Why Paul Graham is wrong about New York City

http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2008/05/cities-based-on.html

by timr • 18 years ago

62 71 18 years ago

sspencer• 18 years ago

Probably going against the grain here, but that was spot-on. PG's analysis of NYC in that article made me wince, especially that nonsense about restaurants and jackets. I also snorted at the notion that NYC is all about money. It is such a large and diverse city that I find it difficult to suggest that it is all about ANY one thing.

tstegart7• 18 years ago

Maybe its not all about money, but its definitely more about money. Coming from Wisconsin and working in Manhattan, I find my midwestern frugalness is completely alien to people. Time is money here, there is no doubt about it. Walking three blocks and taking a subway ride gets thrown out the window in favor of a $20 cab ride. Its the small stuff but it adds up. When a city suffers a shortage of BMWs after Wall Street bonuses come out, its hard to say its not about money.

byrneseyeview3• 18 years ago

Maybe it's a Manhattan thing. I live in Brooklyn, and I encounter some awesomely frugal people.

Also, it may be an Alchian-Allen thing: if you're paying a fixed cost just to live in the city, luxury is comparably less of an indulgence. See: http://www.nationalpost.com/loveandsex/story.html?id=296085

wallflower2• 18 years ago

In NYC, they have laws that a renter must earn an annual income that is 52x the monthly rent to qualify to rent the apartment (yes, subletting from someone is one way around it).

In NYC, a 1BR apartment that you live in by yourself is a status symbol. The average monthly rent is north of $2,500. Spending $2k+ on rent just to live in the city, maybe that's more about ego than it is about money..

pg3• 18 years ago

I find it difficult to suggest that it is all about ANY one thing.

From the essay:

"There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer."

tstegart7• 18 years ago

You know I was cleaning this weekend and apparently I missed the start of "Put the smack-down on PG" week. Any way I can catch up by Friday? Suggestions PG? I have a tentative work entitled "Why PG is wrong about the color of the HN menubar," but I'm not sure it has the same pizzaz as this other stuff we're seeing.

timr2• 18 years ago

The point of submitting this wasn't to pick on pg -- it's a thoughtful piece, and adds a new voice to the discussion. Interesting conversations have two sides.

tstegart7• 18 years ago

Thats true. It was not a comment about this article, it was a joke about many articles appearing in a short time frame all disagreeing with PG in some way or another. All the responses seem to have come out at once. Conversations are good, although I have a running disagreement on a different thread over the logic of some comments, I have to say they are enjoyable to read.

ph0rque• 18 years ago

> I have a tentative work entitled "Why PG is wrong about the color of the HN menubar,"...

You get to disagree about the menubar color at 250+ karma.

pg3• 18 years ago

Actually this one is a delight by comparison. This guy at least means well. The last one was like Fox News.

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

You know, I missed the other articles because I was out of town (I assume), but I just wanted to let you know that'd I'd like to nominate this comment for Comment-Of-The-Year award. Here everyone else is setting up for a flame war and you just come along and remind everyone that they are being four-year-olds.

aditya4• 18 years ago

Frankly, it's almost impossible to find good engineers in NYC. The banks do take them all, that doesn't mean that it's impossible to start up in the city, it is just harder.

On the west coasts, startups compete with other startups and employees bounce around making similar amounts of money. In New York, startups compete with financial institutions which can and do throw enormous amounts of cash at employees without a second thought, hence the startups can't compete.

I have to agree with the echo chamber part of things though, startups in NYC are doing different things than startups on the west coast, but maybe that's because there's just fewer startups here that there's more ideas to go around...

byrneseyeview3• 18 years ago

I wonder if the banking thing isn't as much of a problem as it seems. I work as a financial recruiter, and one of the patterns I see is an on/off relationship with startups and banks, e.g. working two years at Goldman, then one year at a new search engine, then a year at Credit Suisse, then three years starting up a new wiki-based whatsit.

If you know you can quit and -- within a few months -- be earning a great living writing trading algorithms in C++ or reporting systems in Java, a startup is a much saner risk. This also applies to quants and physics majors: many smart folks are lured into the private sector, but many many more smart people can consider a Physics PhD because of the money they can make (if they need it).

dpapathanasiou2• 18 years ago

If you know you can quit and -- within a few months -- be earning a great living writing trading algorithms in C++ or reporting systems in Java, a startup is a much saner risk.

