
Why Paul Graham is wrong about New York City - timr
http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2008/05/cities-based-on.html
======
aditya
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...

~~~
byrneseyeview
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).

~~~
dpapathanasiou
_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.

~~~
benjamincanfly
It's easy for a programmer to cover higher living expenses in NYC because tech
jobs pay well here. If you quit your job to make a go of it with a startup,
you had better start making money quickly, or your reserves will be depleted
before you know it. This has happened to me twice in two years.

------
sspencer
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.

~~~
tstegart
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.

~~~
wallflower
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..

~~~
aditya
Maybe that's the reason a lot of startup action is happening in Brooklyn,
where all the cool designer types and hackers are moving to.

The rent is lower and the people are just nicer, in DUMBO where our startup is
based there's atleast 5 other startups in a 10 block radius. Which, while not
SoMa is still pretty good :)

~~~
itsandrew
I live in Brooklyn (Williamsburg) and I know there is a lot of start-up
activity around me as well. It's easy to build a web app, but building a
beautiful web app requires some incredibly artistic and design-conscious
people which I think NYC (and especially Brooklyn) are chock full of.

~~~
tstegart
hmm.. like painters I suppose...

~~~
itsandrew
Or people that know Adobe...

------
greatreorx
"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.

------
tstegart
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.

~~~
timr
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.

~~~
tstegart
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.

~~~
giles_bowkett
well, they're overdue. the man's gotten very lazy preaching to the converted.

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

------
krschultz
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-...](http://shripriya.com/blog/2008/05/29/new-yorks-message-have-a-rich-
life/)

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

~~~
krschultz
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.

------
j2d2
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?_

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

I'll second that.

------
ardit33
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
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.

------
bayareaguy
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...](http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/07/02/2/an-appreciation-
of-clay-felker)) I've come to think that NYC is really all about _ambition_.

------
aspirant
"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.

~~~
aspirant
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.

------
herdrick
"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.

------
yef
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.

------
kaos
Paul Who?

------
giles_bowkett
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_.

~~~
pg
"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_bowkett
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.

------
time_management
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.

