As Sam Natapoff recently explained in an article in Salon, “Fifteen years ago, New York City was a tech afterthought.” A lot has changed though over the last decade and a half with it being ranked as “the second highest performing startup ecosystem in the world after Silicon Valley.” Statistics show that New York City features:
- More than 280,000 tech jobs in the city
- More than 128,000 tech jobs in the state
- A 57% increase in tech employment between 2010-16
- 7 meter square feet of Manhattan office space occupied by tech tenants in 2016
- 7,500 New York based tech companies (23% increase since 2010)
And even more than that, New York is actually beating Silicon Valley in some sub-industries.
New York has successfully resuscitated its economy resulting in the recruitment of human capital and the promotion of technology and VC financing. What’s also impressive is that New York has done this without having “a strong engineering base;” rather, it utilized “the natural strengths of its existing economy, its diverse industry base, its human capital diversity, and its desirability as a place to live.”
New York has always had a good business background. According to an article by Gerrit De Vynck and Julie Verhage earlier this year part of the city’s success can be attributed to diversity vis-à-vis gender and race as well as “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.”