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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

We had a quite interesting conversation about NYC at the end but for some reason they cut it off. Maybe the cameras stopped working or something.

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Does "quite interesting" extend as far as revising your view about the primacy of Silicon Valley for startups? NYC seems to have supplanted Boston as the obvious runner-up, which is already the first tectonic shift in the startup lithosphere in a long time (decades?), so if any place is going to give SV a run for its money it would likely be NYC. Curious to know how significant you think the trend is or might get.

It was about why NYC may be supplanting Boston as the number 2. If my theory about the reason is correct, then the trend will be pretty significant.

From my experience in London I'd say a major factor is the financial sector pulls in lots of ambitious talented developers and pays them well enough that they can easily afford to take time-off to work on their own thing.

In London at any startup event you go to in London I'd say around ~20-30% of the founders have backgrounds in the financial sector.

I think investment banks are more nurturing of that sort of behaviour than many other firms, they're willing to let people go off and experiment and then rehire them back if stuff doesn't work out for them. I left the bank I was working for, and they became my first client (on a consultancy basis) to help finance my startup and after the consultancy contract was over they gave me an open invite to call them if I ever wanted to come back. I know many other people who have similar stories.

I am curious about you theory because I've been in NYC since web 1.0 so I like to see how your theory is.

Would you like to share it?

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