I don’t see the appeal of the Bay Area. High cost of living, high taxes, high rent, but also droughts, wildfires, occasional tsunamis and hurricanes.
NYC on the other hand has a giant river going through it (two technically), no wildfires, no tsunamis, and plenty of real estate, commercial and residential, compared to CA.
Lagging indicator of previous success. For tech, this currently is Bay Area start-ups (Meta, Google).
The safe route is to invest based on brand name (aka previous success): Bay Area, ex-FAANG, Stanford education, etc. But by definition, you are trying to bet on current and future trends using previous data.
I am skeptical that this is due to any positives on the NYC side, but more a story of the Bay Area's decline.
Of the 796 US cities with 50k+ population, San Francisco ranks 796/796 in population growth % over the last 2 years (-7.5%) while NYC ranks 793/796 (-5.3%).
I agree that overall population metrics tell a story of both cities' decline, but in the context of startups it's important to understand who is moving in/out. Tech workers who are upper middle class are typically moving into these metros, while lower-income families who might not work in tech are moving out.
Actually surprised there isn't more of a flow of tech talent to NYC these days. Or maybe it's actively happening, but we just don't talk about it that much.
The Bay offers great nature, climate and slightly lower cost of living, but just about everything else is more interesting in NYC/Brooklyn.
The Bay suffers regularly from several natural disasters and I’m skeptical on the cost of living being lower. If we’re looking at “the Bay Area”, we should look at the “NYC metro area”, including cheaper suburbs like Yonkers and Hoboken.
The Catskills are quite scenic, but I admit they don’t hold a flame to Yosemite, et. Al.
Headline doesn’t even match the story: The article says they compared just San Francisco to NYC, and when Silicon Valley was included the story was not true.
I mean, I like New York but this is ridiculous.
> Carta’s figures are broken down by county, not region, and in total, the four Bay Area counties on its list still beat out the two included in New York, Kings and New York counties. Kings, or Brooklyn, had 101 companies that raised series A or seed rounds in the period.
> Overall funding in the San Francisco area is still more than twice the amount that is deployed in New York City, and both cities have seen extreme funding dips since 2021. The start-ups that raised seed or series A in San Francisco raised $4.3 billion in total in the year in question, while the 543 Manhattan startups raised only $3.6 billion, Carta found.
TBF if SF is 2X Manhattan+Brooklyn that is quite a fall, but I haven’t seen it in the Q1 numbers.
You do see it in some places around Midtown/Times Square - just not as frequent as in SF, and that area has been crappy for a long time. I love living in NYC but we could become like SF if we're not careful.
Data like this makes me suspicious of the increasingly loud threads about "10 reasons why if you're not building in SF, you're not building!"
Capital invested still wildly favors the Bay Area, but that could be a lagging indicator.