos are against MIT– both schools, in spite of their duds, still have an awful lot of bright, interesting people at them. Unfortunately, while you can avoid douchebags, you can’t avoid writing absurd rent checks, except by getting out or never going there in the first place… which is what a lot of talented people do.

    New York missed its opportunity to become a technology hub. Real estate prices are “sticky downward” (illiquid when declining) and, without an amount of government intervention in the rental market that would be politically untenable, there was no hope that rents and prices would come down in time. The talent that Wall Street bled out (and the amount of this has been overstated, because quants have tended to keep their jobs over the past few years, unlike bankers and floor traders) is, for the most part, leaving the city.

  • Chris

    I have to say that everything you note in this article is somewhat true about a large part of Manhattan, but is absolutely false about Brooklyn. Sure, SV is never going to be rivaled by Silicon Alley, but the reasons you give do not apply to this entire city.

    • admin

      You’re totally right. I used the terms New York and Manhattan, synonymously, which is a gross error. Mind you, most Manhattanites make that same mistake.

      First order of business the next time I’m in NY: finally really check out Brooklyn. Can’t say I know much beyond the Heights and Park Slope.

  • pastrami guy

    try the kitchen table on castro, it’s not katz’s but they cure their own meat and make a great pastrami.

    • admin

      I’ll check it out.

      The closest I’ve come so far is The Refuge in San Carlos (of all places).

  • Atane

    You sound like the kind of guy that moved to NYC, never left Manhattan, then judged the entire city by that. $2500 is mortgage on a damn nice house everywhere outside of Manhattan. I bet unless you are reminded, you actually forgot that Manhattan is a fifth of NYC. There are 4 more boroughs that comprise NYC. Cafes are everywhere outside of Manhattan. Most New Yorkers don’t live in Manhattan. They commute from the outer boroughs to work and go back to real neighborhoods, with real New Yorkers, with real neighborhood jaunts.

    All the good, authentic food that is reasonably priced is not in Manhattan. They leave all that overpriced shit to transplants, Gordon Gekko wannabes & doe eyed tourists. Real New Yorkers don’t care about “scenes”. It’s people who have a preconceived notion of what New York is that do. I call it the “Sex & The City” syndrome.

    If you want to experience NYC, the first thing you need to do is leave Manhattan. Transplants like you paying $2500 a month for shitty sardine can size apartments are the reason for gentrification & why rent is soaring at unbelievable levels, because you are willing to spend a quarter of 10 grand a month to live in a prison cell. I wish more of you left to be frank, you’ve ruined this place.

    • SkellzeePlayer

      So you summarize your whole point by ending with “you’ve ruined this (NYC) place”? Why would I want to live in the ruins of a once great city? You seem to have made the authors point for him.

      • Atane

        Manhattan, guys like him have ruined Manhattan. The other 4 boroughs are fine for the time being. Brooklyn will be the next Manhattan. Hey, we will have Queens, Staten Island & The Bronx. Transplants haven’t ventured out there yet. We don’t need anymore overpriced condos & gentrification.

    • http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/ Michael O. Church

      Excellent post, and I agree wholeheartedly.

      I prefer the outer boroughs, finding Manhattan pretty soulless as a place to live– it’s just a business district with a few overpriced bars– but there’s one factor that is often a problem: commutes. Also, people coming here don’t know which neighborhoods are safe and so they often choose Manhattan just because it’s the “safe bet”.

  • ejpusa

    Ok, but come on, the woman who don’t talk to you are what, 10X more beautiful in NYC then anywhere else on the planet? And that’s a conservative number. Every guy that visits me in Manhattan agrees to that one.

    And food? WOW, I can take you deep underground in Queens. By the time your leave a Bengali Fish feast at the end of the end of the F line you’ll be hallucinating. Like no other meal in the world. And no, I don’t think it could ever be reproduced in a home kitchen. No way, no how.

    But yeah, start ups are tough here. ATT is still pretty confused why people stopped putting dimes in those pay phones. Still don’t get it. :-)

    • andy

      I grew up in NY. I live in SoCal and go to the Bay Area a lot. There are a lot of models in NY, but the number of uber hot babes in Ca. is simply astounding. It’s just like the line in the movie Beverly Hills Cops, something like “6 foot blonde women grow on trees here”

      • Marcus

        You should all visit Stockholm/Sweden during summer. ;)

        • pastrami in SF

          Miller’s East Coast Deli on Polk has the best pastrami in SF. I believe they have many of their ingredients shipped in from NY (definitely not very local/sustainable).

    • marco

      “Ok, but come on, the woman who don’t talk to you are what, 10X more beautiful in NYC then anywhere else on the planet? And that’s a conservative number. Every guy that visits me in Manhattan agrees to that one.”

      uh ? have you ever moved out of NY ?

    • admin

      They are much better looking, that’s true!

  • Lawrence

    Although one should be careful of seeking out confirmations of previously held world views, I would agree with the author. Businesses related to the establishment in New York are held in much higher esteem than anything new. What capital exists here is attracted to the security of the too big to fail industries, i.e. finance. Capital here is risk averse. Furthermore, this city has a long established social hierarchy which occupies the protected, lucrative industries. Consequently, your proximity to the protected industries is indicative of your social influence. And for all the talk of Brooklyn in the comments above, unreliable train service to and from Manhattan negates a lot of the benefits of living out there. To move up the economic ladder here, you must associate with the traditional brands and serve their risk-averse goals. I’ve worked mostly in startups out here, just because I like them, but it’s interesting to see the correlation between how fast my peers have moved up the ladder, and how traditional their industries are. I meet rich lawyers and bankers, but no rich Googlers. Google has little social importance here. It’s just another office, yet one with $155 billion market cap. Whereas Goldman Sachs, at $83 billion, vastly outweighs Google in nearly every measure of “importance” in this city.

    • Felipe

      The trains move millions of people to and from Manhattan. If they were really unreliable it would be total chaos since a huge chunk of the population relies on them. Can you please give some examples?

      • Mr Obvious

        About 10 years back when the northeast power grid failed, everyone in NYC went into the streets and stood still for 6 hours. They were clueless as to what to do. It was like a bunch of stupid zombies. I’d say that is a pretty good example for you.

        • Mike

          That’s because *everything* in the city was dead – traffic lights, subways, commuter trains, etc. People who lived close enough to walk got home just fine, and even those who had cars close enough to a bridge or tunnel. The problem was that the entire city was gridlocked, and for many people it was much easier to sleep in their office than to try to get home.

          And at any rate, I would hardly say people were “zombies” – we were out in the streets, talking, theorizing, exploring, etc. It was kind of exciting.

        • dug

          How is that an example? It is an example that they are reliable. People didn’t know what to do because the trains were reliable so they didn’t have to figure out an alternate means of transportation on a day to day basis. Talk about something you know about. Not something you think you know about.

        • Felipe

          I stand corrected. That has nothing to do with the trains . The entire city went out. Is not like the trains caused the block out.

      • Jen

        The L train has had irregular service all summer. Last week the train skipped all stops between Lorimer an Myrtle Wycoff, and you had to take a shuttle if you wanted to go to any of the stops in between. Two weeks ago, the L train stopped working for two days completely, and a week before that it stopped running after twelve.

        The L train is more regular than NQR or F line… I feel bad for anyone who has to commute to Manhattan on a regular basis from those lines.

        • Felipe

          I cannot speak for the L train because well, I just don’t use that line that much. I travel from Brooklyn, to manhattan, to Bronx quite often. Occasionally to Queens. Service is quite good. I won’t say is 100% perfect since delays do exist but that happens anywhere. Considering that the New York subway system is among the biggest in the world it is pretty reliable. So again, I stand corrected.

  • http://www.roadtofailure.com Bradford

    This is absolutely fantastic, I couldn’t agree more. NYC is “fun”, but for a startup founder, it’s not “livable”.

    Startup culture fascinates me — I’m a Seattleite, but I visit the Bay often for bizdev. Even on the West coast, SF is miles ahead of everything else.

    • Blondie

      Californians visit New York to tap into the main line of cultural vitality, watch with blazing eyes for subtle differences they can bitch about, then fly home to write superiority screeds.

      New Yorkers visit California to go to somebody’s wedding, and maybe to drink some wine. They then fly home to continue living in the most dynamic and desired city in the world.

      Or, to put it another way, New Yorkers don’t write articles like this one. They don’t have to. Nothin’ to prove when you’re the top dog.

      Too bad this article wasn’t actually about technology. There might have been a “there” there. It was about style, and to comment on that than, I reference a SoCal guy (dontya just hate them too, now? been fighting that war on two fronts, have we?) who could have been describing the Modus Operandi of New York:

      “I wanna be more like the ocean:
      no talkin’, man, all action.”
      -Perry Farell

      • http://jm3.net jm3 (John Manoogian III)

        > “One of the biggest shocks upon moving to New York was realizing it had no cafés”

        Really? Bullshit. http://skitch.com/jm3net/dxqw1/new-york-has-hundreds-of-cafes

        • admin

          Yeah? And in how many of them can you open a laptop and work? My claim stands: there’s nothing like a California cafe’ in New York.

  • http://www.benjaminharlow.com/alloftheabove Benjamin

    $2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment?

    Did it come with it’s own hooker and coke habit?

    • anona

      for real … i just left a 575sq foot in the village for $2100

      • Aaron

        this is just a lame, ranting post. OF COURSE ny won’t be like Silicon Valley. The scale built up in Silicon Valley is unrivaled and means nobody will ever “be silicon valley”. Doesn’t mean the NY can’t have a thriving tech startup scene.

        And, not to pick apart your analysis here, but you clearly circled in one small segment of NY. sure, those are the stereo-types you listed (bravo for identifying just about every single one), but NY is not that monolithic. Just like LA isn’t all plastic and Hollywood snobs. Let’s just take one of your stereotypes: food. Sorry, but NY has far better food and variety than SF (wait, was your rant comparing NY to Silicon Valley or San Fran, I kept getting confused because you surely know that they’re two very different place?). And you can have great food in NY without dropping $300 and without cooking at home.

