‘SF, we’re coming for you:’ We went to NYC Tech Week, where everyone is saying the city is the land of opportunity

One of the clearest takeaways from New York’s Andreessen Horowitz-sponsored Tech Week — a decentralized sprawl of happy hours with panoramic rooftop views, panels, and, this year, pickleball matches — was this: When it comes to building startups from AI to consumer to deep tech, New York is no longer playing catch up to attract startup interest.

It might just be pulling ahead.

“People don’t come to New York to live in a group house and code all night and never see anyone else,” said Julie Samuels, the president and CEO of Tech:NYC, an organization that promotes tech founders and entrepreneurship in the city, at a panel on Monday focused on AI startup innovation.

Samules added that New York is the place to be for any founders eager to move fast on product and head count.

“New Yorkers hire,” she said. “People want to live here, have always wanted and will continue to want to live here.”

Getting into Tech Week wasn’t exactly easy: Many events were full or required pre-approval on Partiful, the Andreessen-backed invite platform of choice.

Still, Business Insider managed to drop in on a few of the week’s activities, like a boozy happy hour on the rooftop of IBM’s sleek Manhattan headquarters and Gen Z founders hobnobbing at a cosmetics store, to see what all the hype was about.

NY is going all in on AI

San Francisco has long reigned supreme as home to the industry’s hottest AI startups: big-name LLM developers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Claude are all headquartered there, along with numerous other young companies at the app and infrastructure layer.

One of the biggest themes at New York’s tech week events, however, is that the Big Apple isn’t just ready to welcome an AI startup here and there. The city’s tech community is pushing to become a destination for all things AI.

“The entire AI stack is in New York — you have ecosystems, agents, apps,” said Emily Fontaine, IBM’s global head of venture capital, during a panel discussion at the company’s Madison Avenue headquarters early in the week.

“When you come to New York, you have the whole spectrum to invest in,” she said. “These are all companies that are well developed, have a product, and are starting to get revenue.”

Fontaine added that in New York, “compared to SF, you have strong founders who are actually driving revenue who are excited to go to market with us.”

At a power walk to kick off the event, most founders couldn’t stop talking about AI. They spanned industries and geographies, but one told BI he was determined to make New York City the country’s startup capital.

“It’s the second best. I want to make it the biggest startup ecosystem in the world,” Somya Gupta, who cofounded an AI education startup, said. “SF, we’re coming for you!”

Founder Ben Spray said his next venture is an AI-powered IT department, but that the AI component is a marketing strategy, given how hot the technology is.

“It’s a little bit of a branding move,” he told BI. “I mean, take my AI IT department — it’s really just an IT department built from the ground up to fit into the AI world.”

Even local and state politicians are getting in on the AI push. At an Axios panel on Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she’s keen on using AI to train 100,000 state employees in offices like the DMV.

“I’m not looking to eliminate their jobs,” she said. “I see great potential here, and I leaned hard into this.”

Defense and hardware head East

Science, defense, and hardware-oriented startups, known as deep tech companies, are a red-hot sector on the West Coast, though the New York scene is finally heating up.

One standout was the rooftop party in SoHo hosted by Haus, a deep tech public relations and communications firm, and Stonegardens Advisory, a consultancy that advises startups breaking into defense. With swanky cocktails and cheese boards piled high, panelists dished out how to win key government contracts early.

“The end goal was ultimately to help people who are building the space understand what it means to work with the Department of Defense, which is increasingly opening itself up to startups and learning how to work with these more early-stage companies,” Daniel Oberhaus, who founded Haus, told BI in an interview. (Last week, the Pentagon launched a program to back college-founded startups that serve both commercial and government customers.)

Deep tech may not be as big of a thing in New York as it is in El Segundo, Calif., a nucleus of aerospace, defense, and energy companies, Oberhaus admitted. But Newlab, a warehouse and startup space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, thinks that New York’s software chops and engineering talent will make the city’s hardware companies rival the West Coast. Newlab is tricked out with offices and labs, which have attracted early-stage deep tech startups.

A hub for consumer apps and Gen Z founders

Consumer startups — especially those built for or by Gen Z — are also having a moment in the city that never sleeps.

At one happy hour on Wednesday, founders of consumer startups mingled over drinks to talk about the apps they’re building. Naturally, the event (which was cohosted by Consumer Club, a Discord community for consumer founders, and Superwall, a paywall tool for apps) took place at coworking space and consumer startup hub Verci.

Some startups in the crowd included BePresent, a screen time control app that works out of the Verci space. A16z’s Speedrun startup school also had a presence there, with an investor and recent alumni, like Waveful, a social network that was part of the most recent Speedrun cohort. Lekondo, a visual search engine for fashion, told us they were recently accepted into Speedrun’s upcoming cohort.

That same night, we also stopped by another mixer for Gen Z founders and creators, put together by Natalie Neptune, founder of GenZtea, an IRL events business that aims to connect brands with Gen Z, at skincare brand Kiehl’s. Nathaneo Johnson, a Yale student who cofounded the buzzy professional networking startup Series, was among the Gen Z founders in the crowd.

“You’re seeing an increase of these AI-powered social networks,” said Neptune.

The NY vs. SF debate rages on

Wherever we went, the techies were ready to socialize — perhaps markedly different from the builder culture vibe in San Francisco.

Loosened up by seemingly endless trays of spicy margaritas and champagne at yet another rooftop party, this one at IBM, the crowd was lively and relaxed. Attendees, wearing button-downs rumpled from a day’s work, didn’t just talk business: Conversations evolved into debates on everything from global politics to the misfortunes of dating in New York City.

“Tech Week has proven NYC is a mainstay and a competitive market for tech,” Molly O’Shea, founder of venture-focused newsletter Sourcery, told BI in a text. O’Shea moderated two panels at Tech Week. “I’m sure many visitors (like me) are contemplating moving here to get some of this energy.”

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