If you live or are interested in living in New York City, do yourself a favor and read this post first followed by this captivating discussion here.*
On money in NYC:
“Maybe its not all about money, but its definitely more about money. Coming from Wisconsin and working in Manhattan, I find my midwestern frugalness is completely alien to people. Time is money here, there is no doubt about it. Walking three blocks and taking a subway ride gets thrown out the window in favor of a $20 cab ride. Its the small stuff but it adds up. When a city suffers a shortage of BMWs after Wall Street bonuses come out, its hard to say its not about money.”
On rent in NYC:
“While rent is “extreme” for people who don’t live here, you should also consider that we generally don’t have the same expenses as people in the burbs or elsewhere. We don’t own cars, we don’t buy gas, etc. That right there knocks $500-750 off your living expenses. Furthermore, you need to consider rent in NYC as a culture tax because no where else in the world will you find anything remotely similar in terms of fashion, design, art, food, etc. You might think you’re approximating it with the Olive Garden in suburbia, but you aren’t even close.”
On finding talented software engineers in NYC:
“Frankly, it’s almost impossible to find good engineers in NYC. The banks do take them all, that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to start up in the city, it is just harder.”
On Madison Ave. agency life in NYC:
“I’ve worked in such environments, and as much as I enjoyed the work when I was able to do it, the reality was that we wound up wasting a lot of time spinning our wheels because we accidentally stepped on each other toes. As a result, I wasn’t able to do the work I wanted to do, and was hired to do, most of the time that I was there. So the affection wore off, and I gave up and left once I saw the writing on the wall.”
On Silicon Valley in NYC:
“The thing is, any reasoning that assumes Silicon Valley is where it’s at ignores all the TechCrunch articles about “the crisis in venture capital” and the inability of the VCs to find companies that need their money to lift off at all in the commodity-hardware/open-source-software era. It’s very, very unlikely that the Valley-centric monoculture of the past will continue to characterize the startup scene. NY has a startup scene, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Edinburugh, London, every place I’ve been to or met people from in the last ten years has a startup scene. Even Santa Fe, New Mexico, an isolated mountain city of only 60,000 people, counting daytime commuters, has a startup scene.”
*It also helps if you’re interested in technology and a startup scene. :)
July 08, 2008, 10:17pm
