Further, I've literally never, ever, heard a person who is actually running or employed at a startup consider it a battle.
But it does seem like a good headline for getting lots of clicks...
eBay's 6th Ave office costs $2-3 million per month (what's a million dollars between friends?).
(This isn't really relevant though. I just like reminding people huge sums of money are in play. Your little "$50k to $200k angel round" isn't as big a deal as you think.)
Maybe its just closer to Europe?
More seriously, agree with the article. SF's strength is also its weakness: a huge concentration of bright like-minded people focused on similar objectives.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/us/backlash-by-the-bay-tec...
There are little blobs of heat map down by San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo. There's a little dollop of color up at Portland. There's a half-SF color sized blob in Seattle for Amazon. There's a small, but solid color around Bellevue and a faint twinkle over at Redmond for the fading empire.
Microsoft has an enormous capacity to innovate, mostly thru brute force of the billions of dollars they have sitting around, but still, innovation is innovation.
“you’d have to be out of your mind to live in Palo Alto.”
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/david-karp-is-...
(Of course, this all applies to meeting women through friends. I don't do the bar scene so can't really comment on it.)
The tech scene is healthy and not frothy. Google Venice is a large presence, as is Factual (my employer), Hulu, Snapchat with their sweet Venice boardwalk office, and assorted others (http://siliconbeachla.com/). I like it here because being in a tech startup is very different and cool, unlike in SF/SV where it seems a ridiculous number of people are doing identical work.
I moved to San Francisco last year and settled in a nice apartment on Dolores Park; I was hired at Factual to work remotely but came to the L.A. office for the first month to train up. After a week I told them I wanted to stay, and I love SF. It is just . . . really nice here.
Edit: nvm, I didn't know what Silicon Beach stands for. LA obviously has way better climes than SF.
Immediately reminded of "Money talks, wealth whispers."
Also, yes, I was lucky to be in a great co-working space (New Work City). I'm sure they're not ALL like that. Just as in SF, there are "bright spots" and "meh spots".
And let's not forget Boston / New England ... which is STILL #2 in total Venture Capital investment. [4]
See where I'm heading? This idea of an ongoing battle between two locations as being the core of the IT / Startup ecosystem belies the fact that a considerable amount of activity is happening outside these two regions.
I love NY and I love SF. And I think good entrepreneurs should do their best to network in both of those scenes. And YES there's a ton of VC in SF / Silicon Valley and a huge amount of activity in NY. But entrepreneurs outside of NY and SF can do just fine too. Ask Tony Hsieh from Zappos (Las Vegas) or Jeff Bezos (Seattle). I say, let these two cities battle it on while everyone else focuses on making their company and their local entrepreneurial scenes better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAS_Institute_Inc.
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-23/cisco-agrees-to-buy...
[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericsavitz/2012/03/29/millennial...
[4] https://www.pwcmoneytree.com/MTPublic/ns/nav.jsp?page=region
Edit: Apparently humour needs to come with captions now.
This is a play on the "hammer/nail" truism, observing that folk love to frame things as X vs Y zero-sum games. Possibly because of the human fondness for associating the status value of markers (places, brands) with the status value of our own selves. Thus arguments over NYC vs SF or iOS vs Android or Facebook vs Google or Node.js vs Go are not really about X vs Y at all. They are about establishing status in a troupe of great apes.
Indeed, this edited text is about status.
For the record, I did hear someone refer to it as "the ongoing New York/SF debate". This isn't something I just invented. I had personally never thought there was any comparison to be made until I heard that people out there make it all the time.
edit : Below not beneath (as the below comment points out )
