New York Beats Out San Francisco to Be World’s Best Tech City

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/new-york-beats-out-san-francisco-to-be-world-s-best-tech-city

by pseudolus • 7 years ago

66 40 7 years ago

bloomberg.com

pseudolus• 7 years ago

The actual report that forms the basis for the article can be found at:

https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/274944-0

yesenadam• 7 years ago

Looking at the bar chart on that page - NY scores a lot higher on "Business Environment" than SF, enough to pip SF (#2) at the post.

They have a bunch of categories and add up the scores, that's all. Pretty arbitrary, like any such list. Most of the comments sound here like it's someone's personal opinion, or deliberately fixed, or an insult to SF, or a joke etc.

demosthenes14• 7 years ago

Having spent time in all the US cities on this list, I feel that Seattle should be ranked much higher.

gumby• 7 years ago

The actual report is here: http://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/global-research/tech-cities-in...

Obviously they will get more attention if they don't rank the SF Bay Area #1 so didn't do so last year ether (but chose Austin -- I've lived there and it's great, but it's small, even if you don't compare it against Dallas or Houston).

There are reasons for preferring to live other places than the Bay Area, but the overwhelming volume of investment, people willing to work for startups, people willing to try out new stuff, and the dense network really put it in a completely different class from NY (which has very dense networks -- perhaps even denser -- in other sectors). There's a lot more to to in NY but if what you care about is tech-tech-tech it's hard to beat the Valley (which I assume is swept into their classification of "SF").

segmondy• 7 years ago

I bet that the people doing this, don't work in Tech nor live in SF. I'm not in SF, don't even like the place, but it's the World's best tech city.

rsj_hn9• 7 years ago

LOL, no. If you want to work in finance, the best city is NY. If you want to work in film/media, the best city is LA. If you want to work in tech, the best city is SF/Silicon Valley. It may not be the best city to live in, but it's where you go if you want to be at the center of the action.

SV is where you'll find the headquarters of Apple, Facebook, Google, Intel, Netflix, Oracle, HP, Cisco, Brocade, NVIDIA, Salesforce, Adobe, Seagate, Slack, Uber, Twitter, Quicken, Paypal, Gilead, Applied Materials, VMWare, Symantec, Juniper, Electronic Arts, Brocade, Xilinx and many, many others.

Of the 10 largest tech companies by revenue, 7 are headquartered in Silicon Valley (the others are IBM, MSFT, Amazon) https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/21/ten-largest-us-tech-firms-20...

What major tech company has their HQ in NYC? Fog creek software? Reddit?

sincerely• 7 years ago

Why does it matter where the HQ is? I dont need to work in the city with 1000 tech employers, i only need one, the company i work for.

speedster217• 7 years ago

Have you lived in Silicon Valley? The amount that people from other companies talk to each other is incredible. You're using a technology? Oh just hop in the car and talk to the developers about your use case and help guide the development.

You _can_ do that remotely, but having it happen in person is way more reliable

rsj_hn9• 7 years ago

Think about what that means -- in the entire history of New York, not a single start up began in NYC and grew to be successful and market dominant there. Not a single one. Seattle has been much more successful -- it created MSFT and Amazon. What did NYC create? Best example would probably be fog bugz. Given that NYC has been so successful at creating other kinds of companies and has a lot of talented people, this is a conspicuous gap, no? Austin, TX, has been far more successful at creating tech companies than NYC. Both are tiny specs of dust compared SV.

So clearly there is some kind of difference between these places, no? Some reason why one place offers more opportunity than another in tech?

SV has an incredibly high density of headquarters of the biggest tech firms. This is where the leadership is, where the most experienced engineers are, and where the institutional knowledge resides.

Because attention is scarce and communication is costly, firms tend to keep the most strategic efforts closest and push less critical efforts farther out. As Dan Kaminsky used to say, "If you're not at HQ, you're not part of the conversation".

Individual contributors can be remote and support/sales/backoffice staff can be in satellite offices all over, but the key roles will be concentrated around HQ.

Now go back to finance. There are lots of bank teller jobs in Phoenix. Wells Fargo has a lot of staff there, so does Bank of America. But if you want to have a career in finance, you are going to have more opportunities in NYC where the HQ of so many FIRE firms is concentrated, and not in Phoenix, even though there are lots of bank tellers and back office managers that work in Phoenix.

The types of jobs you can have are just different. The opportunities, institutional knowledge, mentoring opportunities, social networks, level of responsibility -- it's different. It may seem unfair, but that's how it goes.

NYC is basically Phoenix when it comes to tech -- a lot of backoffice and sales positions, and a bunch of engineering satellite positions, but not a single major tech company is headquartered there.

ThrustVectoring• 7 years ago

In short: BATNA.

