While SF might be loath to acknowledge it New York has been a high-tech center for a long time - Fulton invented the steamboat, Tesla and Edison were both working here, later we had Bell Labs, IBM. The Manhattan Project had the named that because so much of the work was on the island of Manhattan before security and safety moved it out to the desert.
One of the big things here is that the NY area's tech scene is just one part of the economy among many. Every time I come to SF and the valley it seems as if the entire economy is being eaten by tech. Having lived and worked on both coasts, I think this is a huge advantage to NY.
>“New York is now the leading place on the East Coast for tech-venture investments,” said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Several years ago, companies that wanted to do something big all had to go to Silicon Valley.”
By now Boston, the East Coast's number two city, is almost as expensive as NYC yet doesn't have nearly the concentration of talent and doesn't have nearly as good a transport scene or dating life (http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics...). NYC also has that critical concentration of nerds and rich people. SF has become so absurdly expensive that NYC starts to look attractive by comparison.
As much as NYC people want it to happen, they don't have the universities or the concentration of talent that Boston does. The numbers prove reality http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228709
That depends on the nature of the startup: There is a ton of hyphen-tech here, so for example a fin-tech startup in my building that focuses on insurance just closed a Round B. Boston has a finance industry, but not on the level of NYC. And it's the same with media and other fields as well. Also something to keep in mind is that NYC has always been a magnet for Boston school grads and tech is no exception.
My experience may be anecdotal but as someone who has lived and spent a lot of time in both NYC and SF, it feels like New York is becoming the smarter place to start a startup. SF has been eating itself over the past year while NYC has seen a growing number of promising young tech companies set up shop.
Mind fleshing that anecdotal evidence out a bit more? My understanding is that the risk tolerance is much, much, lower which is very prohibitive of early stage start-ups.
I know a 'new silicon valley' sounds sexy, especially in places like London, India, whatever, but do we have evidence to back up these claims? Start-up entrances per year, VC firm presence, fund-raising rounds, etc?
The metrics I causally track are private companies that I would want to work for, or products people in my social circle are using. BuzzFeed, Venmo, ClassPass, Casper, Warby Parker, Etsy, DataDog, BirchBox, Kickstarter, and Oscar are all established startups headquartered in NYC which fit that bill. If you wanted to work for a big company, the only two I can think of that don't have a presence in NYC are Netflix and Apple. Risk tolerance may be slightly higher in SF, but NYC has 10x the population and it is becoming cheaper to start a startup every day. I've also seen more than a handful of world class developers move from SF to NYC in the past year.
Stanford: money (VCs/angels), talent, founders and customers, all within a very comfortable radius (complete ecosystem). Google, Snapchat, PayPal, Netflix, ... And, strong alumni networking.
and
Harvard: has talent, founders and some customers, but money often require more travel (currently incomplete ecosystem, read: time and money sinks). Strong alumni networking too.
One of the big things here is that the NY area's tech scene is just one part of the economy among many. Every time I come to SF and the valley it seems as if the entire economy is being eaten by tech. Having lived and worked on both coasts, I think this is a huge advantage to NY.