That cuts both ways, though: it's too easy to bail at the first hint of trouble at a startup, which is why there are relatively few great startup stories out of NY.

hugh• 18 years ago

It doesn't work in quite the same way for physicists/quants though. Once you leave physics and go into finance it's extremely hard to make the jump back -- a few years in finance puts you way behind your peers in the race for publications, and you're pretty much stuck there forever. The startup scene is far more forgiving to its apostates than the physics scene is.

I personally wish it were easier for physicists to spend just a few years in finance to find out whether they like it, and/or to save up some money.

ig1• 18 years ago

It seems similar in london, I went to the london techcrunch meetup a few weeks ago and quite a few of the people there were ex-banking.

jawngee4• 18 years ago

I have to agree with this. It took us (massify.com) forever to find talent.

NYC has an agency mindset which doesn't work in a startup environment. So you hire people from razorfish, digitas, r/ga, etc. but they're expecting the same 9-5 lifestyle and have a hard time adjusting.

iron_ball• 18 years ago

So, by "not the same 9-5 lifestyle," what do you mean? I would hesitate to put words in your mouth, but please tell me the startup lifestyle you have in mind, and whether it is of equal quality. I'm going to give you a handicap, though: You cannot use the concept of "doing something you love," because you cannot require that your employees love it as much as you, or you'll find nobody at all.

Tamerlin2• 18 years ago

You're the one who has it wrong. You're just having trouble finding people willing to sacrifice their lives for their jobs, and those aren't the people you want working for you anyway.

bayareaguy• 18 years ago

I've not spent enough time in NYC to judge for myself but based on what I've read and seen (e.g. http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/07/02/2/an-appreciatio...) I've come to think that NYC is really all about ambition.

ardit33• 18 years ago

Have you seen rents in NYC, how about try to shop for groceries? That's right, that place is so expensive that it is hard not to be worried about money all the damn time.

So, yes, NYC to a certain point is more about money than anything else.

I have seen it even in dating, when you see so many good looking girls, just dating around so they can have the "Sex and the City" glam life, that they couldn't afford themselves. And this "dinner whore" term (sorry if I am being rude), originated in the east coast.

In SF people seem to be a lot less interested on how much money you make, at least when it comes to dating.

Zev• 18 years ago

Well you folks on the west coast started "valley girl" - does that even things out?

Rent might be expensive here, but the west coast is hardly the cheapest place to live either. Just look at prices in LA for example.

True, if you want to live in the middle of one of the most expensive cities in the world, its going to be expensive. But if you move out of the center of Manhattan and into the rest of the city, it's not as expensive at all.

krschultz2• 18 years ago

Working at a startup in NYC I have to disagree with pg as well. I think if anything the vibe is "i am more hip than you are". The place where the vibe is "i have more money than you do" is in Westchester, NY - where all the wall streeters live. They commute in and out, and take all their money to build big homes on the water up there. That has been true since the mid 1800s. The people who are actually into the culture of the city are in the small apartments in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and even within Manhattan.

Read this as well http://shripriya.com/blog/2008/05/29/new-yorks-message-have-...

fleaflicker2• 18 years ago

The hip thing is definitely true but I think it depends on age.

krschultz2• 18 years ago

That is true, I am 21 and I don't work near wall street, so all the people I come in contact with are more artsy than finance major.

greatreorx• 18 years ago

"It would have made no sense for me to build Path 101 anywhere else but NYC, because my network is here."

So right... if you have spent your whole life in NYC, went to college there, and spent a year working at one of the most well known East coast VC firms (like Charlie has), then yes, Paul Graham is completely wrong about doing your start up in NYC. But what about the kid who just graduated from college and is deciding where to do his startup? Charlie's New York is not the same New York that a newcomer will experience.

I live in NY and love the city, but I agree with PG on this if your only goal in life is the success of your startup. If you have other goals though - like having interesting and diverse friends, or great experiences, and don't mind having to overcome more challenges than you would face in the Valley - then NYC is a great place for you.

j2d22• 18 years ago

When PG says New York City, I usually take it to mean Manhattan. Brooklyn and Queens are both pretty awesome. If anyone here is from NYC, I'd love to start some real-life gatherings for YC'ers.

