From your hedge fund list, at least James Simons and David Shaw are tech billionaires and probably some more that I don't recognize. Also, one of the most successful NYC tech billionaires your forgetting: Michael Bloomberg. Although all of these guys are finance/tech it is still tech.
Comparison of the size of venture capital funds is probably accurate, but that is changing as well.
D. E. Shaw & Co. also hires a ton of STEM folks. Also: "D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES) is a computational biochemistry research laboratory based in New York City. Under the scientific direction of David E. Shaw, the group's chief scientist, D. E. Shaw Research develops technologies for molecular dynamics simulations (including Anton,[1] [2] a massively parallel special-purpose supercomputer, and Desmond,[3] a software package for use on conventional computers and computer clusters) and applies such simulations to basic scientific research in structural biology and biochemistry, and to the process of computer-aided drug design."
That's the thing though. The top engineering talent goes to financial companies in New York because that's what's fashionable there. There's an actual cultural difference.
There's one other big cultural difference that has an affect on who wants to do tech startups. In SV people care about "What can you do?/What have you done?" where in NY it's more "Where did you go to school?/What's your pedigree?" and in my experience, Ivy Leaguers are generally funneled into Finance. There is a lot of money spent on recruiting them, so it's easier to just take the hedge fund job out of school than go work for or found a startup.
When Jeff Bezos, who used to work for DESCO, founded Amazon, he didn't do it in New York.
Right, and in Silicon Valley the top engineering talent tends to go to advertising companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc). What does that matter? Advertising and finance are both industries flush with relatively easy cash right now, of course people are going to seek out jobs in those areas.
> There's one other big cultural difference that has an affect on who wants to do tech startups. In SV people care about "What can you do?/What have you done?" where in NY it's more "Where did you go to school?/What's your pedigree?"
That's true and is probably a bigger substantive differnce. Though, ever since Google made it a thing to recruit heavily from Stanford, tech has been a lot more pedigree-sensitive. I don't know if it's necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly different.
Indeed, if aversion to pedigree-sensitivity is a concern, I'd argue that a better place to focus your startup-founding energies would be D.C. There's good bootstrapping opportunities vis-a-vis government contracts and contracting to established defense/telecom players in the city, and the "old guard engineer" mentality in this industries places very little emphasis on pedigree (even though D.C. is otherwise an extremely prestige-conscious city).
Right, I'm not saying it matters at all other than if you're a competing business, you're going to have a hard time recruiting against these firms. It's not always just a money thing either.
I don't think SV is any better than NY though. I work for an SV-based company remotely. Both cultures are kinda terrible and both cities are only chasing after 'easy money' industries without trying to bring in other business. If the money suddenly dried up in advertising, the Valley would be in a bad way just as much as a slump in Finance would crush New York.
Politically, New York has to do a lot more to attract other business. Maybe an incentive to financial companies to fund/start businesses in STEM fields. Otherwise it's never going to happen.
I think that was the case, but it certainly isn't now.
People might not be leaving finance, but I'm not sure how many engineers are going to it. It's definitely not "cool" here any more.
But it still goes back to the pedigree thing. NY is an extremely pedigree-sensitive city and it's way more impressive to talk at cocktail parties about what financial you work for than what no-name-startup/consultancy/generic-design-shop you're working for.
My social circle shrunk noticeably when I left my hedge fund gig in 2008 and worked as a bike messenger; New Yorkers only care about (potential) money.
Well then this must be a perspective thing, too. I suppose if you go to cocktail parties with Wall Street types then that might be true, but in the social circles I run in (a mix of tech, fashion and media) working for a financial company is instantly seen as very boring.
When I didn't have that job anymore and instead had a low-status non-career job (bike messenger), a lot of people simply just wouldn't talk to me anymore. I'm not saying that's definitively the cause of it but I've seen similar things happen to other people there.
The funny thing is that the NYers in finance or law will often tell you how much they'd rather be working at a startup. (Or, well, anything else.)
Yuuup.
I can't even count on two hands the number of people I know who left finance and went on to physical jobs they thought were more satisfying. Bike messengers (like I did) were common, but so were roughnecks, delivery drivers and all sorts of other odd jobs.
That said, I don't really know enough new engineers to say who is going into what these days, but I still see plenty of the 23-35 crowd at financials, all with advanced degrees and all wishing they were doing something else.
The economy has changed, and the tech industry is booming while the finance industry has shrunk. I wouldn't attribute this to OWS, but to the general realization that the finance industry was too big, and many of its services didn't add value. For example, people will be much more skeptical of hedge funds with magical ways to make money, even though there will still be some genuine hedge funds that can outperform the market.
All these changes mean that the tech industry can compete with finance even in terms of salary.