8 ms·
New York Will Never Be Silicon Valley. And It's Good with That
- mylons 9y agoin other news; oranges aren't apples. and oranges are good with that.
- slowandlow 9y agoyeah I'm ok with not being SV.
- croon 9y agoLow hanging fruit, but shouldn't it be the apple being okay with that? /Recent parent practicing dad humor
- sbanach 9y agoCongratulations!
- croon 9y agoMuch appreciated! I've began training my replacement.
- bobthechef 9y agoThe Big Apple to small oranges.
- aylmao 9y ago(:
- mylons 9y agonyc is the big apple. i was turning the headline around to humorously point out the converse
- bitwize 9y agoInterestingchoice of analogy, given that California is orange-grove country and New York is often called the Big Apple...
- mylons 9y agothat's the joke
- cletus 9y agoOh how sad. How will we New Yorkers live without the lack of public transportation, NIMBYism gone insane, the complete opposition to building more than 1 housing unit on 15,000 square feet of land and no housing options for lower and middle income workers within 2 hours of where they work?
- KhanMahGretsch 9y agoWe’re catching up on the public-transport front! http://uk.businessinsider.com/public-transit-ranking-cities-nyc-subway-2017-11?r=US&IR=T http://uk.businessinsider.com/public-transit-ranking-cities-...
- bpicolo 9y agoThe BART stops at midnight either way, reliability be damned.
- bobthechef 9y agoWell, to be honest, the MTA is kind of shit. We'll see what Andy Byford can do to elevate it from third world squalor to something functional.
- lloyd-christmas 9y ago> the MTA is kind of shit The organization, sure. However, the transportation complaints seem to be more of a publicity stunt than anything^. I've lived in NY for 30+ years, NYC for 10 of that. Excluding a few subsections, public transportation as a whole has barely changed in my 15 years of using it (regarding the numbers, part of my time I did as a commuter from the 'burbs). ^ In regards to taxes. A summary of my comments the last time this came up: NYC residents pay a ton in taxes and get little back. Our state taxes get moved upstate and our federal taxes go to poor states. I really think it's just trying to put pressure on our representatives to be a bit more "selfish" as to what happens with our taxes. Both the MTA and Metro North are owned by the state. One of them has 300k daily riders, the other has 5.5m daily riders. 150k of those MN riders end up in the city everyday, so both groups are using state owned products, one group is potentially using BOTH (I always did when I commuted from Westchester to the financial district). The 4 commuter lines combined (NJTransit, PATH, LIRR, Metro North) have 1/3 the total daily ridership of the subway, but get almost double the amount of subsidies from state coffers.
- lvspiff 9y agoNY and Chicago - you guys get to be our financial centers. You get to play with the money that SV and the SV wannabes make. We already have Seattle, Portland, LA, Vegas, Salt Lake, Phoenix, Austin, Louisville, Madison, Indianapolis, Columbus, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Boston, Raleigh, DC, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Miami, Provo, Baltimore, and Ann Arbor. Stop trying to create another overpriced tech mecca.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI don't get who "we" is supposed to be in this statement. Who has Indianapolis and SLC?
- notfromhere 9y agono one sane is going to call indianapolis a tech mecca
- bleezy 9y agoThe USA. He's saying the USA already has enough tech cities.
- RandallBrown 9y agoI think they fall in the SV Wannabes category.
- KingMob 9y agoPortland? My two tech friends in Portland love it, but neither say it's a tech mecca at all.
- jameskegel 9y agoMore of a Portland-culture Mecca, as redundant as it sounds
- tjr225 9y agoI don't think Seattle wants to be SV whatsoever, nor does it have to try to be. In fact there's a lot of open, albeit in jest, hostility towards the "californication" of the PNW.
- walshemj 9y agoGood heavens yes old chap we don't want those greasy engineer types getting the sort of bonus that partners at the vampire squid get
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wgerard 9y ago> the presence of other industries like finance, media and advertising This is a huge part of why I didn't enjoy being in SF (admittedly for a very short few months). Every party I went to, most conversations I had (or overheard in a coffee shop) were tech-related. It felt impossible to have a conversation about anything else, and all conversations naturally gravitated towards tech like some sort of awful singularity. It's pretty refreshing regularly talking to people who work in the arts, finance, education, administration, etc. If nothing else, just for novelty's sake - more interesting conversations happen when you can't talk about your work all the time.
