Silicon Valley Vs. New York City

New York Times: New York Isn't Silicon Valley. That's Why They Like It.

This article in the New York Times has been making the rounds this past week in the New York tech circles. I have seen it in a few different tweets, buzzes and blog post mentions. It is an interesting article. What is my take on the topic?

Silicon Valley is the old, established company. New York City is the startup. New York City does not need a silicon name, although I hold no grudges against the Silicon Alley Insider. New York City already has a name. The name is New York City.     

There is tremendous liveliness in the New York tech scene right now. There is a lot of early stage work going on. An ecosystem is being nurtured. Infrastructure is being laid out. When you get into the tech startup scene in New York now, you are getting on the ground floor. Office spaces that look like evicted starving artists to make room for developers, coders, programmers are in a few different places. There are numerous tech events every week, small and big. There is feverish networking. You might see a string of IPOs in a few years.

What does Silicon Valley have? It has become mature and crowded. Google's sexiest offering to date was Google Search, but that was over a decade ago. Yahoo stands eclipsed and stagnant. Windows is on its way out. Wait, that would be Seattle, but never mind. Steve Jobs just finished work on the final product of his career, the iPad. IBM is upstate New York. Okay, so Oracle bought Sun. Intel and Cisco are humming, but those are global companies, tens of thousands hired in India alone. Facebook started on the East Coast, and many of Mark Zuckerberg's college friends are still in New York City. Zuck, it is not too late to move back. Twitter might be out there, but the next Twitter - FourSquare - is in New York. TechCrunch might be out there, but Mashable is in New York.

New York is the place to be.

Personally I am not in the dot com space, but I am so glad tons of others are. To me it feels like they are all working to better my product for free. My company will bring hundreds of millions of new people online. (Fred Wilson's Insight)

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