Founders' Playground in NYC

As a Bay Area to New York transplant, I’m familiar with the strengths of each city as innovative startup hubs. The Bay Area is saturated with tech workers, side hustlers, pitches over 4th wave coffee, and tech events. New York is too, but there’s also the screenwriter’s pitches, finance guys in puffer vests, fashion “it-girls,” and snobbish literati. New York is vast and its industries are varied. For tech to feel like a major competitor to the nearly one-tracked-minded Bay Area (sorry to all my foodie and artist friends), it has to really be churning out the deals. And churn it has.

    

The New York startup scene has apparently hit an inflection point in the last year after steady progress as a major player, behind the Bay Area and Boston (a college town and breeding ground for startups). Overall funding more than doubled in 2021 over the previous year, hitting $52BN. Last year, moreover, NYC startups UiPath, Warby Parker, Squarespace, and WeWork all went public.

Meanwhile, trends in relocation since the start of the pandemic show New York as the most favored location for those ditching the Bay Area. West Coast venture capitalists Craft Ventures, Greylock, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint, and Threshold Ventures all now have check writers local to NYC. Andreessen Horowitz even has a 34K SF office in Soho.