Edit: on this topic, I believe reddit started in brooklyn and later relocated. Can anyone confirm?

jawngee4• 18 years ago

I'm down.

dpapathanasiou2• 18 years ago

If anyone here is from NYC, I'd love to start some real-life gatherings for YC'ers.

I'll second that.

tstegart7• 18 years ago

I'm down for that as well. It could be the rotating borough meet-up. The Beer Garden in Queens, a cafe in Manhattan, Brooklyn or the Bronx. Um... whatever is in Staten Island.

j2d22• 18 years ago

You're talking my language!

jdennis@gmail.com

Whoever is interested, please email me. I'll send out a message with all the email addresses I receive to coordinate. And ya'll can pass it around accordingly.

sebg• 18 years ago

sounds good.

fleaflicker2• 18 years ago

Tech meetup is pretty decent

http://newtech.meetup.com/1/

aditya4• 18 years ago

Tech meetup is full of entrepreneur-wannabes, FAIL.

Someone I met was throwing around the idea of a language agnostic hacker meetup with a simple programming/logic puzzle as the barrier to entry. Much better idea than tech-meetup!

PS. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=240529 for our new ruby meetup :) Sorry about the self-promotion...

fortes• 18 years ago

I'm interested as well.

itsandrew4• 18 years ago

Reddit started in Boston. Although, it may have originally been conceived in Charlottesville (back me up here Alexis?). Regardless, not a Brooklyn start-up.

I'm down for NYC YC gatherings.

time_management2• 18 years ago

I'm up. magus.pwnsen@gmail.com

agotterer• 18 years ago

Def down,I'm in the union square area.

khafra• 18 years ago

You could use one of the existing ones--since I work in security, I'm most familiar with Citysec, or something like The Last Hope (Jul 18-20 @ The Pennsylvania Hotel).

dangoldin• 18 years ago

Sounds good to me too.

shawndrost• 18 years ago

"I'm going to disprove your generalization with my anecdotes."

giles_bowkett5• 18 years ago

The thing is, any reasoning that assumes Silicon Valley is where it's at ignores all the TechCrunch articles about "the crisis in venture capital" and the inability of the VCs to find companies that need their money to lift off at all in the commodity-hardware/open-source-software era. It's very, very unlikely that the Valley-centric monoculture of the past will continue to characterize the startup scene. NY has a startup scene, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Edinburugh, London, every place I've been to or met people from in the last ten years has a startup scene. Even Santa Fe, New Mexico, an isolated mountain city of only 60,000 people, counting daytime commuters, has a startup scene.

The radical reduction in startup cost for technology companies is THE technology-business event of the last twenty years. It absolutely decentralizes tech startups by making VCs much less important. Yes, the Valley still has an edge in terms of people, but if you're used to being the center of the universe, having an edge isn't the same.

This explains local startup scenes, and makes it obvious they'll become more important in future, not less. Paul Graham isn't just wrong for the obvious reasons - because anybody who says NY is about any one thing is smoking crack, for instance, or because of the Valley's echo chamber, or because there must be something in Boston's relative non-entity-ness despite its incredible programmer population, etc., etc., etc. - he's also wrong because he's ignoring the ginormous sea change in startup capital requirements that his own business revolves around, and which he himself first identified in one of his essays years before anyone in the Valley ever blogged about it.

He's ignored his own discoveries.

giles_bowkett5• 18 years ago

dammit, I misspelled Edinburgh.

tstegart7• 18 years ago

You get points for using ginormous though.

pg3• 18 years ago

"Ultimately power rests with the founders. A startup with the best people will beat one with funding from famous VCs, and a startup that was sufficiently successful would never have to move. So a town that could exert enough pull over the right people could resist and perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley."

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

giles_bowkett5• 18 years ago

Yes. Because it's about which town is number one. It's not about the fact that any town can produce great tech today, with or without startups.

Nor is it about the fact that today's abundance of great free tech enables many towns to simultaneously produce work of top quality, making the whole concept of "number one" meaningless.

Nor is it about the fact that so many towns and non-towns can produce great tech that towns become irrelevant too.

Actually, by yes, I mean no.

I think I've read nearly everything you've published. I was aware of the quote when I wrote the criticism, and I think the quote fails to address any substantive part of it. I think if you want to address any criticism I make, you'll need to write something new, or dig up something obscure which I haven't read.

timr2• 18 years ago

Yeah...Seattle has a startup scene. But from what I've witnessed, you can't compare it to the scene in the bay.

