NYC Thoughts

~This is a piece that I have been working on for a few weeks and got distracted by the vagaries of life. I’ve spent a lot more time in New York City and wanted to think about the types of startups/people I’ve seen in this wonderful city. This was started on 9/23 and finished on 10/17~

Shana Tova to all of my practicing friends! I had the great fortune to go to a wonderful Rosh Hashanah get together overlooking McCarren Park on Monday surrounded by new friends. Having been here for maybe 9 days, I’ve been surprised by the warmth at which everyone met me with, the amount of intros I have received, and the number of friends I’ve already made. 

SF/LA were both very different in terms of cliques / staticness. People showed up, established a friend group, and hunkered down into them on the West Coast. Breaking into those groups felt like a full time job, professionally and personally, and once you broke into them, it felt like getting onto the proverbial island. Whether it was the VC/founder/creative/tv crowds, there were very much clear ingroups and outgroups that stayed static. Candidly, I didn’t do a great job of making new friends organically.

NYC has felt very different. Maybe I’m attributing this to my sunny personality, but NYCers really do respond well to kindness, jokes, and naivety (or they are really good at being nice to newbies). Most strangers have been open to me, gracious with their time, and helpful in connecting me with other great strangers. I think this is not a function of the city being different but NYC bringing a a much more quietly confident side out of me which I truly do enjoy. I do not know if NYC can be home long term, but it feels cozy already. 

Workwise, NYC venture capitalists and founders have been generally different than what I’ve seen on the west coast. The main differentiator is that founders / investors on the West are more technology focused and the founders/investors on the East are more customer focused. With the rise of the forward deployed engineer, a primarily NYC/Palantir specific ‘invention’, it’s been interesting to see a type of validation for the Eastern perspective, which every investor / founder has been quick to flex. The maturation of the NYC ecosystem has also happened incredibly quickly over the last twenty years. In no particular order or stage/size/sector bias, the best funds I have heard about and interfaced with are Thrive Capital with their perfect taste and story, Boldstart Capital with their rugged process and their undeniable track record as early stage investors, Asylum Ventures with their focus on taste and craft. Anyone would be lucky and blessed to have them on their cap table or to consider them their friends. 

Back to the founders! While I have seen the wunderkids who have gone to a top 25 engineering college, done a tour of duty at Ramp, and then begin an agentic startup, I’ve seen many more older professionals building real businesses serving customers. This divide is similar to the one of the venture capitalists. I imagine this divide is fundamentally driven by the vibes of the city. 

Markets here feel less about blitzscaling and more about building something durable. In San Francisco, people chase new paradigms and technology. In New York, people tend to build through headwinds. Businesses like Sydecar make a great fit for NYC. Founders here obsess over repeat customers and market size. There’s a braggadocious discipline and a sense that companies should make money, not just noise.

The result is a different kind of innovation metabolism. Instead of speculative R&D for the sake of frontier cool, NYC founders are building products that touch the real economy: logistics, insurance, healthcare, data infrastructure, fashion, food. The businesses might look smaller on day one, but their roots run deeper. Founders fight to earn a right to exist every day driven by the fact that NYC is a city of scarcity whether its time, space, or attention. 

New York City is a pressure cooker; I’m awed by those who have lasted there for longer than 5 years. Being forged in those fires has truly turned those friends into gems. I’m excited to see where my own NYC journey takes me as well.