I attended YCNYC last night. I didn't get the impression that PG was slamming NYC (aside from the weather, which I sure agreed with this week). A lot of what he said about NYC was positive, a few things were negative, many were over generalizations but that is just how it goes when you make a sweeping, predictive, speech.<p>But I'm really disappointed this is the storyline coming out of YCNYC. I took a lot of notes last night during the Q&A and the founder's talks. I took basically none during PG's talk. There were great presentations from the founders of AirBnB, Weebly, WePay, and others that I really inspired me and taught me things. Talking to lots of other people was very interesting.<p>I spent 6 hours in my car and 2 hours on trains yesterday to get to and from the event, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I did not go through that trouble to hear about Silicon Vally vs Boston vs NYC, and that's not what I got out of last night. Yet on the internet that's all I'm reading about. It really was a tiny portion of the night.
PG was correct on everything he said about NYC. When I first heard him speak at the event, I thought he was going to talk fluff about how great NYC was, but he was honest. Every point he made was true.<p>Haters gonna hate.
"Here’s three things that really pissed me off that rolled through my feed."<p>Some guy on the internet gets offended at out-of-context blurbs he read on the internet about an event he did not attend? Stop the presses.
I'm going to step out on a limb here, and say something that will probably be seen as unpopular, especially among you New Yorkers out there: this kind of inability to self-reflect in any way but with a Quixotic positivity about oneself may be a damaging aspect of NYC culture. To be clear, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to be optimistic, I'm saying that if you can't take criticism, it's hard to make progress. If you're sure you've already arrived, then what's the point of talking about it anymore? It makes it difficult to innovate though, individually and communally, when everyone thinks they've already figured it out and aren't willing to consider other perspectives. At YCNYC last night I felt that pg made some insightful comments. Sure, they weren't necessarily gratifying for NYC. But so what? Does that make them any less important or interesting?