        I’m wondering how many times you watched Gossip Girl and Wall Street to memorize all of the NY stereotypes to include in your rant. Can you quote Chuck Bass verbatim now?

        Listen, NY isn’t Silicon Valley. San Francisco isn’t NY. It’s a different place. deal with it and stop ranting about b.s. that is fairly meaningless. If you don’t want to start a company in NY, then don’t If you don’t like the social circle you’re in here, then change it.

        • Michael

          Lived in Brooklyn/New york for 6 years and living in Oakland/SF now. Aaron makes the most sense.

        • admin

          I still maintain the food is better in SF. Find me a decent avocado in New York in November, and I’ll believe you. But you won’t, because it doesn’t exist. As for the ethnic food, if you call Sicilian pizzerias ethnic, then sure, NY wins. But if that’s your definition of ethnic, who’s diverse here?

          Also, spare me stories about finding some tiny eatery in Queens. Been there for the Indian food….and the Filipino food….and the Mexican food (yuck). Jackson Diner is ok…pretty mediocre actually. Amber in Palo Alto blows it out of the water. That’s just one example. And I don’t need to go to the ass-end of Queens to find it either.

          And I described the one part of New York relevant to the post…i.e, I described the ambitious yuppie circuit that presumably will create those startups. Those who at least possess the skills, connections, and capital to (maybe) make it happen. The point is, that achiever class can’t do it. Should I talk about the diversity of Bed-Stuy in a post about the tech scene? No, because it’s not relevant.

          Your comment sounds more like a rant than mine does. And from your comment, sounds like you’ve spent far less time in SF than I ever did in NY.

    • admin

      Ha! If only….

  • Sababa

    You just outlined all the reasons why I don’t care to live in either city. I grew up outside of New York, and have my share of friends doing a range of jobs there. And, I lived in the bay area for 4 years. I agree with your points about New York. As for SF, I think they make it TOO EASY to start a company there. You get your fair share of start-up douchebags with some equivalent characteristics of their wall street counterparts.

    • travis

      I couldn’t agree more. This article gave me a new appreciation for Columbus Ohio. ;)

      you can keep your urine smelling streets and hip for the sake of hipness.

  • Kramer

    New York, if you can make it here you can make it anywhere.

    California, if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere.

    • Felipe

      Amen

  • http://www.recojeans.com Kevin Barry

    Seriously – talking as someone who has lived in both places – Astoria, Queens, has better food than anywhere in California. It’s also not that much more expensive – One bedrooms cost about $1100 in most of Queens.

    • marco

      amen.

  • Edward

    Kramer is right… NY is a tough place, but you live extremely comfortable if you’re successful. And if you can make your success here, you can make it anywhere else in the world. That’s why SoHo is like the benchmark for successful fashion companies, Court St. is the benchmark for law firms, and NY itself as a benchmark of good food. The bad restaurants get no business and are guaranteed to be extinct, and same with everything else. If you suck, you might as well pick up and move west. Follow the Oregon Trail motherf-er.

  • Edward

    By the way… if the editor of this site has time to write this type of troll, then he is definitely not a successful entrepreneur; that is for sure.

    • travis

      what does it say about your success that you feed the troll you see?

      mr pot, i’d like to introduce you to mr kettle. i think you’ll find that you have lots in common.

  • http://giffconstable.com Giff

    sorry you got sucked into the Goldman vortex. Agreed if you are hanging out with bankers, at the bars and restaurants they go to, and sucked into benefit gala scene, you will see what you describe. I’ve been there. But it is rather strange to extrapolate your personal and narrow-sounding time in New York to general fact, especially given the diversity of NYC. I’ve done startups in both places and could make ridiculous statements about either city.

    It’s a meaningless debate anyway. It’s not about whether New York will overtake Silicon Valley, because of course it won’t. But New York has a shot at finally, finally turning into a more viable place for startups and that’s a good thing.

    As for food, that is a rather funny and wrong generalization. Both cities have incredibly vibrant food blogging (yes, I’m talking about people who cook) communities…. go ask the good folks at Foodbuzz.

  • Hugh

    BAIT. Take a moment and look at adgrok.com. You are just failing/FAILING if you think this is a real dialog.

  • http://www.themagiclantern.blogspot.com Em

    As a proud new Yorker for many decades, I have to agree. Absolutely.
    Webapp and 2.0 geeks might try to disagree, but remember the Valley has all that plus HARDWARE and CHIPS as well. We don’t design or make chips in New York, and we don’t do telecom hardware. Also, the investors in NYC tend to fall into two camps: Big old banks and firms and lil’ tiny VCs. You don’t have VC bench strength of Sand Hill duplicated in NYC.

    Culture? The arts? Food? No comparison: New York is not only better, SF is shockingly weak in comparison. SF is like a neighborhood of NYC. But for high tech and VCs, even I a proud New Yorker have to agree it’s the valley hands down.

  • Frank

    At least the taxes are low in both states … oh wait no both are ridiculous where you pay out 12% of your salary in income and sales tax.

    • marco

      eu is 20% ( but you don’t see it ’cause showing the net price + tax is outlaw )

    • Laughing all the way

      Others have commented enough on the main article.

      I will restrict my commentary to your footnotes. They are truly inspiring.
      For Jon Stewart comedy lines.

      1. Matt Mireles giving advice about entrepreneurship? A guy that could not convince even angels to seed fund his idea? Together with a fired quant from Goldman, who did not manage to get his PhD, we have an excellent team. You will be joined by the creators of Google Wave explaining why email is dead,

      2. Have you even *read* “Bobos in Paradise”? Bobos are those with huge kitchens, band “meandering conversations about heirloom tomato gardening”, and sailing their boats to feel the freedom. Yes Bozo, you are one of the Bobos. Read the freaking book.

      3. Please check the size and the growth of Facebook when it moved West. Everybody and his mother knew about Facebook by then. Ah yes, you did not. You were astutely pricing CDS’s back then.

      4. “I went north of 14th St maybe three times” Congratulations! You managed to live in New York and never see New York. Even tourists have seen more of the real New York than you did. I guess you were not entering the subway either? Or maybe all your knowledge of New York comes from watching Sex and the City?

      5. Cafes? You cannot find coffee shops? OK, I guess you did not even manage to see the New York south of 14th street either. Joe’s. Think. RBC. I will not even start pointing to places in “Upper” Manhattan, or Brooklyn since this is not NYC for you. Oh I see. You do not like these coffee shops. Too crowded. You like the suburbia, and silent coffee shops of Berkeley where nobody is supposed to speak and interrupt the flow of ideas?

      6. ” …the ethnic food in New York, unbelievably, is pretty crappy too…” Congratulations! You managed to write something even more idiotic than all your prior statements. But again, you’ve never been out of Manhattan. I guess your best Greek food was a souvlaki deluxe from the corner diner? And you consider Vatan the best Indian in town? Seriously? Even Tabla Bar has better food than Vatan. And it is a bar.

      Anyway.
      Best of luck.
      You will need it.
      Badly.

      • admin

        Just a couple comments. Cafes aren’t coffee shops, guys. The fact you can’t tell the difference is kind of the point. You can’t really read the piece without having spent some time in California.

        And yes, the ethnic food is crap….compared to SF. Mexican? Non-existent. Indian, that isn’t some greasy taxi driver slop? Ha! Greek is ethnic to you? And you think your city is diverse…

        I know about the growth of Facebook. 90% of it happened on the West Coast, guy. Not to mention almost all of his VC funding (a more important number perhaps).

        • BB

          Please man, don’t mug yourself. You don’t know shit. Five years in NY is nothing, but really you shouldn’t stay longer. Go back to SF, pussy.

          Indian food — I see you’ve never been to Jackson Heights.
          Mexican food — I see you think an SF Burrito is Mexican.

          Want more ethnic food?

          Come out to Crown Heights and get a Trinidadian dosa or some Jerk Chicken at “The Islands”. Watch out, most of the people there aren’t white and they sure aren’t yuppies.

          Or maybe you can come to Flushing and get amazing Korean and Chinese food, the type your tiny brain hasn’t even conceived of.

          What about Brighton Beach? Been there? No? Well don’t go, because you’ll have to speak Russian in any of their hundreds of ethnic restaurants.

          You know what New York will always be? A backwater for pussies like you. Go back to where you came from. The 40% of New Yorkers who were born in another country don’t need your chicken ass clogging up the sidewalks.

          • http://bronxilla.blogspot.com/ bronxilla

            Yes, you can’t live holed up in your $2,500 apartment and expect to experience New York. Some of the ethnic foods may be dumbed down in certain areas of the City, particularly where they cater to tourists, but I dare you to go to Little Italy in the Bronx and tell them their ethnic food sucks. “Now you can’t leave”, Sonny LoSpecchio

        • joe from queens

          I agree with a lot of the pro-west coast/SF points here, but this business about ethnic food sucking in New York is absolutely ridiculous.

          1) New York has more immigrants than anywhere. ANYWHERE. If you want authentic ethnic food, you’ll find it in New York.

          2) Different places have different proportions of immigrants from different countries. SF probably has more Mexican and Indian immigrants, so you’ll have more Mexican and Thai restaurants and food carts, etc., so it’ll be easier to find good Mexican and Thai food in SF.

          LIKEWISE. It’s hard as fuck to find really good Jewish delis, Colombian restaurants, Ecuadorian restaurants, (legit) Sicilian pizzerias, etc. on the west coast. In New York, you’re never too far from any of those.

          • admin

            Joe,

            So you’re completely right in saying that it’s hard to find decent Jewish delis (SF is about the un-Jewiest city in the US), Columbian restaurants, or real Italian food. SF has a huge gap there.

