I’m a New Yorker, grew up there and now living in SF. Brooklyn was cool, but it didn’t “get” the kind of experimental intellectualism that’s needed in a tech startup scene. Not ripping on my old hometown. They have the intellectualism but haven’t applied it to tech. If I were to go back to New York, I wouldn’t go into tech, I’d go into finance because that’s where the nerds would be.

If I may, when I visited Vancouver (several times), I couldn’t find a coffee shop culture there. For some reason this seems like a big deal. In Manhattan and in San Francisco, people write in coffee shops and it’s kind of a thing. This seems like a big deal too. There’s more startups that started in a coffee shop than you’d think. Again, it goes towards a certain kind of intellectual experimentation.

As a Vancouverite, I found people less adventurous, less free-thinking, and greedier, in the Valley. Not by a huge margin, but still.

But if you're in it for the money, the 2x salaries can't be beat.