- gautamnarula 9y agoThis is one of the biggest appeals NYC has over Silicon Valley in my opinion. It's also why, when I had the choice to intern in Silicon Valley, I chose to intern in Santa Cruz instead. It's close enough to the Valley that I could attend cool tech events (albeit with a not particularly pleasant commute), while Santa Cruz still enjoyed the Bay Area's good weather and is not (yet) a tech monoculture.
- IntronExon 9y agoAside from the pleasant aspects of not drowning in a monoculture, it also helps with keeping a better sense of how people think outside of tech. A balanced perspective is definitely better than just a novelty in my opinion.
- ryandrake 9y agoShouldn’t be hard to step out of the bubble. Im in the Bay Area and leave technology at work—it almost never comes up in normal day to day interactions. Try expanding your set of friends or getting a non tech hobby. Good luck!
- wgerard 9y ago> Shouldn’t be hard to step out of the bubble It really was. It's been substantially easier to step out of the bubble in NYC. So easy that I didn't even have to intentionally do it.
- lkrubner 9y agoMaybe, but it is worth pointing out that some VC firms are fighting the good fight to transform New York into a rival of Silicon Valley. I'd especially praise Primary Ventures for their efforts: "Long Live Silicon Alley: The Inaugural NYC Summit" http://www.primary.vc/blog/summit-17 http://www.primary.vc/blog/summit-17 I was at one of their gatherings not long ago and they pointed out that New York is the world capitol for domain-specific knowledge in at least a dozen industries: publishing, law, medicine, fashion, art, education, finance, and more. There is a potential there for a kind of success that will be different than Silicon Valley's, but not necessarily inferior to Silicon Valley.
- lordleft 9y agoThank god. Not to disparage SV, but one thing I love about this city is the diversity of the subcultures here. I'd hate for it to be dominated by any one industry.
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoNew York would want to compete, and it's big enough to do so. And I don't blame them for escaping the "city/state/geographical category is the next Silicon Valley" drivel that's been written previously because otherwise you just end up being eclipsed by Silicon Valley in endless comparisons between them.
- whack 9y agoFor the benefit of those who haven't read the actual article: "New York will never be Silicon Valley" is meant by the author as a compliment, not an insult. Relevant quotes: Investors, founders and employees point to all the things that make New York one-of-a-kind as the reason tech is growing in America’s biggest city: the presence of other industries like finance, media and advertising, much more gender and racial diversity and the metropolis’s centuries-old status as a center of global commerce. New York provides a contrast to Silicon Valley, which has been criticized for tunnel vision, being insular, out of touch with the rest of the country and overly homogeneous–both company employees and the people for whom they create products. Instead of being dragged down or drowned out by New York’s well-established mega-businesses, startups are feeding off them, hiring their disaffected employees, building products to make them more efficient and partnering with them in ways that help both sides. “We wouldn't have been able to start our company with this scale anywhere other than New York,’’ says Ryan Williams, the chief executive officer of Cadre, a real estate investment startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Being in the center of finance gives the firm access to top Wall Street talent and helped it land $250 million to invest on behalf of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. The proximity to major offices of many of the brands Zola sells through its site was a major benefit to being in the city, she says. Having the headquarters of top media and advertising companies a ten-minute subway ride away went a long way too “New York is a much better place for fostering women entrepreneurs and women in tech,” says Samuels, who worked in the industry on both coasts. Both Ma and Ferreira agree.
- bobthechef 9y agoSV is rather provincial, as are Boston, etc, so it's a bit amusing that anyone would presume that NYC, with all its flaws, would suffer from some kind of SV-envy, that it somehow aspires to be one of those boorish enclaves. Certainly, NYC is glad it has a tech sector that is growing, but it a bit difficult to imagine a major city without a tech sector. The occupational diversity alone makes it a microcosm. A tech monoculture inspires images of a 21st century Lehigh Valley.
- mattbuilds 9y agoI grew up right outside of NYC and still live here, probably will never leave. I only have one other friend in tech and I honestly like it that way. I think you get a different perspective on things. I get to learn about a bunch of different industries and see things in a way I probably wouldn't if all my friends were in the same field.
- lloyd-christmas 9y agoLikewise, I grew up in Scarsdale. Very few of my friends work withinin the same industry. Excluding a few people in finance, I'm working through my group of friends in my head and everyone else works in a different industry: publishing, law, actuarial, fashion, art sales, advertising, education, medicine, and insurance (just off the top of my head). What's really nice about it is that we're all able to learn a bit about each industry. I don't need a mile deep, but it's nice to learn a few feet wide.