            I suppose I’m necessarily biased by wanting really good Indian and Mexican, and never finding either in NW. And yes, I went to Jackson Heights. In SF, I don’t have to get on a subway for 45 minutes to get decent Indian.

            Oh, and Cuban food. None of that in SF. Decent amounts in NY.

            Clearly, my piece was biased toward Manhattan. That borough alone, it’s pretty crappy. Thing is, as scum-sucking yuppie that I was, I rarely left Manhattan. So my comments refer more to that borough, than NY as a whole.

      • James D.

        Uh… Just a clarification on your point 3:Facebook moved to Palo Alto in June, 2004.

        I can assure you that not ‘everybody and his mother’ knew about it back then; MySpace hadn’t even reached critical mass yet in those days. Every college kid in the Ivy League may have known about Facebook, but I’m quite certain his mother did not. I’m not even sure there were a million users on Facebook in June ’04.

        I think the author is right that Facebook wouldn’t have scaled the way it did, had it stayed back east. It would’ve been an east coast college site, maybe with some penetration in the rest of the country’s ‘hipper’ schools, but little more. I certainly don’t think its rise to half a billion was inevitable.

  • Máirín

    You do know that Manhattan isn’t the only place in NY to live, right?

    • admin

      Yes! Quite right. I equate New York with Manhattan. Like a true Manhattanite…and yet so wrong.

  • Nobseque

    @Atane

    I moved to NYC and lived in Yonkers. I attended law school in Manhattan. My background included high tech employment with Bay area companies. You are right about things like the rent or culture.

    But I wholly agree with the author. The culture in NYC is definitely one of greed and screwing people over as much as possible. It is even celebrated. I can’t imagine any sort of creativity that involves investing meaningful IP will ever take root there. Well, if it ever did take root, some guy is going to come along and rip the plant out as soon as it gets an inch high.

    Another thing that I am not sure the author touched on is the hierarchy of the place. There is a great deal of emphasis on loyalty to the boss – to the point that people in NYC will put up with abuse. In CA, there is a great deal of emphasis on horizontal mobility. I personally think this finds its roots in the nature of the economy. The NYC economy is, as the author suggests, based on monopolies of information. But I would go further and say that the history of the economy is fundamentally shaped around positioning oneself in a monopoly position over cash flows. NYC’s roots is that of a port. The person who had control over the ports could charge a fee on whatever was imported and exported. So a lot of fight was over who controlled the flow of money or goods through the city. The only way to assert that kind of control in a large scale economy like NYC is through gangs or their variations. In this sort of economy there is no value in someone saying, “hey I have a great idea on how to make the shipment a little bit faster.” The unions would hate it, the bosses charging the fees would hate it, etc. The preeminent issue is maintaining control over the flow or cash or goods and then skimming it.

    This culture has been adapted to Wall Street and corporations. Prior to Silicon Valley and Microsoft, the major corporations were very vertical and were also based largely out of NYC or the neighboring counties.

    So what do we see now? Basically the same thing. Very vertical companies asserting control over a large good or cash flow. For example, GS asserts control over Fed money. With that control they do things like HFT or FR that add little to the economy and have questionable value to be added. But they still maintain control through influence in DC.

    I left NYC because I got sick of having to scrutinize every freaking transaction. Even simple things like a cab fare or buying a sandwich had to be watched to make sure I got my change back or that they didn’t price my sandwich wrong. Strangely enough, incompetence that favored the other party seemed to be unusually prevalent in NYC.

    As far as the other things like must have Ivy League or live upper east side is all true. I don’t know how many times I would get interviewed on that list. I was annoying.

    So now I live in a much nicer area of the country where the landlord actually does fix stuff without bitching and I don’t have to worry about some bozo fucking me over for a buck on a sandwich purchase. I also go out of my way to ensure my money doesn’t go near NYC. All of my savings are held elsewhere. My firm is doing just fine.

    One thing NYC did teach me well is thinking very skeptically about other people’s claims. As an attorney, that is something I will appreciate very much. But that is not a place for a successful start up. Anything valuable will be eaten up.

    @Kramer

    Whatever. You’re retarded.

    • Atane

      @Nobseque

      The business/work culture of Manhattan is that of greed. The other boroughs are nothing like that! I feel like screaming this at the top of my lungs. The neighborhoods are communal, people know each other, kids play in the street, we tend to gardens, play stickball etc. NYC gets a bad rap because of the sharks in Manhattan. 9 times out of 10, those sharks giving New York the bad name aren’t even New Yorkers. Cab driver ripping you off on the fare? I bet he’s not even a New Yorker, but a transplant or from a different country altogether. Getting pinched an extra buck or two on a sandwich? Same deal. All these douchebags come here and act this way because they think it is the “culture” here. They also do it because transplants are gullible & expect to be treated like shit. New Yorkers don’t get treated this way at all, because they don’t accept being treated like crap. Who else but a transplant would pay $2500 a month to live in a closet?

      Come to Staten Island where Italian grandmas will make you Baked Ziti & Lasagna for mowing their lawn or shoveling snow. The St. George neighborhood on SI is New York city’s best kept secret. Everyone greets each other on the block. And the beauty of it is that it is 25 minutes from Manhattan by ferry. The ferry is also free & runs 24/7, 365 days a year. Tons of artists, culture, museums, Middle Eastern, Indian, Pakistani, African, Chinese, Mexican & Caribbean cuisine.

      I always laugh when people say there is no good Mexican food in NYC. They have clearly never been to Port Richmond, Staten Island. It is a largely Mexican neighborhood with tons of great food. Of course, I don’t expect all the transplants to make it out here, and I’m glad, because once they do, they will bring all the crap that they bring along with them everywhere they go. (gentrification & displacing the people who lived there for ages, high rent, lack of diversity, chain establishments that cater to their palettes i.e. Starbucks etc)

      So when I read crap like the author writes, I just know we have someone who literally did nothing & went no where for a few years in Manhattan. It’s like going to Hawaii, then staying in a hotel room for a week, then coming to the brilliant conclusion that Hawaii sucks, & the atmosphere is one of cold “room service”.

      Once you venture past Manhattan, you’ll see that they are no strangers here. Go to Astoria and shoot the breeze with older Greek gents who will welcome you kindly. I could go on and on. This is the New York that most New Yorkers know, but we are a silent majority. However, every upstart who moved here from a different town that got sucked in to working in Manhattan for a few years wants to tell the world what life is like in New York City, and how depressing it is. Guys, you never experienced New York City.

      This blog post by the OP is clearly traffic bait, congrats it worked.

      • http://nerdhappy.blogspot.com Nerdhappy

        I hear what you are saying about the outer boroughs. I lived in Carrol Gardens for two years, my sister still lives in Clinton Hill, and I have friends in Astoria. The world beyond Manhattan is totally amazing and the author obviously missed out on that.

        But I also think everyone is selling Manhattan short. The East Village, Gramercy, Tribeca, Inwood, Washington Heights, these are all in Manhattan too, and they are awesome neighborhoods with amazing people, delicious food, and great bars and pubs.

        If you come to Manhattan and only hang around Times Square, Penn Station, and Wall Street, then you have only seen one small piece of the great island.

      • admin

        The New York I described may not be the New York most New Yorkers know, but it is the New York that the ambitious creative class that creates startups knows. That’s what I tried to capture in my piece.

        People seem to read my piece as a criticism of New York as a whole, rather than that one narrow sliver.

  • http://www.prohiphop.com Clyde Smith

    I could quibble with some details but mostly this is a very solid post. Thanks!

    By the way, hip hop may have been invented in the Bronx, but we don’t need New York anymore except as a market.

    That place is gradually being drained of relevance in every field but it was a nice run from the end of WW II to the end of the 20th Century.

    Ah, the old days! They ain’t comin’ back.

  • Mike

    …and you graduate to Seattle at the end of it all :-)

    • pencilears

      shuush you! keep it down.

      @everyone_else
      Seattle is a terrible city. it rains all the time and people kill themselves more here than they do in the midwest. we have an unusually high rate of multiple sclerosis possibly also attributable to the rain.
      you do not want to live here.
      Californians will find it much to dark, wet, and horrible and new yorkers get unnerved by the blank eye’d politeness of our people.

  • Really

    This is such a ridiculously biased article. “The reality is, the food culture in New York mostly sucks.” “In San Francisco just about everyone I know is an über-foodie.” Are you kidding me? I lived in NYC and SF for four years a piece and I found that everything is relative. Some of the most amazing restaurant experiences I have ever had were at small restaurants off the beaten path in NYC; when it comes to restaurants, SF just cannot compare (although there are some great restaurants in SF) just based on the geography alone (there are so many more restaurants in NYC). I knew some people in both places that liked to cook their own food and I found that either place was just as good for a home cooked meal. I get the point as to why NYC will never be on par with CA for tech companies, but the author is obviously biased against NYC in all respects. NYC is expensive. We get it. So what? The City has so much to offer that it is worth it, at least for some people. Try to find something really fun to do in SF after 2:00AM if a house party isn’t your thing and you are going to be wishing you were in NYC.

    • admin

      Ha. I don’t go out after 2AM, because I have to get up the next day and work on the startup (while New Yorkers are still queueing up for brunch at 2pm, thanks to that bar being open…last I checked Clinton Street Baking Company now serves brunch until 6pm!).

      Mixed blessing that, bars open after 2AM. New Yorkers already drink too much already.

  • yttrx

    I’m a native manhattanite. I was born here. And you can tell right away who’s a transplant (even from outer burroughs) and who isn’t.

    Yes, it’s very expensive. Yes, it *can* be cannibalistic in it’s nature. But even inside manhattan there are dozens of neighborhoods, and some of these neighborhoods contain people who are not allowing themselves to be ripped off on a 2500 dollar, one bedroom apartment that’s specifically priced for transplants.

