Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 203 posts

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

#111

Post by danielson »

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…

> At what point does someone who moves to NYC become a NYer?

10 years, or if you were here on 9/11.

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

#112

Post by avbanks »

lmm wrote: post #43
arcanus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well you might be wrong, the land will now be redeveloped for condos 1,000 total.

" Patchett did toss out a scrap of news about what’s next for Long Island City. He said city land that had been slated for the tech giant’s corporate towers will instead become a mix of homes and businesses. That, after all, had been the original plan before New York decided to drop it and go a-courtin’ for the company. The new-old project will consist of a thousand residential units—two hundred and fifty of which will be affordable. The neighborhood will also gain 100,000 square feet of light manufacturing and industrial space, ground floor retail, a cultural center, a 600-seat middle school, and a one-acre park."

http://gothamist.com/2019/02/22/amazon_blame_game_patchett.p...

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

#113

Post by chiefalchemist »

Ologn wrote: post #105
chiefalchemist wrote: post #35

Google? DoubleClick? Perhaps the more accurate headline would be: New York Became a Tech Town (Because SV Ran Out of Space and People)? Not a criticism, simply an honest observation. But what industry doesn't have outposts in NYC? Why would we expect tech to be any different? Where is the story here? Where is the news?

DoubleClick was founded in New York.

I sit corrected. Thanks. None the less, don't cha think we need more than on such entity to declare "victory"?

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

#114

Post by untog »

TuringNYC wrote: post #26
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.

They definitely didn't need to bribe Amazon. There was a time to argue against that. True leadership would have been to have these protests when the incentives package was put together, not later when we already bagged the win and would lose everything.

Yes, true leadership by Cuomo and De Blasio would have involved local politicians and the people they represent from the start. But they didn't. They negotiated the deal in secret then presented it to citizens as a done deal whether they liked it or not.

Really, can anyone be surprised that this was not met with enthusiasm? IMO the blame lies at the feet of Cuomo, who is used to getting his own way and dictating to others. This is one of very few times that it came back to bite him.

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

#115

Post by nickelcitymario »

etblg wrote: post #81
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…

I think the most critical flaw in Sudbury's plan, is that people would have to live in Sudbury (no offense) It's a small, cold, somewhat-remote city known for mining, and particularly for having an incredibly tall smokestack visible everywhere in town. You can fund startups, but who is going to move from other places to Sudbury?

LOL

It's not a critical flaw. It's a reality to be contended with.

The flaw would be pretending this isn't the case, and trying to be just like Silicon Valley and competing with them on their terms at their own game.

Sudbury is a real city in a real place. It can't relocate. It can't choose a better climate. So community leaders have to contend with reality.

Like any competitive landscape, you have to look at your strengths and weaknesses. Our weaknesses are obvious (it's fucking cold). But our strengths?

How about having two of the largest and longest running mining companies in the world operating here? How about having an entire class of engineers who have specialized on mining and have already chosen to live here? How about having two colleges and a university supplying fresh talent every year? How about a radically lower cost of living? And an abundance of funding from local, provincial, and federal governments who are hungry to see real progress in this space? How about a far more open immigration policy attracting top talent from countries your president is afraid of?

I'm sorry but this Valley-centric mentality is just weird. It may surprise you to learn that not everyone thinks the Bay Area is awesome. (I've been. I loved visiting. Wouldn't want to live there.) Alot of brilliant mathematicians, scientists, and engineers want nothing to do with it.

We also have universal health care, radically lower crime rates, an abundance of nature, low population density, comparatively cheap real estate, and hockey. So much hockey.

That smoke stack has long been roughly 98% water vapor because we long ago cleaned up our smelting process to not need it, and the steam was needed to push the other 2% to the top. It's also being decommissioned in the next few years.

So who's moving here? The people who love it. Don't believe me? Check out #WeLiveUpHere for a hint of the passion locals have for this community.

Anyway, that was all an aside. This wasn't about "hey, look how great Sudbury is, you should all be like Sudbury." It's 100% fine if you don't like it, but it's delusional to think that everyone feels the same way.

