New York vs Silicon Valley for tech startups

Antonio Garcia, a former Goldman Sachs number cruncher, decided to up and leave for the brighter sky on the West Coast, in order to found his startup company. After getting established, he wrote a little retrospective comparison of both places for tech startup companies, ending up practically humiliating New York in the process.

You can find a few excerpts after the break.

$2495 for a 500 sq. ft. one bedroom apartment.

There, that’s how much my first apartment in New York cost (in 2005).

Living in New York, you hemorrhage money, and don’t see much in return. My career salary high-water mark is still working as a quant on Goldman’s credit desk, and I lived worse, from a quality-of-life perspective, than I did as a Berkeley graduate student. ‘Ramen’ money in New York is enough to support three families, and then some, elsewhere. If YCombinator existed in New York, they’d have to dish 5x more than their already slim initial funding to keep new startups in Cheetos for three months.

Basically, startups flourish in the Bay Area the same reason the homeless do: decent weather, relatively cheap living, and no stigma attached to your lifestyle.

At cocktail parties with these people, the “ambitious ass-kickers” Paul Graham thinks will save the New York tech scene, the second question you’re asked is inevitably what do you do? And so begins the not-so-subtle binning of you into your social echelon, more ritualistic and damning than any Japanese business card exchange ceremony:

+2 for working at Goldman Sachs

-1 for being a quant rather than a banker or trader

-1 for living on the Lower East Side

-2 for not being Ivy League

+/- 1 for being Gentile (depends on the cocktail party).

And you’re socially in the red at that point. The rest of the conversation is as vacuous as interstellar space.

No place for Trotsky to sit down

One of the biggest shocks upon moving to New York was realizing it had no cafés5. You can’t have startups or revolutionary political movements without cozy cafés to dawdle, work, and plot in. Every day I step into the Red Rock Café in Mountain View, I see 2-3 startup founders I know, see about half a dozen hackers working on something on their Macs, or overhear some entrepreneur’s pitch to an investor. Every day. Assuming you teleported all those people to New York tomorrow, the system would fall apart, as they’d have nowhere to meet.

Katz’s pastrami is the only thing I miss

As a random but illustrative tangent, the food culture in NY vs. SF explains much of the attitude toward work and money as well.

The reality is, the food culture in New York mostly sucks. Sure, people there know how to go to Nobu and drop $300 on sushi, and every headliner chef needs to have some New York outpost, but most New Yorkers couldn’t fry an egg if their lives depended on it (plus, most don’t even have decent-sized kitchens).

You can find the full post here

Do you agree with anything he says or do you call 'bull'?