    But you have to know where to look.

    And to know where to look, you have to have been here for a very, very long time.

    See, it’s sort of its own built in flood-valve; we eliminate transplants by forcing them to think for themselves and be independent and figure out how the hell to sustain a good life here. It’s possible, people do it every single day. I’m doing it right now.

    But there’s not one native who’s going to tell you how. And good, because we don’t need any more fucking transplants. Stay in idaho. (or queens)

  • http://yourstartupsucks.com Brandon

    Interesting points — but completely unfounded.

    Just three hours ago, 900 technologists, investors, creatives, and hackers came together for a near-free, extremely popular, extremely supportive evening of tech demos. This happens every month — and there’s more than 14,300 people among our ranks.

    There’s a difference between the valley and the alley: our ecosystem is collaborative whereas yours is heads-down competitive. For now, you’ve got the engineering talent — but that’ll change when folks start to realize they can live in Manhattan instead of San Fransisco and STILL kick entrepreneurial ass.

    The NYC tech community is supportive and vibrant and growing in a way that Silicon Valley will never “grok”. You speak of closed doors, of competition, of expense and you sound like someone who hasn’t been to the city in years.

    I’ve gotten meetings with VCs and angels and CTOs and researchers by sending a single polite email. My customers live around the corner and — what’s more — are only too eager to be a part of my development process. The biggest question many engineers face here is whether they’d like to go to a ruby meetup or a python meetup or a noSQL meetup or a scheme meetup or a computational linguistics meetup or… get the picture?

    The Dogpatch experience is NOT the NY Tech experience. We have an open ecosystem that is growing fast and that cares very deeply about sharing, collaboration, and improvement. I build systems every day of my life and I wouldn’t want to be doing that anywhere else other than right here.

  • Jack
    • Antonio

      I agree. Glad to see more than just my datapoint on the food thing. Funny…lots of people agreed with my post, EXCEPT about the food bit.

  • http://startupSQUARE.com Tristan Kromer

    I agree with some of the main points and otherwise enjoy the writing, but some of this reads like someone who arrived in San Francisco, never left the financial district and then said, “San Francisco isn’t very hilly.”

    Clearly you are also not looking very hard for cafes. I mysteriously manage to find them quite easily when I visit, even having not lived there in 10 years. I call this Yelp.

    Regarding rent, you got ripped off. Or perhaps you like to live posh. Perhaps you’ve never heard of Brooklyn or Queens. I think it’s interesting, particularly given your comments about Columbia. Oh yes…Columbia in Harlem.

    Columbia is not in Harlem. Buy a map. It’s not even in Spanish Harlem. I hear there’s something called Wikipedia that can help you if you need to do a fact check.

    I’m also completely baffled as to why you think no one other than students and teachers would go to Harlem, if in fact Columbia were in Harlem. Perhaps you simply don’t think the people who live in Harlem count. I don’t know if this poorly phrased on your part, or you desperately need to make some black friends.

  • Riet

    Sydney sounds better than both, quite frankly.

    • janm

      No. Financial services in Sydney dominates, but they don’t do great ORM layers and figure stuff out, they implement big-vendor crap badly. There’s almost no local market for technology and you’re a long way away from interesting markets.

      And it’s probably cheaper to live in Manhatten.

      It does have coffee shops and food, though.

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  • jon2234

    Nothing like fighting flame with flame. Silicon Valley is a tech mecca eh? Perhaps you and your little closed community can believe that if you keep repeating it to each other. But the view from the outside with a bit of historical context is different.

    With all of the gazillions of dollars in funding and hordes of brilliant PhDs what have you guys actually produced int he last few decades. Some nifty consumer oriented web page companies. Great – a 500th site letting me comment on photos of people’s pet poodles with social bookmarks. The sad part about SV today is that there is so little real technology. What I see are bunch of Python script kiddies and their enablers (con-men VCs whose primary economic function is to disguise the fact to pension funds and endowments that VC is an awful awful investment asset) chasing trends by lashing together technologies developed long ago and far away (the Internet — defense funded East Coast, Linux — Bell labs East Coast) etc… Facebook is a media company not a tech company. Now dont get me wrong – its a very well done and well executed media company. But it aint technology.

    SV is in a sad state of core tech decline masked by the hubris of a bunch of script kiddies founding companies to – oh say optimize some ad placements on websites – and thinking they are the freaking Manhattan Project.

  • Kevin

    Hello there everyone. I am a current resident of Brooklyn who spends about a month a year in the Bar. I got back from one such trip yesterday. I have dual careers in the arts and tech.

    I won’t argue that the Bay Area will always be above and beyond NYC for tech startups. Regarding everything else…

    Your experience as a quant for Goldman Sachs told you very, very little about the enormous and varied place that is New York City.

    How much did you learn about hardware stores sitting behind a desk all day? I know where to buy drywall, plexiglass and rent generators… in Manhattan.

    Downtown Manhattan is not New York City in the same way that four or five neighborhoods in SF are not the Bay Area. Hell, the halfway point in Manhattan is 96th St.

    Regarding hardware stores, there are many serious construction supply places in Chinatown, Chelsea and far uptown. If you get to count places in Oakland and Palo Alto, maybe you should consider that Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx have hardware stores that can stock the materials to build a skyscraper or maintain several bridges.

    Same thing with rent. Desirable SF is about as expensive as downtown Manhattan. Want to live in a cheap place or SOMA or the Tenderloin to prove your point? Fine. Harlem and Washington Heights still have plenty of run down cheap places to live. And of course, you can live in Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx on very little.

    I posit that we have the best ethnic food in the world. Sure, burritos are better in California. But Jackson Heights has better Indian food than SF ever will. Sorry that you never made it outside 6th St and Curry Hill. And I’m very happy with the CSA produce I get every week from a farm on the North Fork of Long Island.

    • Truthiness

      “I posit that we have the best ethnic food in the world.”

      I’m sure Indian food is better in India than in NYC.

  • projectshave

    (1) My gf works for Goldman Sachs and makes far more than the hypothetical $300K for quants, yet neither she nor most of the people she works with act the way you describe. In fact, even her boss, a GS partner, is totally down to earth. She’s not in IB or trading, which probably draws more assholes than other departments.

    (2) The cost of living is only extreme in Manhattan. We live in a 1300sq.ft. apartment on the Hudson for $2500. It takes 10 min. to get to Manhattan. Our kitchen is bigger than your whole apartment.

    (3) The food in NYC is much better than my experience in SF, but LA is the best for cheap eats. Even Chicago is better than SF.

    (4) There are lots of small tech companies in NYC, but they aren’t in consumer web stuff. They are generally finance and media startups. They will never be profiled on Techcrunch.

    (5) I’m from the midwest and people in NYC are, IMHO, generally assholes. Native NYers call it “aggressive”. People in CA are much friendlier and more laid-back.

    Your experience in NY is colored by your snobby social circle. Since I avoid those people like the plague, I’ve had a generally good experience in my 5 years here. With all that said, I’m eager to move to SF for the weather and farmer’s markets.

  • darose

    Wow – what an astute analysis … of the small prep school / Wall St. yuppie contingent that makes up approximately 2.5% of the population of NYC.

    VC’s have been opening offices and funding startups here like mad over the past few years. They – and those of us who work for such startups – obviously know something that you don’t.

    Great! Competitive advantage for us!!!

  • Transplant

    “New York, New York, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere”. Have you ever heard a song like that for Menlo Park? No.

    You came to New York, you failed. You even failed to use the subway to get out of Manhattan. Sour grapes.

    Boo hoo. Bye bye.

    Succeed in NYC first and come and tell your crying story.

    • Truthiness

      Its also true that if you can’t make it in NYC, you can get the taxpayer to bail you out. See AIG, Bear Sterns, Lehman, even GS.

  • laa

    wow, Om, a stunningly narrow minded post. i happen to believe NYC is a fantastic place for startups. there isn’t another place on earth that is more densely populated with smart, passionate, tenacious and creative entrepreneurs. yes, NY has suffered for more than a decade at the hands of a hording financial sector (filled with greedy bankers who drive rents sky-high and artists to brooklyn), and yes rich people get to live like poor people here – but c’mon man, be a student of history. NY has seen many trends come and go. it is a cultural, political and business epicenter of the world. SF is a small town where wealthy ex-Goldman types retire to ‘live the good life,’ sip wine and join VC firms that look like yacht clubs. it’s a fantasy world. NY is about the struggle, about the journey. the valley is about fluff.

    anyway, fine if you hate it here. NYC says fuck you back. but don’t be so dismissive of a trend which is very significant and very real for those building awesome tech companies here.

    and I’d order your t-shirt now. :-)

    • bek

      It is refreshing to hear someone speak the truth about living in New York and being in the tech world there. Besides what’s mentioned in the story, the taxes are too high so even if you are paid the highest salary you’ve ever made you are still less well off. And it is too paved over and full of garbage; Silicon Valley, Boulder – these places have green and wilderness spaces everywhere. And don’t even talk to me about the hardware store situation. You have to rent a truck or take subways to go to a Home Depot? That is so ridiculous. NY is a decaying city.

      • http://bronxilla.blogspot.com/ bronxilla

        You can’t be serious – too paved over? Should our streets be made of dirt? would cobblestones make you happy?

        Yes, New York is too expensive because our government is huge and we provide just about every service you can think of, but decaying? Say that to the people who keep migrating into New York and keep it thriving.

        • joe from queens

          Damn, bronxzilla. That’s sad — you ought to get out of the city sometime.

          By ‘too paved over’, he means there are (1) no green spaces on the scale of those you see on the west coast, and (2) not as many trees outside of dedicated green spaces as you see in west coast cities. This is objectively true.

          • http://bronxilla.blogspot.com/ bronxilla

            Well, I think it’s funny that I read his statement literally but, given his rant, not surprising that I did. I get out of New York plenty. There certainly are not enough green spaces in New York but there really aren’t any more places to get it from.

