What NYC Needs: A New Narrative
metamorphblog.com
metamorphblog.com
"New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer." - http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
Of course, founders can make plenty of money. But New York does seem to be unusual in how much it lionizes people who already have lots of money (or least, people who allocate lots of it). I don't expect to see the phenomenon discussed in this blog post change anytime soon.
Why? The existence of finance people who have made tons of money and their lionization resulted in the lionization of finance folks who haven't made tons of money. In fact, there's probably a bit of the opposite, namely "you're in finance and haven't made it, so there must be something wrong with you".
NYC lionizes AFTER you've made it. Even if it cares how (and it doesn't seem to), it doesn't lionize folks who haven't made it, regardless of how they're trying to make it.
The people who "belong" here are the ones whose parents bought real estate in the '70s when it was cheap, those who can actually afford a desirable, family-capable, apartment, and the token not-so-rich (upper-middle-class and extremely well-connected) who have rent control (an arrangement that is often better than ownership, because rent-controlled rents are often lower than the maintenance fees for owners).
This is what NYC tells you: you don't belong here unless (or x1 x2 ... xn). The easiest of those xi to change is your income.
Aside from that, it's not that materialist of a city.
That said, I think the "paradigm of creating a business for the purpose of getting on a specific investor's radar" is an idea that largely exists in the minds of tech bloggers like the one who wrote the article.
You can stop with the False Choice that opens the piece: Who's the hero of the startup universe? Is it the entrepreneur, or is it the investor?