[dangrover]

I started my last business in SF, got acquired by a company in NYC, lived there for two years, and just moved back. I keep meaning to write a blog post about this.

NYC's tech scene wasn't bad, but it really doesn't hold a candle to what you'll find in SF.

Where SF really shines is how hospitable it is to people who are on the margins. There isn't such a wide gulf between "having a job" and "doing a startup." You'll find people all over the entrepreneurial spectrum, and it's so much easier to meet people for some reason. Having technical skills (in addition to whatever other skills you possess) makes you more respectable, not less, as it does in NYC. And everyone is so much chiller.

[_delirium]

My limited experience agrees with that, especially the difference in "proper job" / hacker gap. Imo it's partly scenes being clustered differently rather than purely what exists/doesn't. There is a lot of fringe/weird tech scene in NYC, but more clustered with the new-media art scene, and quite disconnected from the VC/startup scene. NYC Resistor seems to be making some progress towards getting interest from both crowds, but my outsider guess is that its SF analog, Noisebridge, is closer to the SF tech-biz scene than Resistor is to the NYC tech-biz scene.