  • Erik

    Really? Never a home cooked meal? Just because your social circle did not include that, does not mean its not possible. I’ve had that happen many times. In fact I hosted a weekly get together at my own apt. with many types of home cooked food, and I know quite a few people who grow their own food. You can find a backyard, it is not impossible, and for not that high of rent either (2BR 1600).

    I’ve found in my 4 years here a melting pot of ideas that are vast and strong. I’ve seen maybe people take a business from their living room as a part time job to a full time job. I’ve seen people open boutique shops that expand and move. I’ve seen a coffee shop and cafe become successful enough to open an organic bakery (and BOTH are very inexpensive).

    Sir, your views are quite simply ignorant and biased. The beauty of NYC is that there are many types of people, creatives, inventors, techies, and yes hustlers. It takes all kinds.

    And as for social status…really? You really are worried about what a bunch of yuppies think? I think you lack confidence. Find friends that believe in you because of your ideas, not your tax bracket.

  • http://trevorowens.tumblr.com Trevor Owens

    Hey moron, you forgot about Yale, Penn, & Princeton. Three of the world’s top universities that all send graduates to NYC.

    Thanks for wasting 5 minutes of my life with this garbage.

    • CMD

      None of which are located in New York… derp.

      • Dan

        Hey California, nice economy you’ve got there. ;-)

        I’ve visited California, and I know the people who run startups, and they are usually functioning alcoholics who’ve spent too much time reading The Game and Ruby on Rails in a Nutshell, and nowhere near enough time living a real, diverse existence out there in the “Real World ™”

        A reciprocal accusation could be made towards wall street types over here, but they’re not the folks in startups.

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  • HookahMike

    This is hilarious!

    A guy who works at Goldman Sach, who dates an Ivy League Med Student, who goes to parties where you get or loose social points, and spent more for his one bedroom by himself then I do for my room in a 6000 sq foot Financial district share thought NY was shallow.

    As an employee of one of the big 3 (tech companies), with a start-up I work on in the spare time, and a consulting practice to help other start-ups get prepared to be in front of investors. I just got to laugh.

    I ride my bike to work on the West Side highway along beautifully landscaped parks. I wouldn’t go to Nobu, cause its a joke, but would have a 10 course dinner at Degustation where the menu is seasonal for 75$.(East Village)

    The NYC angels are a strong organization, the VaNJ gets a lot of stuff done. If you are actually going to Wall street to find your investors you’re doing it wrong.

    No we don’t have as many start-ups as Silicon valley. We never will, then again I have been threatened by a knife wielding tripping dreadlock wearing teenager who decided being homeless was better then highschool in NY.

    I’ve not had to listen to a pitch about how social shopping was going to facilitate better brand experience through genuine conversations in a while either.

    • HookahMike

      Haven’t been threatened by.

  • Vladimir

    The closest thing New York has to a hackers’ cafe is upstairs at Earthmatters, an organic food store on Ludlow off Houston on the LES.

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  • Emily

    What do you mean Silicon Valley has relatively affordable rent prices? Relative to NYC or relative to the rest of the countries cities?

    I’ve lived in NYC and the rent prices are the same as they are in Silicon Valley/SF. A lot of start ups are leaving SF for cheaper rents like in Portland (aka Silicon Forest).

    • http://and-still-i-persist.com bfwebster

      Yeah, that was a big CLANG! while reading this. Bay Area rent/property prices aren’t quite as outrageous as Manhattan, but there’s a reason why a lot of Valley folks commute in from Walnut Creek, Morgan Hill, or (as I did on two occasions) Santa Cruz.

      But I’m truly baffled by his talk about lack of cafes and the lack of a ‘food culture’. NYC? Seriously? And what do home-grown asparagus and Home Depot have to do with tech startups?

      • Pooua

        He might have had a thin case arguing that asparagus gives rise to tech business savvy, but Home Depot and Fry’s are obvious choices. Tech startups don’t exist just because someone had a great idea; they exist because the people with the idea figured out how to make it a reality, and that means they had to build something that has a physical existence. They had to know which end of the screwdriver to use!

    • sflove

      Are you kidding? For the same rent in SF you get a place that is 3 times the size of a place in NYC. There are plenty of cheap places that are really nice. I have lived in the city for about 14 years and I’ve had 5 places. I’ve never paid more than $500/month in HUGE places with backyards.

      I guess if you need to live in highrise condos in SOMA you can’t live affordably – but even then, the size you get is significantly more than NYC.

      You can’t compare SF and NYC to Portland – totally different classes of city from capital access, business density, and many other factors.

      I’ve lived in NYC and I’ve lived in SF – hands down SF is a better place to live with better people.

  • DD

    I just got back from a week out in the Bay Area where I spent time on Sand Hill Road pitching my startup. The synopsis of what the top-teir VC’s told me was this:

    “We love your idea and we love your product. It is a significant technology with real IP and a high barrier to entry. You have a large and rapidly growing market. Your positioning and timing make you the best play we’ve seen in this space. Your team is outstanding. Your access to and strategy for capturing top talent to join your firm are brilliant. Your cost structure and revenue growth are impressive.

    However, this is a new era. We are high on your product, your team and your market. We no longer invest on those fundamentals. Before we will fund you we have to evaluate you according to the criteria of this new era in technology. We are going to have to hang out with you for six months and ensure that you meet the highest standards of these new criteria. You must prove that:

    1. You have ample access to, “real”, cafes to work in. You must adhere to the new productivity paradigm of the cafe environment. No cafe workspaces, no legitimate business, no funding.

    2. You can pick up on shallow, insecure babes by truthfully saying that you run a startup when they ask you what you do. Our assistants will brief you on the definition of success and conversion rates. No demonstrable playa skills, no legitimate business, no funding.

    3. You have access to and knowledge of organic gardening. No crunch, no legitimate business, no funding.

    4. Your friends and neighbors must all demonstrate that they are world class chefs. Nothing validates a market, ensures that an innovative and high quality product is delivered, and market share for software will be captured more than your ability to maintain the company of an obnoxious culinary cackle of foodie snobs.

    Let’s reconvene in in three months and see how you are doing in meeting our criteria for funding. If that conversation goes we’ll take a couple of minutes at the end to see how you’ve developed your product, market share and revenue growth.

    ”

    Please dude! What I am about to say I do not say for the sake of being pretentious. I think this whole NY vs SF, and for that matter any kindergarten home team, “We’re Number 1″, discourse is silly. I say this to make a point.

    I am a native of Northern California. I lived in San Francisco for 20 years before recently moving to New York. I spent the large majority of 15 of those years working for software startups in Silicon Valley. They were all great teams funded by top tier VC’s, and achieved various levels of success. This petty, “We’re better than”, rant was absurd. What makes Silicon Valley great is an engineering culture that strives for greatness and passion for excellence combined with equally skilled and committed business people and access to capital.

    There is no reason why that can’t exist in New York. New York has all the assets you need to be a major technology center. It has a long way to go to be on the level of the greater San Francisco Bay Area to be sure. I for one am not interested in this silly argument. I do know that New York does have more than its fair share of superficial people, whose intellectual prowess may be significant within a very narrow spectrum, but lust too much after all of the trappings of money, power and prestige. From the looks of this blog, New York got a net gain out of a certain quant’s relocation to the Bay Area.

    The more people whose priorities and analysis are distractions from the real ingredients for success in building a substantial technology industry that leave New York the better.

    The rest of us can put our heads down and build amazing products with pride and humility in the spirit of Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy, Scott McNeely, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, Stanley Mazor, Paul Chambers and many others in the pantheon of great technologists and pioneering entrepreneurs. The more we invest ourselves the way these greats did the more significant, successful and enduring New York’s technology industry will become.

    This type of pride and steady discipline isn’t sexy or high profile or a high-octane rocket rise. But it is what made Silicon Valley great. If it can be done there. It can be done in New York. All of the ingredients exist. It is up to us to develop and apply the requisite technical skills, vision, discipline and passion for great technology.

    Sincerely,
    David

    • admin

      Dude, I loved it. And you totally had me too. I didn’t realize it was satire until about point two. That says something about the VC scene and the funding process…

    • Jonathan Halvorson

      There are some good points at the heart of this post. The culture is different in NYC, and engineering/quant talent is definitely pushed towards the careers that are more lucrative, high-status and readily available here–namely, finance careers.

      But David is right that this post veers into the ridiculous at times. Really, no cafe culture in New York? I spent grad school here and wrote my dissertation at cafes across Manhattan, from Morningside Heights to SoHo. And in any case, cafe and foodie culture have nothing to do with the ability to support a entrepreneurial industry.

      And Antonio’s point about not going north of 14th street made me laugh out loud. Dude, 90% of New Yorkers live outside of downtown Manhattan. In fact, probably 75% of New Yorkers only go somewhere between 14th and Wall street once a week or less. Wall Street dominates the money scene in New York, but Fortune 500 companies in almost every industry are based here and publishing (with its quasi-creative class) is huge in terms of employment, if not $$$. It isn’t just agents, but editors, copywriters, etc. Who do you think your neighbors were in the East Village?

      That said, there is a much stronger argument for why New York will probably not catch up with the Bay Area in any of our lifetimes that Antonio didn’t mention. Is no one here aware of the work that won Paul Krugman the Nobel Prize? (OK, the Swedish Bank prize in honor of Alfred Nobel.)

      Krugman explained why certain places acquire dominance in particular industries (mostly historical accident!) and keep it long after the historical conditions that created the dominance in the first place are gone or irrelevant. It’s basically all about critical mass and the ability to draw from a pool of local talent that is created by other local companies. Think of HP and its progeny in the case of Silicon Valley. Once a city or region becomes dominant in an industry it is very hard for other places to supplant it. So Antonio is right, but mostly for the wrong reasons. David, I appreciate your optimism about New York, but the odds of it catching up soon are almost zero.

