This article is almost completely 100% opposite to my own experience raising money in NYC. There's plenty of good angels here - largely entrepreneurs who have

This article is almost completely 100% opposite to my own experience raising money in NYC. There's plenty of good angels here - largely entrepreneurs who have been successful with their own businesses. I talked to a number of them one-on-one and never paid to pitch. There's plenty of good early-stage venture capital firms here - yes, fewer than Silicon Valley, but there's fewer startups to compete with. Raising money from early-stage firms here was a relatively straightforward process. The deal terms were clean, and the valuation was adequate. (Trust me, you want clean terms and an adequate valuation over a high valuation under a ton of preferences anyway. Keeps your options open.) Recruiting was also easy - I largely hired people I'd worked with before at other startups, or who came recommended to me by people I'd worked with before at other startups. The differentiating factor, I suspect - because personally, I'm nothing particularly special - is that I worked at a few startups in NYC and got to know people over a few years before founding my company. (Like Chris Dixon wrote a while back, there's a time to learn and a time to earn.) I suspect this is largely true for Silicon Valley as well.