- colmvp 9y ago> ...much more racial diversity Right, if you ignore the fact Asians make up a third of SV and hugely contribute to the tech scene, the area is totally lacking diversity. NYC is so superficially centered on appearances, that I would never want SF to be like it. The type of strange ideas and interesting people I met in SF wouldn't have thrived in NYC. It doesn't surprise me that something like YC bloomed in SV, not in NYC, at least until it became a trendy industry. There's a reason why industries that involve appearances thrive in NYC, such as media, advertising, and fashion. Don't get me wrong, I love NYC, I lived there for a number of years and missed it when I moved to SF. But I've always disliked the sense of superiority that NYC has over the rest of the country. From my experience on living in both cities, NYC might be more diverse in industry, but at parties I found people in SF to be far more open to more thought provoking, controversial, and unconventional ideas.
- chasing 9y agoNYC is full of strange ideas and interesting people.
- electricslpnsld 9y ago...and those strange and interesting people can still afford to live in NYC. Just look at the exodus of artists from San Francisco to Oakland, and now with landlords chasing everyone out of lofts in Oakland [1,2], from Oakland to LA. Despite paying lip service to the creative and the weird, the Bay Area has done very little to actually protect those folks [3]. [1] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/29/oakland-artists-move-out-after-new-warehouse-rules/ http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/29/oakland-artists-... [2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/23/residents-in-salt-lick-warehouse-in-oakland-are-getting-evicted/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/23/residents-in-salt-lic... [3] https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/Artists-leaving-sf-bay-area-grass-is-greener-12382578.php https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/Artis...
- ghostbrainalpha 9y agoThe Bay Area is a beautiful melting pot of ethnically Caucasian, Asian, Hispanic, Black, and Indian folks that appears very diverse if you look at physical appearance. But if you have lived in S.F. and also New York, it's easy to see why someone would claim N.Y. is more diverse. I think it has a lot to do with embracing different ways of living. Its a pretty common joke how much conformity there is in the Bay in a basic workplace enviroment, ie. wear this flannel shirt, have 'x' opinion on social media, have 'x' political view. New York isn't better or worse, but it feels like there is more variety in your day to day interactions with different types of people.
- bob_theslob646 9y agoIs it not amazing that both areas, cannot solve problems such as homelessness and traffic/congestion. Really makes you think why some people go into these fields.($$$, not all but some) It is ironic because with all the money they make, they cannot afford to live in the cities that they work.(http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-unaffordable-even-for-engineers-2015-5)(https://therealdeal.com/2018/02/25/why-increasing-numbers-of-new-yorkers-are-calling-it-quits-on-city-life/) http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-unaffordable-e... If only the government could match private sector wages. I think a lot of people would be way more interested in the public good then!
- ThomPete 9y agoI have lived both places (SF in the dotcom period) and now live in New York. I love SV for many things and there are many great people there, but at the end of the day, New York is my city because its more human, honest, candid and less tribal.
- somberi 9y agoJust to give a proportional representation - California is 2.5X of New York State's economy (2.5trn vs 1trn) and around 17% of the 2.5trn is from Bay Area. If you include greater NYC region (as opposed to just NYC and not NY State), then the economy of just NYC-related economy 1.3 trillion (2012 number, so may be 1.5trn is a fair number to adjust for baselines), which is 3X of Bay Area economy. There is a reason why Godzilla stamps Empire State Building out more often than Golden Gate Bridge in the movies :)
- lilfatbitch 9y ago>much more gender and racial diversity Cannot emphasize this enough. Otherwise we get insecure startups that organize forced diversity: https://www.recode.net/2018/2/26/17036190/silicon-valley-women-crypto-cryptocurrency-digital-currency-citcoin-blockchain https://www.recode.net/2018/2/26/17036190/silicon-valley-wom... In NYC, diversity is so normal that it wouldn't matter if a startup is full of white hetero males. But in Sillicon Valley that wouldn't fly, you're fucking a white male.
- senatorobama 9y agoBecause there's available women in NYC.
- zombieprocesses 9y agoclickbait filler "news/journalism" like this just irritate me so much. Firstly, who said we want to be silicon valley? Secondly, who are these two journalists that gives them the authority to say what ny is good or not good with? What the hell do they know about anything? Thirdly, they comparing a major city to what amounts to a business district. Maybe if they compared district ( garment, finance ) to silicon valley, there might be a point to this article. It's such a non-story turned into one just because they need to publish rubbish everyday.