  • Dev

    Please. The Bay area’s best days are far behind it.

    Is this just because you you are jealous of NYC based Admeld?

    http://www.nyconvergence.com/2010/08/admeld-raises-15-million-.html

  • Chaz

    Great post. As far as Goldman Sachs folks, these people don’t even register any more one the “those that matter for shit” scale..along with anyone in the NYC Financial Services industry. Here is how you know: You see a nicely dressed dude in a {insert luxury car name here} and you learn he runs a start-up. You may still think he is a douche, but you also think: risk-taker, creative, achieved something, produced something.

    You see another similar dude in similar car and learn he works for Goldman Sachs (or Finance in general). You think: thief, no class, produces nothing/adds nothing,
    no integrity, does coke, hates kids and loves trannies. And if you see a girl with GS dude, she is immediately an over-educated, sell-out prostitute…or just a prostitute.

    NYC Financial folks broke the social contract. Before, they at least understood that they can earn any amount of money they wanted, as long as the average schmuck could buy a shitty house, a car every five years, and a vacation to some jerk-off place once a year. Now that NYC financial people have taken ‘all’ the money, Average Joe now can see how worthless a Financial Services person is to a society. With a Goldman Sachs employee, there is no longer anything to even be resentful of…The start-up assholes in San Fran can still garner resentment because they can remind the average dude what he has not achieved. No Average Joe ever dreams
    of making a lot of money in an unglorious way…No one wants to break the Home Run record with a Steroid Needle sticking out of his ass as he crosses home plate. NYC Financial People are forever more, pure shit…

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  • http://www.nitenren.com Renarudo

    Clearly, this post was made to be flamebait. As a native of New York City, there is so much in THE FIVE BOROUGHS that keeps me seeing new things every week.

    I have more restaurants from various food styles and ethnicities in my neighborhood in Queens than I can shake a stick at.

    IT definitely sounds like you have a very limited view of the city and interacted primarily with, as you put it, “Yuppies”. Seriously, I hope you meet some folks of ethnicity who can take you into Brooklyn or Queens, because there is no excuse for your comments on the food scene.

    For serious, have you BEEN to the Gyro stand on 53rd and 6th?

  • exNYerGeek

    thank god someone spelled it out.

    though I have to say Katz’ is a total scam because they have 3 kinds of pastrami:
    pastrami, lean & extra lean all priced higher than the next

    In other words we’ll give you disgusting cuts of fat unless you pay more- par for the course in NYC

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  • Ruy

    You guys have In&Out burger. Honestly if you had used that as your argument I’d have given it to you. All the other stuff is just hopeless stereotyping. You fall into the who’s who of NYC only if you let yourself. There’s ample room for a tech boom in this city.

  • Stefan

    Funny article with of course a lot of truth to it. However, I moved to NYC from Silicon Valley beginning of this year and love it. I work for a tech company in a hi-rise building at the intersection of Wall Street and Broadway; can’t get any cooler. Granted that hi-tech people belong into the blue-collar category here regarding income level, but I am already afraid of having to move back someday to the boredom of Silicon Valley and see people in slippers and t-shirts every day.

  • Bicoastal

    Unfortunately this guy was scarred “working as a quant on Goldman’s credit desk”, guided by his “live-in girlfriend, an embodiment of her socioeconomic cohort”, and traveling in circles where “every yuppie…worked as either a Wall Street guy, a lawyer, or an agent of some sort.”

    Sorry you never saw New York. Meaningless word vomit.

  • Amy

    OMG, your whole piece is so ridiculous! You don’t know what you are talking about! CLEARLY, you lived in a bubble when you lived in New York, hanging out with all those corporate lawyers and bankers. And achem who pays $2495 for rent in 2005! You were probably at the office until 10 and getting take out and then getting a car home or getting wasted at a really lame club in the meatpacking district with the rest of your type and all the Euro trash…..Or “slumming” it at some dive bar on the LES thinking you are all cool….I assume you took cabs everywhere? In response to NYC as a decaying city—- NYC is still one of the cultural and financial capitals of the world. Just read any literature on the creative class and social nodes and you will see that NYC is still the center of the financial, social, artistic, and yes even foodie worlds. S.F. and Silicon Valley as a cultural capital-Since most of your conjectures are based on anecdotal “evidence” I’ll use your same reasoning. I know many people who have gone to CA excited about the promise of all the wonderful things in your article. And you know what? Most of them come back to NYC. Sure, the lifestyle is pretty good there: low pollution, lots of dinner parties, pot, good food. But it is BORING! San Francisco has no film or theater scenes, few literary types, little diversity, everything closes at 12, the weather sucks (it’s always damp and bordering on cold), and most people suffer from anti-intellectual bent and are passive aggressive. Food-Yes the food is good in California but I really think it is one note. The ingredients are generally good but the preparation is generally nothing out of this world. Whereas in NYC the ingredients can be really good (depending on time of the year), but the preparation is generally outstanding. People in NYC eat really well…..
    I applaud you for trying to write something catchy and for trying to seem like an expert in all matters and things NYC/East Coast. But there’s a reason most people in NYC give little thought to the West Coast or that small town of Silicon Valley—–it’s just not that interesting….

    • joe from queens

      “and most people suffer from anti-intellectual bent and are passive aggressive.”

      TRUE DAT.

  • Gunnar

    As a recent grad currently “living” in New York, things have changed quite a bit since the banks hit the fan.

    - Goldman no longer has anywhere near the burnished luster you describe.
    - Finding delicious food with little effort (or cash) is now incredibly easy thanks to Yelp.
    - I pay $1000 a month for a decent place in midtown west. The only person I know who pays north of $1500 is my friend’s brother who lives in a Trump building on Central Park West with a park view for $2400. Now that is a nice(!) apartment, but roughly equivalent to a house on Nob Hill in SF.

    By far the best part about living in New York: I don’t have a car.

    • Franco

      Where’d you find the place? I couldn’t find anything for less than $1500 and a 7k broker’s fee in the area.

  • http://www.flayer.cl bidah

    well, im not from sf or nyc, but really… nyc is a dream, has always been, i just wanna wake up and be there. sf can wait.

  • ex-esquire

    if you agree to wear the same i-heart-ny t-shirt for a month (no laundry) and give me 7 years (whole economic cycle has slowed post-crunch so that’s only fair) you’re on

  • emilio

    i love this rant. ive been in NYC for too long… gotta get out :)

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  • koan

    Man, watching the springs a-poppin’ out of the commenter’s heads here alone is worth the price of admission.

    Well done, Antonio!

  • tesstricks

    Above all else the Nobu comment is really weirding me out. Who goes there just for sushi when we have St. Mark’s? I’m sorry you didn’t figure out that sublimity is usually not found by following a trail of money. You could’ve had a better time here.

    Congratulations on figuring out that trolling draws eyes!

  • Brooklyn4Ever

    I love educated NY opinions by people who never left the island of Manhattan. Scratch that – I’m assuming you never ventured north of 96th street or south of chambers. I’m a 3rd generation native of Brooklyn and lived in San Francisco for 6 years- how much of an expert would I be writing about San Francisco if every comment was based on my experience in the dirty streets of the ‘Loin or the botoxed beauty salons of Union Street?

    You want rent comparable to SF? Come to Brooklyn. You want East Bay cost of living? Queens. And you can leave the car at your mom’s garage in Atherton because an $89/mo metrocard buys you all the transportation you need. Oh yeah, our subway runs 24/7 and is far more ‘green’ that your HOV grandfather-stickered 1997 Prius stuck on the 101.

    Yes I miss the produce at the Ferry Plaza (but the crowds are nicer in Grand Army Plaza) and the burritos in the mission, but there is an amazing amount of great food here if you put down your ‘Not For Tourist’ book or iPhone app or whatever. And I can send my children to great public schools here.

    Ultimately quality of life is subjective in a lot of ways. When I’m here I always miss the outdoors and the wine country I had ready access to in SF, but there I always missed the life and energy of the real City, NYC. We have a lot more than finance here – New York is the home to arts, entertainment, retail, fashion, advertising, diplomacy, and yes, a burgeoning tech scene. Many of the entrepreneurs I know came to start companies because this is where they want to live and the people/culture here – whether from finance, marketing, or whatever – is conducive to building it.

  • http://www.linkedin.com/in/reginawalton Regina Walton

    Wow! I’m a native Californian, born, bred and, for the most part, educated there. I went to law school in San Francisco. I moved abroad for almost a decade, and I came back to San Francisco in 2009. The rents were still crazy.

    I’m in, of all places, NYC now. I’m on the fringes of tech. I’ll admit I don’t work for a start-up (…at least, not yet…) but I’m loving the environment here. I think it’s great, and I don’t really understand your ire. In the Bay Area people can be just as snooty and exclusive as evidenced by all of examples you brought up as to why the Bay Area is better. Hippies and goats? Dude, really?

    I love San Francisco and the Bay Area. I find avoiding douches helps me cope with wherever I happen to live. Try it.

    It’s YOUR problem that in three years of living here that you didn’t get above 14th St. BTW, My first apartment was uptown in Harlem and, since then, I’ve lived in North Brooklyn.

    It’s YOUR problem that the people you dealt with couldn’t cook. Maybe try socializing with people who aren’t complete douchebags. I pass Balthazar a few times a week, but I have NO DESIRE to eat there. The only thing I know about it was it was featured in a pretty funny Sex and the City episode a few years ago.

    I agree with the produce. As a native Californian, the produce here sucks. However, with Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and FreshDirect, they’re trying.

    You chose to run in those exclusive circles knowing full well the sorts of people that were in them. I’m going to parties (a lot on the LES since you brought that up) where there are smart and earnest people trying to do their respective things. I have no doubt that a fair amount of them will.

