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.
