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Comment by code4tee | Hacker News Reader

The NYC tech sector is indeed growing quite strong and is also quite grounded in the realities of business because of the diversity of NYC’s overall economy. Few cities in the world have the economic diversity that New York does. That drives the mindset to be noticeably different, mostly in a good way.

At several meet ups recently the moderator wasn’t shy about warning Silicon Valley companies “I’d advise you to be clear about how you plan to make money and be profitable because if you don’t the audience here is just going to grill you on how you plan to make money and be profitable.”

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The irony of this is that attitude has created pretty much zero startups that have transformed into sustainable, profitable, medium or large companies. While there have been a couple successful exits that later crashed and burned like Tumblr and Blue Apron, and a couple TBD like MongoDB and Jet (Wal-mart acquisition), many of the NYC startup IPOs and exits seem to be playing a game of hot potato by selling to the next sucker with completely veneer metrics. Having had an early stage startup in NYC, I would say there was way too much focus on "you need metric X to be Y right now" even if doing so was detrimental to getting something off the ground.

That said, NYC is a good environment for established tech companies opening large satellite offices like Facebook, Google, etc.

> that attitude has created pretty much zero startups that have transformed into sustainable, profitable, medium or large companies.

You are looking at modern day Amazon and comparing its profitability to startups, when Amazon itself consistently lost money every year until around 2004.

I just mentally built this list, but I have:

Here to Stay: Facebook, Twitter, Square, Netflix, Salesforce, Workday

Likely Strong Businesses: Airbnb, Stripe, Slack, Palantir, Twilio, Trade Desk (profitable), Zendesk, Automattic, Squarespace, One Medical, Juul

Profitable: Stitch Fix, Yelp, I'm sure there are others.

Maybe: Cloudera, New Relic, Dropbox, 23andMe, Robinhood, Plaid, Opendoor, Instacart

We will see, but big private valuations: Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Coinbase, Instacart

Then for NYC I would have:

ZocDoc, Warby Parker, Classpass, and probably also Harry's, 1stdibbs, Lemonade, Compass, and Betterment. I'm sure I missed a few interesting ones, but I still think the current crop of SV companies established after 2004ish are on a different scale or tackling a bigger addressable market than the ones in NYC. Wallstreet is probably an even worse critic when a company is in its own back yard. I was at a Bloomberg event where the founder of Blue Apron was absolutely annihilated by the interviewer, and you could tell it was taking a toll on him mentally. Meanwhile, Evan Spiegel is in a similar situation and doesn't appear to have a care in the world out in LA.

Which is why it will never really be Silicon Valley. No risk, no reward. NY is too expensive for anyone to sit around and take risks, likewise, it will never see the real reward.

Your argument is that Silicon Valley is an economical place to do business relative to NYC and that New York, with its centuries long history of immigrants turning up with nothing and “making it,” don’t take risks? Tell me more. :-)

It is dramatically easier to live on a budget in the NYC metro area than anywhere in the Bay Area...

Implying Silicon Valley is affordable compared to NYC is silly.

The Californian "Try It" attitude is basically the equivalent of throwing shit against the wall while using other people's money. It works sometimes, but it's a terrible strategy that only works because VCs hit a unicorn that wipes out all the mistakes every so often.

> it's a terrible strategy that only works because VCs hit a unicorn that wipes out all the mistakes every so often

The "only" part of that doesn't actually invalidate the fact that it works. What you said is: it's a terrible strategy that has worked extraordinarily well.

It's a great strategy that has been shown to work across five decades of tech upheavel, precisely because it does pay for itself over time and keeps generating returns for institutional money. That it works so well is why it has all kept getting bigger as the positive results roll forward. It also produced the greatest concentration of tech dominance and invention the world is likely to ever see in one place.

Maybe it's time for some daring innovators to disrupt this rickety archaic model?

What is this “real reward”? Housing is cheaper in NY (though certainly not inexpensive). Last I checked, we still have theaters, museums, clubs, etc too. Ok weather is a problem.

NYC has far better museums then SF.

Similar properties to those suburban bungalows where HP, Apple, and Google where founded are easily selling for $1.5 million now.

My Brooklyn apartment is about the same cost per sqft. I don’t have a yard but my access/commute to the metro core is much better.

New York doesn't want to be Silicon Valley, though.

New York is an Alpha++ world city. When New York looks to compete with other cities, it competes with other Alpha++ and Alpha+ cities. New York doesn't even think about SV. It thinks about London, Hong Kong, Paris, Tokyo, etc.

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