    I’m not dim enough to think that the scope of the tech scene here can eclipse the scale of Silicon Valley. However, I do think that the tech scene here is very strong and can carve out its own unique and viable niche.

    To say it can’t is, frankly, bullshit.

    Beyond that, this post seems to be nothing more than a rant and an expression of how much you didn’t like NYC. With that said, I’m glad you’re some place that you like better. (…seriously…no sarcasm there at all..) However, this is an apples and oranges comparison. I’d rather have it done by someone who wasn’t so biased against NYC and had a broader experience of what NYC has to offer. If you didn’t take advantage of all that was here while you were here, that’s on you.

    There is a booming tech scene here. It’s developing. We’ll see where it goes. Why would it want to aspire to be another Silicon Valley?

  • http://www.skypulsemedia.com Howie at Sky Pulse Media

    If you are talking scale you are right. But plenty of start-ups in NY period. Not all are tech. And your story sounds a bit like my NY friends who moved to LA and didn’t get discovered by Hollywood. Everywhere you must pay your dues. Like 10 years worth before the big pay day hits. It just is that way. I think you do what you want anywhere if you put your mind too it.

    A lot of your observations are correct regarding NY and SF./SJ. And we all live in our own self created bubble. I can live in a 2 Bedroom in LES for the price of your first 1 bedroom. Why did you pick such an expensive area to live?

  • http://meaghano.com Meaghan

    This is really one of the most blatantly sexist things I’ve read in awhile. Considering the industry I work in–yours–that is saying a lot. Great example.

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  • John

    Something about all of this, but especially the comment about west coasters being passive aggressive reminded me of the New Yorker cartoon where the LA receptionist (I know, southern California, not northern, but the point remains) is saying “have a nice day” and thinking “fuck you” while the NYC receptionist is saying “fuck you” and thinking “have a nice day.”

    • admin

      Hahaha. That’s pretty good. It IS a fact that the California ‘have a nice day’ is really ‘fuck you’…..

  • http://hmvinc.com Rob

    Wow. Why did you spend all your time in New York hanging out with (and apparently trying to impress) a bunch of assholes?

    This post would probably reach the opposite conclusion if you had the same girlfriend living in Pacific Heights, then compared that experience to hanging out with some of the bootstrapping entrepreneurs in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side.

    There are jerks everywhere, greed everywhere, and the fresh vegetables my startup co-founder brings to work from his garden in Brooklyn tell me there is good food everywhere as well.

    I don’t know where you spent your time in NYC, but I suggest spending three years below 14th Street next time.

  • Marja-Leena

    Looked from this angle New York really is a looser! But if you just visit the city a couple of times in your life to see all the wonderful museums, shows and galleries, then you can wear that T-shirt and remember your visits with the profound happy knowledge that you don´t actually have to live there :)

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  • supernaut

    Most of this is objectively true – at least as far as the business environment and the overall quality of life in the two places.

    It’s also true that the GS/Wall Street experience of New York is hardly the only socially viable currency and that that experience of living in the city doesn’t come close to encompassing all of its social/ethnic/cultural diversity. It probably doesn’t even touch it – because if your baseline point of reference for anything “New York” is Balthazar, you’re already out of your depth.

    That said, New York people will always stridently rationalize their choice to live there in the face of any misery index or contraindication. In fact, New York is SO great and SO important and SO much better than anywhere else, that you’ll even notice that when someone leaves New York to go on vacation, their friends in New York will respond to their relieved/elated tweets or Facebook updates with comments about how they need to “hurry back” to New York – or even with the type of comment that says, in essence, “wherever you are, and no matter how great you feel about it, New York is better and don’t forget it!”

    The take away is: don’t leave New York for too long, or you’ll realize that in your blind ambition to “get there,” you’re getting completely fleeced.

    I speak from personal experience. And, yes, I’ve been to Crown Heights, Red Hook, Jackson Heights, Morningside Heights, Harlem, Bushwick, the Gowanus Canal, etc. etc.

  • http://www.tereza.com Tereza

    SV = a boys locker room

    NY = a fabulous co-ed cocktail party

    • admin

      Sadly, that’s true.

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  • http://slvnews.net Jim

    Well done, stirring up the shit. I’m curious why the weather differences are not mentioned at all. To me this was the absolute deal breaker when I tried living on the East Coast.

    • admin

      Yeah, New York weather is unbearable. It’s nice about four weeks out of the year…two in Spring, and two in the Fall. And the rest you’re either freezing your family jewels off, or you feel like you’re living in someone’s armpit.

  • andronaut

    While I can appreciate the good things about living NY, it is most definitely ghetto. And I’m not only referring to poor neighborhoods. The ghetto is pervasive, from the crumbling infrastructure to people not caring about the garbage on the sidewalks. It’s an attitude that manifests itself in so many ugly ways in this city.

    Indeed, hustlers are not builders. They do the bare minimum they can to look important, gain status and make a boat-load of money. That’s what NY is all about. If you can play this game you will enjoy living here a lot more.

    The only tech start-up scene there is in NY is non-tech yuppies/hipsters who discovered the Internet 5 years ago. Most of the real hackers I know live in New Jersey.

    So best of luck to you, aspiring New York entrepreneurs!

    • admin

      Thanks for the support.

      You paint an even grimmer picture than I do…

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  • http://www.getthedrift.com Doug Weaver

    Reading your — I’m guessing — 5,000-word rant on the superiority of Silicon Valley to New York is a bit like listening to the short guy at the party telling everyone how hot his girlfriend is. Dude, why are you trying so hard? The piece seems to be all about how S.V. makes it homey and comfy for the tech start up. But with all that comfort can make one a bit myopic. Baz Luhrmann famously wrote “Live in New York but move away before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California, but move away before it makes you soft.” Seems like you might have things a little upside down. @UpstreamDW.

    • admin

      Ha! If you’re not hard, then New Yorkers won’t pay attention to you. Also, I think the NYers are used to being the aggressive, superior ones at the party, and aren’t quite used to being talked down to the scruffy hippies they’d typically look down their noses at. Maybe they can dish out but can’t take it?

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  • chas

    Sorry you couldn’t hack it here. Its not for everyone.

    • admin

      Yeah, I couldn’t. And neither can any other tech entrepreneur, which is why there aren’t any. That’s kind of the point.

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  • ha

    Your problem is you have no imagination or curiosity. New York rewards both. This entire article is from the perspective of somebody who moved to New York to work on Wall Street and spent too much time at the office to ever get to know and understand the city or it’s mind-blowingly diverse population. Maybe if you didn’t spend your time reading the Times Wedding section you’d have a friend from Nigeria instead of just making some crypto-racist comment about street vendors. New York is the only place in the world where you can walk out the door and meet somebody from any place in the world. The fact that you met no new people or had new cultural experiences outside of upper-class gossip circles is a testament to your own failings.

    Furthermore, you are extrapolating a limited viewpoint of Manhattan to encompass the entire city – New York is FIVE Burroughs. You had a bad time because you spent your time in horrible places with horrible people like yourself. Chumps come and go from this city everyday – you are only part of the churn of those who can’t hack it.

    For the record I have nothing bad to say about any other place in this country (or world), but I have no patience for little brats who whine and cry when this city shits them out.

    • andy

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  • jabbajac

    LOL this article was a great procrastinating device. If you’re going to compare NY and SF/SV then you gotta spend a little bit of time outside of manhattan and go into brooklyn, queens, the bronx, hell even staten island. sure cost of living is relatively higher in ny but hey, it’s a world famous city. Also, it seems you clearly hung out with the really craptastic financial crowd, you should really snoop around and see what other people you can meet. As for your points, the only point I absolutely cannot agree with is food. There are so many authentic places in NY, they’re just not big advertised places, most of them are hole in the walls and usually in the ethnic neighborhood. You’re not gonna get good ethnic food where you usually visit, expand your horizons and check out the ethnic neighborhoods.

  • Yonemoto

    Well, this article seals the deal. I’m starting my startup in Baltimore.

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  • Ben

    Great article; it really did make me laugh. And kudos to the commenter that reminded me of how much I miss In-N-Out.

    However, I think that your whole reason for liking SF over NY is that you enjoy your startup more than being a monkey at GS (which is perfectly understandable). Both cities are incredibly livable, which is why both have a high cost of living. If you had found a job in NY that you enjoyed, then perhaps you would have invested more time in discovering some of the great things that other commenters have pointed out.

    While your article endeavors to point out the benefits of several bay area neighborhoods, you have failed (as other commenters point out) to afford New York the same opportunity. New York has tons of great restaurants, most are not expensive, and it’s your loss if you cannot figure this out. Yes, there is a difference between a cafe and a coffee shop, yes, New York has both, and no, it’s not hard to find an example of either.

    Most importantly, I take serious offense to your view that New Yorkers don’t know how to cook. Perhaps the vacuous herd of ivy league sheep you ran with don’t know how to fry an egg. Perhaps you didn’t care enough to find an apartment with a working kitchen. My heart cries when I think that your conclusion is based more on the trading desk culture that values White Castle eating contests more than home cooked meals.

    You have made your blanket statements based on your experience of (i) working in the financial district, one of the city’s most culturally vacant areas, and (ii) living in the plasticly-grungy LES, which is New York’s answer to the phoniness of LA (seen the party bus pulling up outside Libation recently?). Could you please tell me the two most generic neighborhoods in SF, so that I can move there for 3 years to take a job I should know I will not enjoy, surround myself with people that are miserable in every way, and make blanket statements about how much it sucks?

    Really sorry you didn’t do your due diligence before taking a job at the Goldman Deathstar, but that’s no reason to hate on NY as a whole.

    • admin

      I would never claim to be totally subjective!

      You are quite right that I would have enjoyed NY more with a more enjoyable job. It was a good day when I would even see a bit of sunlight. It’s very different now, even with a startup to get off the ground.

