from Hacker News

The Ongoing Battle: NY vs. SF Tech Scene

by younata on 11/25/13, 10:05 PM with 70 comments

• by jtoeman on 11/26/13, 12:27 AM

  Is there a "battle"? I mean, a battle to me means there is a likely winner, and people are pushed into making decisions and taking sides. In 15+ years working at tech companies, I've never had to "pick" - I choose to live in SF - thats it.

  Further, I've literally never, ever, heard a person who is actually running or employed at a startup consider it a battle.

  But it does seem like a good headline for getting lots of clicks...

• by rayiner on 11/26/13, 12:37 AM

  I hate to say anything good about SF, but frankly only people in the NYC tech scene think they're in competition with SF. I doubt people in SF think much about the tech scene in NYC.

• by jaboutboul on 11/26/13, 1:09 AM

  Too bad it's going to be destroyed now that DeBlasio was elected. He has no idea what to do with the tech sector. Bloomberg spent millions to basically stump for the tech scene in NY. DeBlasio plans on doing no such thing, he has no clue and no plan. When all the other candidates visited numerous startups during the campaign, DeBlasio showed almost no interest.

• by kimar on 11/26/13, 12:11 AM

  "[NYC] is home to fashion, art, film, literature, theater, banking, and more."

  Maybe its just closer to Europe?

  More seriously, agree with the article. SF's strength is also its weakness: a huge concentration of bright like-minded people focused on similar objectives.

• by jbarrec on 11/25/13, 11:53 PM

  I wish the tech scene on Long Island, NY was a tenth of what it is in NYC. It's amazing how the culture dies within a few miles of NYC. Is this the same on the west coast?

• by jamesmcbennett on 11/26/13, 12:24 AM

  David Karp agrees with you

  “you’d have to be out of your mind to live in Palo Alto.”

  http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/david-karp-is-...

• by eshvk on 11/26/13, 12:26 AM

  How are salaries/living expenses in tech different in SF and NYC? Assuming you are living in SF or NYC, of course. Are they higher in NYC or lower or vice versa?

• by jboggan on 11/26/13, 12:02 AM

  Meanwhile Silicon Beach soldiers on and the weather is looking mighty fine this time of year . . .

• by bch on 11/26/13, 12:57 AM

  > First, there was far less elitism. This was surprising to me given that the East Coast is home to finance giants and "old money".

  Immediately reminded of "Money talks, wealth whispers."

• by mikeg8 on 11/26/13, 12:50 AM

  I really like the idea behind the takeaways and can imagine some truth to these observations... but it's hard for me to know how true it really is based on the OP's one week trip. Maybe the OP was lucky and just walked into a welcoming and diverse co-working space.

• by rexreed on 11/26/13, 8:05 AM

  Not to shock or surprise anyone here, but there's a lot of the tech scene outside BOTH NY and SF. Where's the largest private software company? Cary, NC [1]. Microsoft and Amazon? Based in Seattle. IBM? The non-NYC parts of NY (White Plains and Armonk, NY). And what's happening in different regions like Chicago? Lots going on. DC and Baltimore? Tons of activity -- including a $2.7B acquisition [2] and an IPO or two [3]. Raleigh? Philadelphia? Las Vegas? Indianapolis? Kansas City? Miami? Atlanta? Austin? Estonia? Berlin? ...

  And let's not forget Boston / New England ... which is STILL #2 in total Venture Capital investment. [4]

  See where I'm heading? This idea of an ongoing battle between two locations as being the core of the IT / Startup ecosystem belies the fact that a considerable amount of activity is happening outside these two regions.

  I love NY and I love SF. And I think good entrepreneurs should do their best to network in both of those scenes. And YES there's a ton of VC in SF / Silicon Valley and a huge amount of activity in NY. But entrepreneurs outside of NY and SF can do just fine too. Ask Tony Hsieh from Zappos (Las Vegas) or Jeff Bezos (Seattle). I say, let these two cities battle it on while everyone else focuses on making their company and their local entrepreneurial scenes better.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc.

  [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-23/cisco-agrees-to-buy...

  [3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/03/29/millennial...

  [4] https://www.pwcmoneytree.com/MTPublic/ns/nav.jsp?page=region

• by jacques_chester on 11/26/13, 12:48 AM

  When all you have is a slightly upgraded monkey brain, everything looks like a status play.

  Edit: Apparently humour needs to come with captions now.

  This is a play on the "hammer/nail" truism, observing that folk love to frame things as X vs Y zero-sum games. Possibly because of the human fondness for associating the status value of markers (places, brands) with the status value of our own selves. Thus arguments over NYC vs SF or iOS vs Android or Facebook vs Google or Node.js vs Go are not really about X vs Y at all. They are about establishing status in a troupe of great apes.

  Indeed, this edited text is about status.

• by jweir on 11/26/13, 12:57 AM

  It is TriBeCa. Triangle Beneath Canal.

  edit : Below not beneath (as the below comment points out )