New York Will Never Be Silicon Valley. And It's Good with That
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is a huge part of why I didn't enjoy being in SF (admittedly for a very short few months).
Every party I went to, most conversations I had (or overheard in a coffee shop) were tech-related. It felt impossible to have a conversation about anything else, and all conversations naturally gravitated towards tech like some sort of awful singularity.
It's pretty refreshing regularly talking to people who work in the arts, finance, education, administration, etc. If nothing else, just for novelty's sake - more interesting conversations happen when you can't talk about your work all the time.
It really was.
It's been substantially easier to step out of the bubble in NYC. So easy that I didn't even have to intentionally do it.
SF/SV for tech. LA for media. Houston for oil....
Is it as prominent as it seems?
You mentioned Houston as an example. Well, Houston has a rivalry with Dallas, where I live. One thing that came up when gas prices dropped like a rock a few years ago was that Houston's economy also dropped like a rock because of how dependent the whole city is on oil, but Dallas was totally unfazed by the whole thing because of how diverse our economy is, causing some of my more crass fellow Dallasites to lord it over Houston about how much better we're doing economically and making fun of Houston for putting all their eggs in one basket (IMO, that was going too far: as much as I like to joke about how much Houston sucks, it's always just joking, and I'm not going to take pleasure in their unemployment).
That just horrified me. Sorry, but that's work stuff. Work stuff stays at work. If you hang out with people in different industries, you're less inclined to talk about work stuff because neither of you will understand the nuances of the other's job.
Yes, thank you for this! I was struggling to articulate why those novel conversations happen, but this is totally the reason.
> I'd also say the message to me is "work hard, play hard, and keep a work life balance". People in Dallas get shit done, but they aren't going to work for more than 40-50 hours/week.
I can confirm that the culture here is very 9-5. We don't have the ambition-centric culture that SF has, and that works for me because I'm honestly not an ambitious person. You're probably not going to find many people here who are trying to grow their own business on the side or who go to a bar still trying to work through problems they're stuck on at work. I go to the bar when my job is stressing me out so I can forget about the stress by drinking tasty alcoholic treats until I can no longer concentrate on anything.
In other parts of the nation that I’ve lived there is less mono culture but I often hit a wall chasing my ideas.
In the Bay Area there is limitless possibility not just embraced but quarterbacked by seemingly everyone I meet.
If New York or Chicago had a culture that not only embraced these other wonderful cultural aspects of life but also had this focus of building big ideas so deeply engrained in their way of life then I’d be there and not here.
That said, the rent is too dang high out in the Bay. Time to end NIMBYISM in this state!
The diversity of startups is huge: marketing, software for construction project management, dog walking apps, you get the idea.
To say there is no diversity in the Bay Area might just mean people aren't looking hard enough.
Hell, you can go work for Tesla, in the automotive industry.
The fact that they are all tech companies is just the process we're going through in general at the moment as software continues to fill gaps where things are done manually or otherwise inefficiently.
Sure, but they're software startups first and foremost. Conversations felt like they inevitably drifted to very stereotypical discussions ("What's your stack?" or "Who's funding you?") because that's most people's day-to-day.
It's a bit like speaking to a group of executives (who also might come from diverse sectors) vs. speaking to a group of teachers, artists, dog walkers, and construction workers.
My point is that startups hire SME in all of those areas - people are actually dog walkers, teachers, artists, etc.
It may not be the focus - but the people and jobs are there even if not the primary focus.
I spent a lot of time in NYC after college and you have to go out of your way to mingle between groups.
Finance people hang out with finance people, entertainment people with entertainment people etc.
I don't think either place is ideal, but they both offer something is all I'm saying, if NYC has an edge here.
"I told you we'd meet again. Unfortunately it's a place like this I would never be in... I had fashion friends."
It only took me a slight active effort to diversify and you can meet the most interesting people in Healthcare, non-profits and tourism. New York, though remains unmatched in diversity along every dimension possible. It is not even quite the fair comparison given the population size differences between SF and NYC.
[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Tech-isn-t-biggest-S...
