
New York Beats Out San Francisco to Be World’s Best Tech City - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-04/new-york-beats-out-san-francisco-to-be-world-s-best-tech-city
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rsj_hn
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...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/21/ten-largest-us-tech-
firms-2018-revenue-seen-topping-1-trillion.html)

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

~~~
sincerely
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.

~~~
rsj_hn
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.

~~~
rrdharan
I kinda think DoubleClick should count, although I don’t know how dominant
they were:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoubleClick)

Honestly I also think Bloomberg should count.

I also wouldn’t go so far as to call them “major” but Mongo is headquartered
in NY.

Interesting list: [https://www.builtinnyc.com/2017/11/07/nyc-top-100-tech-
compa...](https://www.builtinnyc.com/2017/11/07/nyc-top-100-tech-
companies-2017)

~~~
rsj_hn
I would count doubleclick. I missed it because when I looked at my various
lists, it didn't account for acquisitions. Google bought doubleclick, but yes
it was market dominant when Google bought it.

Thanks for your list, which is interesting. No way would I consider 'vice
media' or 'buzzfeed' to be tech companies. We are well past the stage where
delivering something over the web makes you a tech company -- a tech company
uses some advance in technology to gain a key competitive advantage. So you
can argue that the Bloomberg terminal was bloomberg's key advantage and thus
makes Bloomberg a tech company, assuming they were the ones who invented
information terminals or did some technological innovation to radically
improve them.

But there is nothing like that in vice media or buzzfeed. These are media
companies. That also means the definition of a tech company changes over time.
If I start a company selling books online today, that's not a tech company.
Even though Amazon was a tech company doing just that in the past.

Take Blue Apron -- what exactly is technical about it, other than they have a
website? Take, as a comparison, Amazon. You can say "both Blue Apron and
Amazon sell stuff over the web". But selling stuff over the web in 1998 was
technically innovative whereas doing the same in 2018 is not. And you can tell
that Amazon is a technology driven company by looking at AWS and all of the
innovations they have created since then as well. Amazon makes money by
inventing new technologies, whereas Blue Apron makes money by selling prepared
meals. That's not a slam on Blue Apron, because there are many drivers of a
company. Maybe Blue Apron has the best chefs. Maybe they have the best quality
food. Maybe they have the best customer support. Maybe the best prices. There
are lots of legitimate business approaches other than focusing on
technological innovation to gain a market edge.

Similarly, nowadays every taxi company has smartphone based dispatching. But
that's not going to convert taxi companies into tech companies, but Uber will
remain a tech company and it continues to rollout other tech innovations even
as others catch up to them with smartphone dispatch.

~~~
rrdharan
Yep, I agree with all of these points. Casper and Capsule also come to mind
(both headquartered in New York, probably get lumped into these kind of lists,
and probably aren't really _tech_ companies).

But there are other ones that "feel" more like tech companies, just nothing
quite nearly as big as DoubleClick. e.g. Songza (acquired by Google),
Cockroach Labs, Vimeo (acquired by IAC but still operating independently) have
not (yet) been mentioned.

EDIT: I see Vimeo was covered below.

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gumby
The actual report is here: [http://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/global-
research/tech-cities-in...](http://pdf.euro.savills.co.uk/global-
research/tech-cities-in-motion.pdf)

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").

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mac01021
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?

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segmondy
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.

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xfitm3
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.

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

[https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/274944-0](https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/274944-0)

~~~
yesenadam
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.

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towaway1138
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...)

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kerng
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.

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demosthenes14
Having spent time in all the US cities on this list, I feel that Seattle
should be ranked much higher.

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

Drops mic.

