While SF might be loath to acknowledge it New York has been a high-tech center for a long time - Fulton invented the steamboat, Tesla and Edison were both working here, later we had Bell Labs, IBM. The Manhattan Project had the named that because so much of the work was on the island of Manhattan before security and safety moved it out to the desert.<p>One of the big things here is that the NY area's tech scene is just one part of the economy among many. Every time I come to SF and the valley it seems as if the entire economy is being eaten by tech. Having lived and worked on both coasts, I think this is a huge advantage to NY.
This makes sense to me:<p><i>>“New York is now the leading place on the East Coast for tech-venture investments,” said David Silverman, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “Several years ago, companies that wanted to do something big all had to go to Silicon Valley.”</i><p>By now Boston, the East Coast's number two city, is almost as expensive as NYC yet doesn't have nearly the concentration of talent and doesn't have nearly as good a transport scene or dating life (<a href="http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics-how-dating-became-a-lopsided-numbers-game-jon-birger/" rel="nofollow">http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics...</a>). NYC also has that critical concentration of nerds and rich people. SF has become so absurdly expensive that NYC starts to look attractive by comparison.
My experience may be anecdotal but as someone who has lived and spent a lot of time in both NYC and SF, it feels like New York is becoming the smarter place to start a startup. SF has been eating itself over the past year while NYC has seen a growing number of promising young tech companies set up shop.
There's...<p>Stanford: money (VCs/angels), talent, founders and customers, all within a very comfortable radius (complete ecosystem). Google, Snapchat, PayPal, Netflix, ... And, strong alumni networking.<p>and<p>Harvard: has talent, founders and some customers, but money often require more travel (currently incomplete ecosystem, read: time and money sinks). Strong alumni networking too.<p>and<p>IIT system: not bad either.