Your average startup founder in Seattle is in his mid-to-late 30's, and has just come off of an N-year (N >= 10) successful career at Microsoft or Amazon. He's financially comfortable, and the decision to jump into a startup was probably driven as much by boredom (with the 9-to-5) as ambition. Moreover, without outside help, young founders rarely get the time of day from local investors (after all, everyone knows that you need to work at Microsoft for a while to gain experience before you can start a company!)

All of this could be viewed as good or bad, but in my opinion, it's not as vibrant, energetic or varied as the scene in the bay area. Here, young founders have an uphill climb to prove themselves -- in the bay, it's almost the opposite.

kaos• 18 years ago

Paul Who?

time_management2• 18 years ago

I feel like a second-class citizen when I'm looking for apartments and have to sift through ungodly crap, much of which is priced above what I'm willing to spend. The inherited wealthy are a small set of people, but they have a huge effect on real estate here. Aside from that, I think New York is too diverse to be just "about money", and so I disagree.

New York will be an awesome place to live after the real estate crash. I will be so happy to see that happen.

yef• 18 years ago

Yup. Being the capital of ideas isn't terribly interesting. Ideas aren't worthless but they are worth less than the vetting, refining, and execution of ideas.

herdrick• 18 years ago

"Is this really how Paul thinks his YCombinator startups should make decisions on where to build their business? By restaurants with jacket requirements?"

Paul figured out a way to quantify something (fussiness about appearance) that seems completely squishy. That's a good skill to develop, by the way.

aspirant2• 18 years ago

"Ideas today are a commodity. Anyone can have an idea..."

This line scares me.

Yes anyone can have an idea. In fact everyone has ideas. The catch is that they range from disastrously false to powerfully true.

A place that:

1. Values ideas in the abstract (and not just their shiny tangible fruits), and

2. Is skilled in the art of investigating the truthfulness of a proposition (dialectic),

will arrive at truer and therefore more powerful beliefs, faster. If Cambridge offers more of that to people than elsewhere, then PG is right. Since the rebuttal doesn't seem to comprehend this, it serves for me as one more data point that PG is right.

Pay attention in case you missed it - PG taps out an article in Cambridge about how ideas are valued there more than anywhere else, and someone not in Cambridge writes a rebuttal that seems to hurriedly elbow right past the big idea, about ideas.

Now, as far as why the idea capital and the startup capital aren't (currently) one in the same. Well, have you ever noticed that not all ideas are about startups? And some very powerful ones at that. Like...

- ideas about the limits of human potential, technically and ethically.

- ideas about how to properly wield rationalism and empiricism

- ideas about what is good (to be sure, if your idea here isn't just an incremental advancement but a disruptive one, it can result in your imprisonment and execution rather than your IPO).

- maybe a few trillion others

So you can see why it will be hard for the capital of ideas to be the predominate home of any single occupation. Add to this, that powerful ideas tend to motivate people who manage to believe in them to the point of conviction. So if an idea motivates someone to execute their plan - their plan to reform education, their plan to work with the poor, their plan to save the whales for god sakes not just their plan for another effing startup, am i clear? - then they won't always be executing there in Cambridge. That doesn't mean that ideas are antithetical to execution.

But I would still buy this man a beer, because PG's article seemed true, but brutally so. And if such a thing had been said about my mother and she had heard it, it would be right to rise indignantly to say, "Scoundrel, take that back!" Of course the honest thing would be to later educate her on the truthfulness of those very same points, but in a more gentle and loving way.

So Charlie, I reject your reasoning but applaud your chivalry.

aspirant2• 18 years ago

I spent a month in Cambridge after writing this and now think this post was a bit rash.

Cambridge may be more about ideas than anywhere else, but it also seemed home, more than anywhere else, to people doing scholarship for scholarship sake and to people who had subjugated significant ideas to serve their little ideas.

Again and again I ran into people studying great thinkers and great thoughts for no greater reason than that they had never been out of academia, didn't want to leave, and were using these thinkers and thoughts as fodder for their thesis (job application) in order to get a professorship that would shield them from the outside world forever.

Encountering those sickly sorts will leave any results oriented person, like Charlie, wary.

Why Paul Graham is wrong about New York City

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