New York has Columbia University and NYU, as well as nearby schools like Stony Brook, Cornell, Princeton and Yale. New York has commercial banks and investment banks and hedge funds based in New York with massive worldwide networks, huge machine learning setups generating billions in trades (I used to administer one machine which had over $1 billion a day flow through it). Someone like Peter Weinberger (the "w" in awk) bounced between Bell Labs and Rentech. Speaking of AlcatelLucent Bell Labs, there are other R&D departments like IBM research. Plus most of the major advertising and design shops. I know the Facebook Android UI is done in Facebook's NYC office. Google owns a huge building in New York, and many Bay Area companies have large offices in New York. Not to mention publishers and their networks - the New York Times, Time-Warner, Viacom and so forth.

In 2000-2001, when people like Marc Andreessen were having trouble getting VC, investment banks and hedge funds were splurging on tech investment, even after all the Y2K money they had just spent.

One thing is hedge funds don't jump up and down saying look at our algorithms, look at our infrastructure. They tend to be very low key - I only know of one Youtube video with the currnt head of RenTech, which has $65 billion of assets under management, almost all of which is capital from the firm's 300 employees. They are no slouches, and have had some excellent computer scientists, mathematicians and scientists work for them.

New York does not have to persuade anyone it is a tech hub, especially relative to Austin, Denver, Portland and Seattle.