It's not even remotely the same "as anywhere". If you come to SF and live a middle-class life, you'll be surrounded by tech people. It breaks down on economic lines -- well-off people are in tech (and perhaps law and medicine), and everyone else is struggling.
Can you make friends outside of your industry? Sure, I had plenty. But it was increasingly difficult to meet those people without making a conscious effort to do so, and that's the difference.
Right, if you ignore the fact Asians make up a third of SV and hugely contribute to the tech scene, the area is totally lacking diversity.
NYC is so superficially centered on appearances, that I would never want SF to be like it. The type of strange ideas and interesting people I met in SF wouldn't have thrived in NYC. It doesn't surprise me that something like YC bloomed in SV, not in NYC, at least until it became a trendy industry. There's a reason why industries that involve appearances thrive in NYC, such as media, advertising, and fashion.
Don't get me wrong, I love NYC, I lived there for a number of years and missed it when I moved to SF. But I've always disliked the sense of superiority that NYC has over the rest of the country.
From my experience on living in both cities, NYC might be more diverse in industry, but at parties I found people in SF to be far more open to more thought provoking, controversial, and unconventional ideas.
[1] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/29/oakland-artists-...
[2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/03/23/residents-in-salt-lic...
[3] https://www.sfgate.com/expensive-san-francisco/article/Artis...
But if you have lived in S.F. and also New York, it's easy to see why someone would claim N.Y. is more diverse. I think it has a lot to do with embracing different ways of living. Its a pretty common joke how much conformity there is in the Bay in a basic workplace enviroment, ie. wear this flannel shirt, have 'x' opinion on social media, have 'x' political view.
New York isn't better or worse, but it feels like there is more variety in your day to day interactions with different types of people.
I noticed this in the Dallas/Ft Worth area too. What I also noticed was how many friends in both NYC and SF were completely oblivious to the fact that cities besides their own can also be rather diverse.
Both SF and NYC are constantly in their own bubbles, and I wish that they'd break out of them more instead of dismissing 98% of the country as "flyover states."
If you think specific types of industry are an indicator of an area's superficiality, I'd like to remind you of a media company in SF called Lucasfilm, an ad company in nearby Mountain View called Google (a client of SF's Epsilon) and a fashion company called Gap Inc.
Don't forget Levi's, Pixar, etc.
Quite a while ago (like 15+ years ago), I read a bit on language diversity, a chart of the number of languages spoken by at least 1000 households. San Francisco actually was highest on the list, higher even than New York (which was also very high up there).
Sorry for no cite, it was a while ago, I haven't been able to recreate this. SF's diversity may have dropped a bit since then, but it's most assuredly still there (I hear several different languages at least every day just walking around). But I do think it's another decent metric. After all, by the first measurement, there is essentially no diversity in Asia, which is absurd.
People in SV like to think they have unconventional ideas, but they all think the same way. ie, if you don't have the same pseudo-thought-provoking-disruptive ideas as the others, you will be laughed at literally.
I will quote Noam Chomsky, that perfectly summarizes SV in my opinion: ` One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there’s a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. `
NYC is way more diverse both graphically and in thoughts as you have people having completely different lifes, in different type of industries, with real-issues at hands.
Relevant quotes:
Investors, founders and employees point to all the things that make New York one-of-a-kind as the reason tech is growing in America’s biggest city: the presence of other industries like finance, media and advertising, much more gender and racial diversity and the metropolis’s centuries-old status as a center of global commerce. New York provides a contrast to Silicon Valley, which has been criticized for tunnel vision, being insular, out of touch with the rest of the country and overly homogeneous–both company employees and the people for whom they create products.
Instead of being dragged down or drowned out by New York’s well-established mega-businesses, startups are feeding off them, hiring their disaffected employees, building products to make them more efficient and partnering with them in ways that help both sides.
“We wouldn't have been able to start our company with this scale anywhere other than New York,’’ says Ryan Williams, the chief executive officer of Cadre, a real estate investment startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz. Being in the center of finance gives the firm access to top Wall Street talent and helped it land $250 million to invest on behalf of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
The proximity to major offices of many of the brands Zola sells through its site was a major benefit to being in the city, she says. Having the headquarters of top media and advertising companies a ten-minute subway ride away went a long way too
“New York is a much better place for fostering women entrepreneurs and women in tech,” says Samuels, who worked in the industry on both coasts. Both Ma and Ferreira agree.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/public-transit-ranking-cities-...