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  • ng

    wait, did the writer work at goldman sachs? i can’t tell from his blog post.

    dude, get over yourself.

  • http://www.socialamp.com marvin avilez

    All I know is that ……..he told it like it is…….and he made it funny…what else could you ask for….

    • admin

      Thanks!

      Someone agrees with me on here at least…

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  • http://www.netpaths.net/blog Chris at Netpaths

    +1 I think New York has great opportunities, it is just harder to find them in the massive throngs of people.

  • http://www.gspayscale2011.net GS Pay Scale 2011

    Excellent!
    Great article, I already saved it to my favourite,
     

  • http://twitter.com/bizmike Michael Lewis ::::✈

    Meetup.com, Foursquare.com, Tumblr.com are huge NYC startups.

    IAC & Google have a strong presence and are heavily involved in the tech scene in NYC despite not having started there. 

    Every night there’s a tech event and every month there are countless Startup-centric Meetups involving NYC based tech companies.

    So where are you getting that there are no tech entrepreneurs. 

    There are several amazing coworking spaces and incubators like nwc.co, Sunshine Suites, Dogpatch Labs and even Techstars created a NYC chapter due to popular demand.

    I live on the West Coast now after the NYC based VoIP company I worked for was bought by a California tech company who couldn’t build a superior product after trying for several years.

    I ran a tech Meetup with over 900 members (which was small for NYC) and every month some amazing people would come out and share what they were building. 

    Sites like Etsy, Postling.com and Foursquare came from those NYC roots and reside there today.

    Geography has it’s pros and cons but it’s what YOU’RE made of that determines success. 

    Oh and it’s pretty smart to post on a topic that has been debated to death knowing you’ll get a shit ton of traffic. I fell for it.

  • http://www.codybrown.name Cody Brown

    This post is full of so many half-baked generalizations about NYC that it’s really not worth the effort to rebut in full.

    You have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m sorry you couldn’t get laid here.

  • http://jchewitt.com JC Hewitt

    NYC is a lot more than Goldman Sachs and Manhattan living. It’s a hub for art, advertising, media, management, and plenty of other industries.

    You can get a room for $500 or less in Brooklyn or (very) upper Manhattan within 15-30 minutes of commuting anywhere important in the city.

    If you never cooked in NYC and never knew anyone who cooks, that’s just you – it’s a city of 8 million people and another several million commuters.

    What are you trying to accomplish with this essay? You didn’t like your ex-girlfriend – fine. There are comparative advantages to living in both NYC and the Bay Area. Just about every company uses technology in some fashion. Not all of them will be Silicon Valley style innovators.

    There’s way more to life than social metaphysics. Not everyone in NYC cares about the pecking order.

    I guess rap-style East/West coast conflicts bring page views, but the complaints are rarely rooted in reality. Partly because both cities are so damn large that no single person has a complete understanding of the society – least of all a carpet-bagger.

  • Julie

    Actually, I agree with all of your points, but I don’t like your attitude.

    I’m proud to have my (usually) expensive restaurant food, and actually hate home cooking, no matter how “natural” or “home grown”.

    Also, your apartment was a bit on the expensive side, wouldn’t you say? You could do much cheaper.

    New York has a different culture for sure, but I wouldn’t say a worse culture–worse for tech startups, perhaps, but that’s not part of the value system in NYC. If you want to become a model, you come to NY. If you want to start a tech company, you go to Silicon Valley.

  • Another Nyer

    Having taught at an art school in new york, I’ll throw in that you left out Madison Ave and the ad/marketing companies that draw a large portion of the design/art talent. But what you left out is that the Valley made its early money on hardware and now it’s all the rage for software using that ‘old’ hardware money. I might suggest that all that ‘old’ wall street money, and madison ave money, is where the cash comes from that fuels the latest nyc tech scene.

    Also, don’t forget many NYC VCs are investors in those Valley companies you listed. So it’s a little more difficult to separate than any regional flame war could really hope for.

  • Erik

    Fantastic. New fan.

  • admin

    Yes, it was pricey. It was so expensive I moved into a tenement in the LES, actually. The doorman thing gets old. And I had a lot more fun in the LES.

    And I agree, the two cities have very different fortes. I could easily right a similar rant about how SF stinks. In fact, there’s an idea for another blog post….

  • admin

    Thanks!

  • Bjorn

    so true.

  • pastrami guy

    i think you got to the thick of it. $500k/year and can’t get laid? no wonder he is bitter.

  • Brooklyn_Berger

    Lots of subjective material here. There are 8 million people in the 5 boros, are you telling me that they are all shallow exploiters that don’t cook their own food? The beautiful thing about NYC is that it has EVERYTHING. I take nothing away from the Bay area, but your view of NY strikes me as coming from someone who worked too much and had too few friends.

  • Neanderthal Overload

    Ahh… yes, it’s all about getting laid isn’t it? How American.

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  • admin

    One word: Armonk.

  • Bennett X

    I’m from NY. Now live in SF. Adgrok, You’re completely right, except for the food part. NYC is for Streeters, lawyers, media-types, agents, wealthy or highly paid creative professionals, young partiers, and trustafarians. And immigrants, perhaps, that’s another NY entirely. But for anyone who doesn’t fit into these categories? The city’s quality of life is abysmal.

    And the poster above re: Brooklyn – I lived there, too. It’s great. It’s more relaxed. But it doesn’t touch SF for quality of life in any human’s dreams. And NYC rents and buy prices are *still* much more expensive than SF, take a look on CL.

  • admin

    Hey, I hear you. I don’t like social metaphysics either. But the problem is people in New York do, and that kind of squelches the scene.

    As for that $500 room…..I think I’d like to see it. I bet it’s one of those 80 sq. ft. places. If not, then kudos to you for finding it. I sure never did.

  • http://jchewitt.com JC Hewitt

    Yeah, tiny horrible places, but if you’re working every day – no one cares.

    Just look around on Craigslist with a filter – there are tons. I currently have the entire floor of a brownstone to myself for $1300/mo, a few blocks from an express subway. All you have to do is live away from the whites.

    The Upper East Side is the worst neighborhood I’ve ever lived in. And prep school kids are the lowest kind of scum.

    You have to give NYC some time. San Fransisco used to be a podunk little town. It would’ve been easy to discount its future success easily.

    Your old employer would’ve been atomized if its old CEO had not propped it up through unprecedented legal support. The financial industry in general will implode when it loses political support.

    Something’s going to have to replace all that securities-related business. It’ll probably be something related to tech. Bailouts only delayed the day of reckoning for the financial industry. That’s why there’s interest in the tech sector among young NYC types these days – in large part, the financial sector exists purely at the pleasure of Washington, and can be destroyed at the stroke of the pen by a Federal Reserve bureaucrat.

  • B.S.

    hilarious. awesome. so true. wonderful piece. really enjoyed it and ultimately agree.

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  • Mitsu

    I’m from the West Coast. I went to Harvard. I moved to New York from the West Coast for the change of pace, for the different lifestyle, for the art scene, for the challenge of living in a difficult-to-live place. I’ve lived here for eight years now, have never worked for a bank or financial services company, and for the most part, while I have met, know, and think many folks working for financial services companies are perfectly fine people, I think they’re more or less wasting their lives doing things which are simultaneously boring and unproductive. I am, in other words, a West Coast snob. I think building things is more worthwhile than skimming off the top of the economy. I think hustling is a waste of time and life. You only live once. I have no interest whatsoever in appearing in the Sunday Styles wedding section and I have to say if I ever met anyone remotely interested in that I would run, not walk, the other direction as fast as I can.

    But you know what? There are a lot of other people like me here. They are either tired of working for banks or they never took a bank job. They want to build things, too. If all you did when you lived here was work as a quant, no wonder you have a skewed view of what people are into here. I’ve worked for nonprofits, also staffed to the gills with Ivy Leaguers who want to build things and make the world a better place. I’ve worked for startups here too.

    Yes, Silicon Alley is probably never going to rival the Valley. But there is a vibrant culture of smart, dedicated builders here who couldn’t care less about the vaporware culture of the financial services world, who want to make a difference, who want to build things and have fun. And frankly, Silicon Alley folks, for whatever reason, seem to be a bit healthier, and more female, than the equivalent crowds in the Valley. Don’t know why, but it’s just an observation.

    Quality of life in New York is way less than the Bay Area, yes. Food on the West Coast (not just SF — LA and Portland have superior food in my opinion than New York, too) is far better overall. Produce is better. But there is a real tech culture here and it is not going to disappear.

  • BSise

    I spent five years living in Manhattan (business school and commercial finance company), and four years so far living in the Bay Area (digital media companies; I now live in South Beach, SF).

    I LOVE both NYC and SF deeply.

    But this post is 100% correct. The Bay Area has all the right DNA for people to _create value from scratch_. (Not move money around; not climb the social ladder.) NYC will never have that. It has so many other incredible, beautiful things, but it will never have that.

    (I should say though, that the poster overstates the “relatively cheap living” characteristic of the Bay Area. Yes, NYC is insane, but a South Beach SF condo ain’t cheap either.)

  • http://www.groupme.com Steve

    I love NY and I love what I do (NYC startup). I didn’t even know there was a coast war going on, this is a waste of time, just build good product.

  • admin

    You’re brave to make a go of it in NY. That said, I think NY will lead SF in certain sectors, like mobile.

  • KB

    So typical of a west coaster to never set foot off the island of Manhattan during their time living here and think they are all knowing of NYC. Going into Brooklyn or the Bronx (Yankee Stadium or CitiField doesn’t count) would be like actually setting foot in Oakland and not just passing through it on the BART into work. I learned that they all live in their own little islands of reality and they really hate when a New Yorker calls them out.

    When I lived in Sausalito and worked in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco co-workers would comment all the time how horrible my commute must be coming “all the way” from Sausalito in the “North Bay”. You think they would have checked Google Maps or something before making such a stupid comment.