Battle of the Tech Ecosystems: Boston vs. New York

Somerville (bordering Boston and Cambridge) is home to one of the world&#x27;s largest makerspaces: <a href="http://artisansasylum.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;artisansasylum.com</a> and a big cleantech incubator: <a href="http://greentownlabs.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;greentownlabs.com&#x2F;</a>

Silicon Valley.<p>If you&#x27;re moving somewhere, why waste time on a city that is distant second, in terms of startup ecosystems? It&#x27;s not like Boston or NYC are significantly cheaper than the valley.

When we discuss &quot;Tech Ecosystem&quot; - why does it always have to be about funding? There are so many different factors that can make a certain area better or worse: real estate prices, salaries (esp. for engineers), access to colleges, etc. Besides, not every tech company is VC-backed.

I recently moved to NYC to join a startup and I must say the community is thriving here. You can find a lot of like-minded people at local Meetups.<p>This was on the front page a couple of days ago - should give you a good idea of ecosystem here: <a href="http://www.cbinsights.com/new-york-venture-capital" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbinsights.com&#x2F;new-york-venture-capital</a>

Personally I&#x27;m a big fan of the NYC startup scene. First of all if you are creating a B2B that isn&#x27;t selling to tech companies then NYC is ideal. Many times we&#x27;ve been able to take a quick subway ride across town to pitch our product at the NYC headquarters of some large company that is interested in our product. And that&#x27;s helped us sell our product to businesses like Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren.<p>Second of all I like the community. There are lots of interesting meetups and hackathons going on, and while I&#x27;m sure SF has more I feel that NYC has more than enough to satisfy me.<p>And third I like the energy of NYC. It is a great city to accomplish things in because it really has an infective spirit of getting things done. It&#x27;s hard for me to explain, but the city is always busy and there are always people around you working and getting things done.<p>Anyway I don&#x27;t know much about the Boston scene so I can&#x27;t properly compare the two, but I can say that I like NYC a lot.

I spent 6 years in the boston tech startup scene (2004-2010) and have spent 2010-2013 here in the NY tech startup scene.<p>My quick observations:<p>- Better engineers in Boston - Larger thinking business ideas in NYC<p>Fusing the business ambition of NYC with the technical acumen of Boston would be an amazing ecosystem.

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Boston has such a lead in the biotech ecosystem compared to anywhere else that I wonder if they could establish a tech niche of bio&#x2F;pharma-related tech. Chasing traditional consumer mobile&#x2F;web-tech seems like swimming upstream in Boston.

We are closer to NYC (Stamford CT) - but as far as startups are concerned, I like Boston ecosystem more. More vision.

Boston Strong.