Rise of the New York Tech Scene

I've worked as a software consultant in NYC and more broadly in East Coast tech scenes for most of my career.

The NYC tech scene is fundamentally intertwined with other industries. The founders I know are all technical people, but none of the companies they founded are purely tech: one is an airline-adjacent company, one is doing health insurance, another is doing medical imaging. The companies I worked for in NYC all sold concrete products or services: not once did I work for a company that received their primary income from serving ads because nobody was willing to pay for their product.

The typical SF startup I've interviewed for isn't actually solving a problem. They might have some success because they put a slick interface over a shoddy backend, like Robinhood making a nice UI while farming out the actual clearing house work to a third party because they don't understand it. Or they might make short-term success by bypassing regulation, like AirBnB or Uber bypassing zoning and taxi medallion systems, respectively. But clearing houses are performing a real, complex service, and failing to understand that leads to problems like the GME fiasco. And when you bypass regulations, you end up causing the harms those regulations were meant to prevent, like driver exploitation and homelessness. And sure, those regulations weren't perfect, but these companies certainly don't fix the problems because they're more interested in stuffing their pockets than solving a problem they don't even understand. SF loves to disrupt because they can't solve. Sometimes they luck into a profitable business but almost universally at the expense of doing harm. I generally find it distasteful.

NYC startups in constrast, generally start with someone working at a company, and then seeing how a technology they understand can solve a problem that company has. It starts from understanding an industry and the needs it meets. While SF startups have solutions in search of problems, NYC startups have problems and hypothesized solutions. Sometimes NYC startups fail because, as it turns out, problems are pretty hard to solve. But I have a lot more respect for that than what I've come to expect from SF startups.