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Founder Interview – Stella S.
February 9, 2026
Seed Five
Coast to Coast Startup Rivalry: NYC vs. SF
Jide Adebowale
An economic analyst and writer based in New York City. Jide spent six years working as an economist for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and now writes about urban life, regional economies, and the future of work. His work blends cultural commentary with a data-driven perspective.
New York vs. San Francisco
The Empire State vs. the Golden State. Skyscrapers vs. steep hills. Subways vs. driverless cars. East vs. West. If you’re talking about America’s most ambitious cities, the conversation inevitably circles back to these two. Both are endlessly reinventing, endlessly innovating.
Detractors have tried to write their obituaries for decades. Their populations dipped during the pandemic before the trend finally started to reverse. In many ways, they became poster children for the “too expensive, not worth it” mindset that sent many Americans to the Sun Belt in search of cheaper rents and more square footage. The difficulties these two titans have faced have been immensely challenging. And yet, despite those struggles, one thing remains true: these are the cities where innovation happens, where money changes hands, where ideas are born, where the world is changed.
And in the post-pandemic economy, New York and San Francisco have become the stage for one of the country’s defining rivalries: the battle for startup supremacy.
Startups vs. Scale
To grasp the stakes of this fight, you first have to look under the hood at how each city’s economy runs. San Francisco has long been synonymous with tech, and for good reason. The broader Silicon Valley region has produced some of the most famous digital products in the world, from Google to Facebook to Twitter (now X). But today, San Francisco itself is front and center in the AI startup era. You can’t talk about startups without talking about AI, and you can’t talk about AI without talking about San Francisco. Even if some critics see the frenzy as more bark than bite, the economic trends and investments it’s driving are undeniable.
Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Scale AI headline the wave of San Fran AI startups. The funding numbers are eye-popping: Bay Area companies alone pulled in $55 billion in venture funding in Q1 2025, representing 69% of all U.S. VC funding. Oracle and OpenAI recently struck a $300 Billion cloud agreement for AI infrastructure. That’s not just startup activity; it is San Francisco’s dominance.
Q1 2025 Venture Funding Distribution (%)
It shouldn’t be a surprise–San Francisco has always been a city that serves as a testing ground for all sorts of new, big, and bold ideas. It’s a city with a deep network of founders and venture capitalists, and the tech talent to work for those companies. The San Francisco economy could be summarized as one where people come to experiment–experiments that generate billions of dollars.
So where does New York come in? If San Francisco is where new ideas are born, New York is where they’re turned into businesses. Its strength lies in sector diversity: finance, real estate, healthtech, media, all thriving and increasingly integrating AI. While the Bay Area runs on the volume of new startups, New York runs on scale: the sheer number of people, the depth of capital, the density of office space. Its geography adds to its advantage: Eastern Time Zone overlap, proximity to biotech hubs in Boston, lobbyists in DC, and quick flights to Europe.
NYC’s “we have it all” economy is now firmly embedded in the startup world. NYC startup funding reached $1.25B across 60 deals in August 2025. Its hot sectors mirror its ecosystem: fintech evolving out of Wall Street, healthtech built atop a metro of 20 million people, and a growing AI scene. Notable New York AI startups include AlphaSense, an AI platform for market intelligence, and EliseAI, which builds assistants for real estate and healthcare.
Even if New York trails San Francisco in raw startup dollars, its diverse economy and business infrastructure make it a natural home for scaling and monetizing across industries.
Funding by stage
After Hours: Where the Founders Play
New York has worked intentionally to elevate its startup profile, and it shows. At events like New York Tech Week, investors and founders broadcast that “New York isn’t just ready to play in AI. It’s already a big player.” But where New York can really strike back against San Francisco is in what happens outside the office. The city offers a seemingly infinite menu of venues, bars, lounges, galleries, and rooftops where ideas can be traded as easily as business cards.
In New York, it’s easy to build your product and then sell it to the people sitting right next to you — because in NYC, everyone is already right next to everyone else. Finance, media, fashion, and tech are stacked on top of one another in the same neighborhoods, on the same subway lines, at the same events. The proximity makes “product to pitch” frictionless. A founder can meet an investor at a breakfast in Midtown, make a media partner over lunch in SoHo, and have a fashion collaboration at a Chelsea gallery opening, all on the same day. The density of industries becomes its own accelerator.
San Francisco, though, is no slacker in this regard. There’s a reason the center of gravity has shifted from suburban campuses to the city itself. Hubs like Mission Bay, SoMa, and downtown buzz with startup energy. Cafés and lounges serve as idea labs by day and deal rooms by night. While some twenty-somethings might complain that San Francisco’s social scene feels slower than they’d like, that critique misses the generational shift. Gen Z drinks less, and a new social fabric has formed around run clubs, Pilates studios, infrared saunas, and wellness houses. In a city where founders already live in optimization mode, those spaces double as networking hubs. The healthier, more intentional scene may prove to be a long-term advantage.
The push and pull is clear. New York leverages its unmatched social and cultural breadth to lure talent and investors, while San Francisco doubles down on concentrated startup energy fused with an evolving lifestyle scene. New York has the regional economy and cultural reach; San Francisco has the startup masterminds and the density of ideas. Both are rapidly evolving, both are fighting for an edge, and the battle continues.
Spillover Effects
The battle for startup supremacy doesn’t stay confined to pitch decks and investor rounds, it spills into every part of urban life. It shapes politics, as San Francisco–based AI companies like Anthropic ramp up their Washington presence, even doubling down in D.C. to lobby for favorable AI policy and federal funding.
It shapes office culture, too. New York’s comeback is in full swing, with office attendance in July 2025 exceeding pre-pandemic levels by 1.3%, making it the first major city to reach that milestone. If you want in on New York’s startup scene, it increasingly means ditching the sweats and hopping on the next train into Manhattan. Speaking of transportation, driverless cars from Waymo, Cruise, and other autonomous vehicle ventures are now a visible part of San Francisco’s street scape, another reminder of how deeply tech and startups are reshaping everyday city life.
The ripple effects aren’t limited to tech-adjacent sectors. In areas like housing, safety, healthcare, social services, and even climate response, you can find a seemingly endless number of startups in these cities looking to shake things up. This wave of startups isn’t just chasing downloads, they’re seeking impact. Ambitious founders aren’t satisfied with building apps, they want to fundamentally change the systems the cities run on.
What’s Next?
So, what’s next for America’s two venture capitals? As always: continued innovation.
San Francisco:
San Francisco will remain anchored by today’s giants in AI and the broader startup world, but the next wave is already in formation. How do we know? That’s the thing about the startup engine: it breeds like vermin. You can’t stop the ideas, the companies, the funding from multiplying. There’s simply too much money, ambition, and power at stake. San Francisco will keep producing, because that is what San Francisco does.
New York:
It will keep evolving through its diversity. Ideas flow among finance, fashion, media, and tech; and novel combinations arise daily. Its advantage lies in its sprawling ecosystem, nonstop energy, nonstop movement, nonstop events, and nonstop business creation. If you want to build and scale across verticals, this city is wired for it.
Forecasting the startup landscape a decade out is impossible. But betting that San Francisco and New York will still occupy the top tier of global innovation? You can take that to the bank.
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