Far too much has been written about Boston versus New York City. Sports rivalries and cultural differences have a way of coloring our world view to include startup companies and venture capital. However, the past few years tell about a much closer relationship. The real story is Boston and New York City, particularly versus Silicon Valley.
This week, we welcome Xconomy’s most recent addition to its coverage, New York City! While having started in Boston and expanded across the country, Xconomy’s newest addition reflects the growing ties and teamwork between New York and Boston.
Let’s start with a few data points. It’s always been easy to think about Boston and New York as separate worlds. After all, it’s 225 miles between downtown Boston and Manhattan—a journey that takes typically takes 3 ½ hours. In contrast, the trip from San Francisco to San Jose is only 48 miles along the 101, which in the middle of the night is under an hour. With traffic, well, that depends and can take as long as the Boston-NYC trip.
Somewhat ironically, the technology created by entrepreneurs and the VCs that back them have been shortening these distances. Wi-Fi on the Acela and 3G mobile networks let entrepreneurs and venture investors stay productive on the Boston-NYC journey, making the trip seem a lot shorter. Personally, I love working on the Acela. It’s some of my most productive time, and I feel like I’m in the office. I can even have meetings, particularly if I secure the seats facing each other with the table between them. Web networking and collaboration tools make sharing information and coordination much more effective as well, not only between these two cities but across the world.
Venture capitalists and angel groups are expanding and coordinating financing activities between Boston and New York City. “New York is clearly on a roll here. If anything we’ve seen the presence of several Boston firms either opening offices or having affiliations,” said long-time New York venture capitalist and founder of Greycroft Partners, Alan Patricof. Matrix Partners recently opened an office, headed by Nick Beim. New firms like Founder Collective operate fairly seamlessly between the two cities. TechStars’ recent expansion to New York has been a great success. The Golden Seeds angel group several years ago opened chapters in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia that systematically collaborate. Syndication among angel groups more broadly in New England and New York got started around 2005 and has been going through various iterations and improvements.
How does this then play out in the numbers? Silicon Valley may have had the lead for many years, but looking at emerging companies, the Boston-New York team looks like it’s been running a fast break. According to the most recent PwC MoneyTree data, the gap between New York/Boston and Silicon Valley for seed and early-stage companies has closed, whether looking by total deals or by dollars.
Five years ago, Silicon Valley did nearly twice the number of seed and early-stage venture deals compared to Boston and New York combined, 338 versus 178 in 2005. For 2010 the two regions are essentially tied with 400 for Silicon Valley and 392 for New York/Boston. Dollars tell a similar story. For 2005, the ratio was 1.3:1 in favor of Silicon Valley, growing to 2.2:1 by 2007. By last year, that gap had closed to 1:1 with $2.16B invested in Silicon Valley seed and early-stage companies and $2.05B invested in those in New York/Boston (see charts above.) “The startup and entrepreneurial environment in New York is the strongest I’ve seen in the past 40 years,” says Patricof.
But it’s not just adding numbers. The rapid growth of consumer-oriented, ad-tech, and fin-tech ventures makes Boston and New York City highly complementary and drives increasing