My point was that every community has to contend with tech disruption. The desperate ones will throw their money behind anything tech and hope it sticks. The smart ones will focus on the areas where they're already strong.

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

#116

Post by untog »

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…

Google is in the midst of a large expansion in NYC. Amazon themselves are even still expanding in NYC, just not to the levels (and location) of the HQ2 plan.

NYC tech will be absolutely fine. It's still a very desirable place to base a company, and IMO people won't even be talking about the Amazon deal in a year's time. I mean, think about the level of resistance big tech companies face in San Francisco, or Seattle even. This is a pretty uniform thing.

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

#117

Post by jakelazaroff »

vonmoltke wrote: post #107
fjp wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about people getting priced out of their homes, their neighborhoods. Just from the news of Amazon, people in adjacent neighborhoods were told by landlords their rents would be increased significantly upon lease renewal. People grow up in their neighborhoods and are connected to them and proud of them. Their are ways to bring up a neighborhood without pricing its residents out of living there. The main issue that…

> Amazon pays $0 in federal tax Citation to actual financial statements needed. Their most recent 10-K indicates they paid $1.2B in total taxes. > demanded $3 billion in local tax breaks No, they didn't. At least $2.5B of that is on the table for any company that wants to build and office for 25,000 people in LIC. > offered very little enforceable things in return Not sure what you mean here. The majority of the tax…

Amazon paying $0 in 2018 federal taxes was widely reported. Here's one citation: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/15/amazon-ta...

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

#118

Post by o_nate »

msrpotus wrote: post #101
CPLX wrote: post #5

New York is the most important city in the history of world civilization, this shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. Everything genuinely important in this country ends up run from New York City eventually. People forget the Rockefellers made their money in Cleveland. But that aside NYC has always had a serious tech community since the electric grid was invented in lower Manhattan, or the transistor in suburban New Je…

I love New York but I’m pretty sure if you consider the history of the world, London, Rome, Istanbul/Constantinople, and Jerusalem (maybe Beijing/Peking too) are almost certainly more important.

Agreed. One could maybe make a case for NY as pre-eminent city of the 20th century, but Rome held that title for at least 4 or 5 centuries. London maybe for 1 or 2 centuries (I'd say 18th and 19th). Maybe Madrid at the height of the Spanish Empire. From an Asian perspective, a case could be made for Beijing.

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

#119

Post by untog »

vonmoltke wrote: post #94
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.

> 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. If that is the case, where are the calls to end the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program[1], the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program[2], and the Excelsior Jobs Program[3]? That is where the vast majorit…

I don't think it's all that surprising that individuals are more motivated to protest something specific rather than the economic development programs that allow it to happen.

I (and many others I've spoken to) don't have a problem with the idea of economic subsidy to support businesses moving to NYC, but objected to a company the size (and success) of Amazon doing so. I can imagine there would be widespread support for a move to limit these programs to smaller startup companies, and maybe we'll even see some local politicians propose that.

But there's a city/state issue here. Few people would object to Amazon creating a massive HQ and 25k jobs in Albany, even if they would in NYC. So any answer would have to take that into account too.

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

#120

Post by nickelcitymario »

gammateam wrote: post #48
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…

I more or less responded to this in response to "etblg", but you'd be amazed at the amount of funding available from angels, local governments, provincial governments, and federal governments.

No, we probably won't be building the next Facebook up in Sudbury. We don't need to.

But we can do extremely well being "big fish in a small pond", as the saying goes. Our strength is mining. Very few communities have the concentrated resources and expertise that we do in this very specific sector.

I think your point of view is a little VC centric. If you're a community leader in any city like ours, your ambition isn't to attract billions of dollars of investment to build the next unicorn. I mean, sure, we wouldn't say no to it. But the actual challenge we're trying to solve is job creation. To create jobs faster than they can disappear.

If we throw all our money willy-nilly at any tech startup, we're not going to get a good return on that investment. Startups notoriously fail at a ridiculously high rate.

But we can look at our strengths, and build upon them.

You know, like any sane business person would.

Post reply on HN