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It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

nytimes.com

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Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#41

Post by [deleted] »

code4tee wrote: post #18
TuringNYC wrote: post #11

I realize the anti-Amazon movement was a limited (but loud) group of individuals, but if their level of influence has lasting power, NYC tech is in trouble. Consider NYTimes' own article on the amazon exit. Half the people angry at Amazon were commenting that Amazon wasn't going to pay living wages (thinking that corporate HQ2 jobs are fulfillment jobs.) The other half were angry that Amazon was going to pay too much…

The backlash was mostly about the tax breaks and government subsidies that would have been given. The argument was that New York is New York and doesn’t need to bribe companies to put big offices here.

[deleted]

Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#42

Post by kharms »

TuringNYC wrote: post #20
nkozyra wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NYC tech is in trouble. I don't see much support for your argument here. As I see it, the stance is NYC is a strong enough tech city to be able to say no to Amazon; to not need to bend to their every whim to bring them here.

I would agree that we didn't need to bend to their every whim. We could probably have given them no incentives or token incentives and still won the HQ2 deal. There was a time to do that -- when we were making the proposal, not after it was already agreed to by both sides. But that isn't the my argument -- my argument is that the entire rhetoric is nonsensical. My shock is the dual narrative on "tech pays too much --…

>My shock is the dual narrative on "tech pays too much -- down with tech" "tech pays too little -- down with tech."

What's shocking about this? If you're uneducated and barely scraping by in LIC and Amazon moves in you have two problems: their low end jobs don't pay enough to improve your quality of life while their high end jobs are unattainable and will drive you out of the neighborhood. While Amazon might have been a net positive for the city it would have been actively harmful to a slice of the population. They spoke up.

Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#43

Post by lmm »

arcanus wrote: post #23
code4tee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The backlash was mostly about the tax breaks and government subsidies that would have been given. The argument was that New York is New York and doesn’t need to bribe companies to put big offices here.

Given the withdrawal of Amazon, didn't that invalidate the argument?

See what happens to the lots Amazon was going to build on. If they're sitting empty in a year or two, sure. If another company (or dozens of smaller companies) snaps them up and builds similar amounts of offices to what Amazon was planning, nah. I'm betting on the latter.

Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#44

Post by adventured »

meddlepal wrote: post #29
johnmarcus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why it will never really be Silicon Valley. No risk, no reward. NY is too expensive for anyone to sit around and take risks, likewise, it will never see the real reward.

Implying Silicon Valley is affordable compared to NYC is silly. The Californian "Try It" attitude is basically the equivalent of throwing shit against the wall while using other people's money. It works sometimes, but it's a terrible strategy that only works because VCs hit a unicorn that wipes out all the mistakes every so often.

> it's a terrible strategy that only works because VCs hit a unicorn that wipes out all the mistakes every so often

The "only" part of that doesn't actually invalidate the fact that it works. What you said is: it's a terrible strategy that has worked extraordinarily well.

It's a great strategy that has been shown to work across five decades of tech upheavel, precisely because it does pay for itself over time and keeps generating returns for institutional money. That it works so well is why it has all kept getting bigger as the positive results roll forward. It also produced the greatest concentration of tech dominance and invention the world is likely to ever see in one place.

Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#45

Post by neom »

johnmarcus wrote: post #16

whaa whaa whaa. This is nothing more than a hype article because NY is butthurt that it lost Amazon. "Silicon Alley", that's a joke. Your going to compare a single street to an entire state sized area of the Bay? LOL. NY has tech jobs rooted in old fashioned ways of making money - nothing interesting and very little actual innovation. It's just basic automation of number crunching, primarily to keep up with the guy n…

It's true, it's awful over here. We all work for banks and write java. Probably best if you stay in SF.

Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#46

Post by joeyb1111 »

TuringNYC wrote: post #20
nkozyra wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NYC tech is in trouble. I don't see much support for your argument here. As I see it, the stance is NYC is a strong enough tech city to be able to say no to Amazon; to not need to bend to their every whim to bring them here.

I would agree that we didn't need to bend to their every whim. We could probably have given them no incentives or token incentives and still won the HQ2 deal. There was a time to do that -- when we were making the proposal, not after it was already agreed to by both sides. But that isn't the my argument -- my argument is that the entire rhetoric is nonsensical. My shock is the dual narrative on "tech pays too much --…

> Finally, that the exit of 25,000 high paying jobs could be seen as some sort of victory is also alarming. NYC has really never recovered from the 2008 crash when ~500,000 well paying finance jobs were compressed/reduced/automated. NYC needs those jobs and the ecosystem they would create.

NYC unemployment is like 4%. I don't think it's in need.

Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#47

Post by [deleted] »

madengr wrote: post #17

NY is not a tech town. Google is not tech, it’s advertising. Amazon is a mail-order company. Uber is a taxi company. Stop calling “tech” technology. The revenue generated by those companies is not the technology itself. A semiconductor fab, a satellite construction facility, a defense contractor; those are “tech”. /rant

[deleted]

Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#48

Post by gammateam »

nickelcitymario wrote: post #30

One of the biggest lessons I've taken from New York's approach is not to try and be the next Silicon Valley (as every community is trying to be). You can't beat the Valley at its own game. That's foolish. Instead, look to what industries your community has long been successful in, and develop the tech to disrupt those industries before the Valley does. NYC's example was to focus tech on advertising, finance, and medi…

Your whole post missed the important part about what can get funded and where.

NYC is coming up, but the graveyard of quirky disruptors would still only be pursued in Silicon Valley. These non revenue generating companies acting as developer daycare need to be flipped from one portfolio to the next until you have a deal size big enough to matter, swap out the board and executive team and shop it to the public markets, ka-ching. New York VCs and other markets cant and wont chase developer daycare companies on a broad enough scale to grow these into deals.

Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#49

Post by pmart123 »

code4tee wrote: post #3

The NYC tech sector is indeed growing quite strong and is also quite grounded in the realities of business because of the diversity of NYC’s overall economy. Few cities in the world have the economic diversity that New York does. That drives the mindset to be noticeably different, mostly in a good way. At several meet ups recently the moderator wasn’t shy about warning Silicon Valley companies “I’d advise you to be c…

The irony of this is that attitude has created pretty much zero startups that have transformed into sustainable, profitable, medium or large companies. While there have been a couple successful exits that later crashed and burned like Tumblr and Blue Apron, and a couple TBD like MongoDB and Jet (Wal-mart acquisition), many of the NYC startup IPOs and exits seem to be playing a game of hot potato by selling to the next sucker with completely veneer metrics. Having had an early stage startup in NYC, I would say there was way too much focus on "you need metric X to be Y right now" even if doing so was detrimental to getting something off the ground.

That said, NYC is a good environment for established tech companies opening large satellite offices like Facebook, Google, etc.

Re: It Started With a Jolt: How New York Became a Tech Town

#50

Post by wefarrell »

TuringNYC wrote: post #11

I realize the anti-Amazon movement was a limited (but loud) group of individuals, but if their level of influence has lasting power, NYC tech is in trouble. Consider NYTimes' own article on the amazon exit. Half the people angry at Amazon were commenting that Amazon wasn't going to pay living wages (thinking that corporate HQ2 jobs are fulfillment jobs.) The other half were angry that Amazon was going to pay too much…

Politicians (AOC included) represent their current constituents. Not future potential constituents who might move into their district, but people who live there now.

The key issue here is rising rent, and this is something Local politicians (AOC in particular) campaign on. A significant portion of people here would see their rents go up without seeing any additional benefits.

How would you expect an elected official, who campaigned against higher rents, to justify not opposing Amazon?

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