The organization, sure. However, the transportation complaints seem to be more of a publicity stunt than anything^. I've lived in NY for 30+ years, NYC for 10 of that. Excluding a few subsections, public transportation as a whole has barely changed in my 15 years of using it (regarding the numbers, part of my time I did as a commuter from the 'burbs).
^ In regards to taxes. A summary of my comments the last time this came up:
NYC residents pay a ton in taxes and get little back. Our state taxes get moved upstate and our federal taxes go to poor states. I really think it's just trying to put pressure on our representatives to be a bit more "selfish" as to what happens with our taxes.
Both the MTA and Metro North are owned by the state. One of them has 300k daily riders, the other has 5.5m daily riders. 150k of those MN riders end up in the city everyday, so both groups are using state owned products, one group is potentially using BOTH (I always did when I commuted from Westchester to the financial district). The 4 commuter lines combined (NJTransit, PATH, LIRR, Metro North) have 1/3 the total daily ridership of the subway, but get almost double the amount of subsidies from state coffers.
I honestly doubt another subway system will be built in a new city within the next decade, which is pathetic for other reasons.
Some people get so obsessed with NYC public transport they completely miss the big picture. Yeah your train may be 10 minutes delayed but at least there is a train. The perfect is the enemy of the good. The messy complexity of real life ( including corrupt politicians) is never going to look like something you dreamed up in sim city.
For instance, my current commute from voice lessons in the Upper West Side to my apartment in Brooklyn (about 9 miles) is one 30-minute train ride, with a train arriving at least every 5 minutes, plus a 5-minute walk on each side. I'm disappointed when that train doesn't go to Brooklyn on weekends because of construction or something, and I need to make one transfer to another train that also comes within about a minute of me getting to the transfer station.
My voice lessons in SF were in Diamond Heights, under 3 miles from my apartment in the Mission. All the commute options involved a bus that comes every half hour, and getting to that bus involved either a transfer from another bus, or walking 15 minutes to take BART one stop. So I would just take a Lyft or a ZipCar, and if the every-half-hour bus wasn't running that day, I wouldn't even notice because I didn't consider it an option. (Sometimes for the return trip I would walk >20 minutes downhill to Glen Park BART, but it's too steep to be a reasonable commute uphill.)
And then I moved to Oakland and gave up on going to voice lessons entirely.
Both the MTA and the Bay Area transit systems have plenty of room for improvement. The difference is that we think that improvement to the MTA is politically realistic, that covering the city with good, reliable transit is within the realm of possibility because we're so close to being there. That's why we make more noise in NYC. In SF, it didn't feel like there was a point.
/Recent parent practicing dad humor
There is a reason why Godzilla stamps Empire State Building out more often than Golden Gate Bridge in the movies :)
"Long Live Silicon Alley: The Inaugural NYC Summit"
http://www.primary.vc/blog/summit-17
I was at one of their gatherings not long ago and they pointed out that New York is the world capitol for domain-specific knowledge in at least a dozen industries: publishing, law, medicine, fashion, art, education, finance, and more. There is a potential there for a kind of success that will be different than Silicon Valley's, but not necessarily inferior to Silicon Valley.
I love SV for many things and there are many great people there, but at the end of the day, New York is my city because its more human, honest, candid and less tribal.
Firstly, who said we want to be silicon valley? Secondly, who are these two journalists that gives them the authority to say what ny is good or not good with? What the hell do they know about anything? Thirdly, they comparing a major city to what amounts to a business district. Maybe if they compared district ( garment, finance ) to silicon valley, there might be a point to this article.
It's such a non-story turned into one just because they need to publish rubbish everyday.
Really makes you think why some people go into these fields.($$$, not all but some)
It is ironic because with all the money they make, they cannot afford to live in the cities that they work.(http://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-unaffordable-e...
If only the government could match private sector wages. I think a lot of people would be way more interested in the public good then!
In fact there's a lot of open, albeit in jest, hostility towards the "californication" of the PNW.