Your salary is highly dependent on what the next-best thing you could be doing if your employer didn't hire you. If you live in a city where only your employer hires developers, your next best option sucks, so you can be forced to either move out or accept an uncompetitive offer. If you live in the SF Bay Area, you can walk out the door of Facebook on a Friday and into Google on a Monday, which means that both companies must compensate you handsomely in order to keep you around.

ghobs912• 7 years ago

Sure the title may be jumping the gun a bit, but you're severely overhyping SF and underestimating NYC with your comment. The fact that Fog Creek and Reddit (moved to SF) were the companies that came to mind shows that you don't know the NYC tech landscape well.

On top of the condensed list below NYC has Columbia, NYU, and Cornell Tech in terms of talent pool, and one of the most extensive transit systems in the world.

1. Bloomberg 2. Oath (AOL + Yahoo) 3. Blue Apron 4. Buzzfeed 5. Tumblr 6. Etsy 7. AppNexus 8. Flatiron Health 9. Oscar Health 10. Shutterstock 11. Squarespace 12. IAC (Tinder, Match.com, OKCupid, etc) 13. Zocdoc 14. Compass 15. Casper 16. MongoDB 17. Warby Parker 18. Vimeo 19. Betterment 20. Classpass 21. DigitalOcean 22. Foursquare 23. Fanduel 24. Stackoverflow 25. SeatGeek 26. Birchbox

etc.

carljv• 7 years ago

It’s interesting to see how the definition of “tech company” has expanded. Only one or two of these companies create and sell software or technology. These are startups, maybe, and I think we can talk about where the “innovative” companies are. But these are companies that run platforms online, or use the web to sell products in novel ways. They seem very different from most of the companies on the parent comment’s list.

romwell2• 7 years ago

Tech landscape

Companies that use tech for their business =/= tech companies.

My overview:

1. Bloomberg [news, finance data tech]

2. AOL [zombie telecom?]. Yahoo HQ is in Sunnyvale.

3. Blue Apron [food]

4. Buzzfeed [news]

5. Tumblr [zombie adult microblogging]

6. Etsy [online marketplace]

7. AppNexus [adtech]

8. Flatiron Health [health]

9. Oscar Health [health]

10. Shutterstock [image hosting]

11. Squarespace [web hosting]

12. IAC (Tinder, Match.com, OKCupid, etc) [online dating]

13. Zocdoc [health]

14. Compass [real estate]

15. Casper [mattresses. Matresses, Carl!]

16. MongoDB [tech]

17. Warby Parker [eyeglasses]

18. Vimeo [video hosting]

19. Betterment [finance]

20. Classpass [um, fitness?]

21. DigitalOcean [cloud tech]

22. Foursquare [search tech]

23. Fanduel [gambling]

24. Stackoverflow [BBS tech]

25. SeatGeek [online ticket booth]

26. Birchbox [makeup]

I mean, if we brand matress, fitness, and make-up companies as "tech", then sure, plenty of tech in NYC.

Otherwise, I'd say it sounds a little... overhyped.

xfitm3• 7 years ago

New York is definitely finance. It's not to say the tech scene is small though. You have to work a little harder to network but that's nothing new to NYers.

kerng• 7 years ago

This article and ranking seems interesting - "best tech city"? I still can't comprehend how they came to that conclusion, but it must have to do with finance. Tech wise neither NYC nor London would attract me for tech jobs. Even Seattle is ranking higher in my books compared to those when it comes to "best tech city" and it's not even listed.

mac01021• 7 years ago

Is there widespread agreement on what it means to be a "tech company"?

Is a tech company or tech city just a company or city with a lot of software jobs? Or do people generally construe it to encompass more than software (batteries, nuclear reactors, pharmaceuticals)? Are some kinds of software excluded because they aren't novel enough?

Can Uber, FedEx, and Walmart all have the same level of technological sophistication and still one be regarded as "tech" and the others not?

I have the same question when it comes to investing, where "technology" is identified as a sector (for example Personal Capital uses it as one of 7 sectors across which to balance its portfolios). How do you decide what companies fall in or out of that sector?

towaway1138• 7 years ago

As always, ask "Best for what?". If your goal in life is tech and nothing else matters, the SF Bay Area tops everything.

If you want to raise kids in a reasonably safe environment, have them attend good schools, live in a house or equivalent condo, commute less than four hours per day, etc., the Bay Area is simply impossible. (Maybe if your spouse also draws a tech salary.) Do the research. In this sense, it's not "best", but rather one of the worst places in America.

(And don't even get me started on the public defecation...)

arcaster2• 7 years ago

New York Beats out San Francisco to Be World's Best City.

Drops mic.

New York Beats Out San Francisco to Be World’s Best Tech City

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