I would’ve added this as a section to my last post, “New chapter”, but I felt a disccusion on NYC vs SF would be inappropiate in a more serious summer reflection post.

Background

SF

I lived in Mountain View from June-August 2021. During those 3 months, I visited SF ~5 times. I hated the city. In an Uber once, I saw Victorian mansions and people dealing drugs a block later. I was also stuck in Union Square at 7pm one weekend with a friend. Everything closed after 7pm. SF was fun if you knew people in the city because most of the social scene focuses on kickbacks rather than going out to bars and clubs.

NYC

I lived in NYC from May-August 2022. I stayed in FiDi, which I liked. That’s a hot take because there’s nothing to do in FiDi, it’s just where Wall Street is. I personally loved being able to go back home to a quiet, safe, and relatively clean neighborhood. I loved NYC for the amount of things to do, the proximity of everyone, and the hustle and bustle. I went to Brooklyn and Queens and every Manhattan neighborhood other than UES. I was a subway surfer.

2023

I moved to SF in June 2023. Most, as in 85% of the people I know, moved to NYC. I originally committed myself to moving to SF because I knew I wanted to be a founder one day and SF is the best place to involve oneself in that life. Also the gen AI boom started in November and SF was the center of it.

As mentioned in my last post, I hated SF initially. No one I knew was there. There was nothing to do. Barely anyone was on the streets. Everyone was tech-adjacent. The only people I met for my first two months were founders. Every conversation at a party started off with, “What are you building?”. I couldn’t wait to visit my friends in NYC during August.

Yet when I finally arrived at Penn Station, I wasn’t excited to be in NYC. I still kept thinking about the people I could be hanging out with in SF and the green parks on hills overlooking vibrant Edwardians and the SF skyline. In NYC, I was immediately greeted by the grimy subways that teetered on rails, the trash on the streets (SF streets are also dirty but NYC was worse surprisingly), the 30+ min commute to get anywhere in the city. Downtown Brooklyn where I was staying with a friend was gentrified and it astonished me to walk into an apartment complex and not a house. There was no green space to be seen. People were everywhere all the time.

  • Transportation: NYC has a more extensive and better-run public transit system than SF. That doesn’t mean it’s better maintained though. SF muni is much nicer and newer and it takes me max 15 minutes to get from Lower Haight to downtown. It took me an hour to get from downtown Brooklyn to Flushing and that trip required me to go through Manhattan. Just because NYC transit is more extensive doesn’t mean it scales well. Overall NYC transit is better than SF but imo that’s because NYC is bigger so they had to stack lines one atop another without much thought.

  • Safety: I don’t have to worry about being jumped by a high, crazed, homeless person in NYC. I walk around unwarily in NYC and feel comfortable walking home at night pre-10pm. NYC ✅

  • Cleanliness: I don’t live in downtown SF and the area I live is very residential. I’m sandwiched between 4 parks and a couple hills/mountains. Even when I was in downtown and Chinatown though, streets were surprisingly clean. There was no trash nor human feces strewn about. Mission is probably the dirtiest part of SF I’ve been to this summer. NYC is another story. Downtown Brooklyn, Flushing, Midtown, East Village, there was trash on the street and mysterious liquid streaming in the subway and on the sidewalks. SF ✅

  • Food: SF has less diverse food than NYC. With that said, almost all the restaurants I tried/looked forward to trying in NYC were a letdown other than a Michelin-star omakase (Joji) and a spontaneous Thai place in Prospect Heights. NYC restaurants were disappointing but maybe also because I was trying more new restaurants this time rather than going to the ones I liked from last summer. Every sushi I had in SF though was amazing even though they were definitely cheaper than NYC. Quality of ingredients is better in SF. My only complaint with SF is that there’s no Sichuan food. SF ✅

  • Greenery: SF hands down. SF ✅

  • People/Vibes: I really like Paul Graham’s essay on cities. Cities are important and they shape the era, the people, and the culture. Graham writes, “When you talk about cities in the sense we are, what you’re really talking about is collections of people.” He characterizes major American cities c. 2008, all of which I happen(ed) to live in.

On NYC:

New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.

On SF:

As much as they respect brains in Silicon Valley, the message the Valley sends is: you should be more powerful.

What matters in Silicon Valley is how much effect you have on the world. The reason people there care about Larry and Sergey is not their wealth but the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone.

On Cambridge:

What I like about Boston (or rather Cambridge) is that the message there is: you should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to… Cambridge as a result feels like a town whose main industry is ideas, while New York’s is finance and Silicon Valley’s is startups.

The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just that there’s a concentration of smart people there, but that there’s nothing else people there care about more. Professors in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens — till they start hedge funds or startups respectively.

I agree with Graham. I didn’t appreciate Cambridge I lived in NYC and SF. In NYC, every gathering I went to people asked each other how much they made, worried about moving up the corporate ladder, and showed their wealth by buying experiences – cruises on the Hudson, tables at clubs, fancy restaurants, and more. The goal of life was to make as much money as possible and spend it ostentatiously on the weekends. I admit that I too was guilty of this and describe myself in NYC as a hedonist. In SF, every conversation started with “What are you building?”. People value you based on how ambitious you are, how knowledgeable you are about the technology landscape, and how outrageous your ideas are. In Cambridge, which took me the longest to realize, people are nerdy, upfront, and passionate about it. In other words, they like knowledge for knowledge’s sake. This is why Cambridge speaks to me the most. Growing up in Arizona, I never met anyone who nerded out about history or dreamed outside of the Valley or thought about technology and its impact on society. Cambridge introduced me to a world where I fit in and it was safe to be nerdy.

Disclaimer: These are all sweeping generalizations of each city. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions to each of these descriptions. But generally speaking, these are the vibes I get from each city.

As for the SF vs NYC people debate, SF ✅. I’d rather take idea-obsessed, eccentric, and perhaps egocentric people over those who solely chase wealth and pleasure.

Overall

I prefer living in SF. The greenery, chill streets, and people are all more enjoyable – to me – than NYC. I never thought I’d say this but here I am. Of course, this is all subject to change as I’m sure I will change as time progresses. Like I mentioned previously, I’m definitely an East Coast person and the preppy, nerdy, Ivy League vibe fits me more as I “came of age” in New England, but for now, SF is where the people who will influence and inspire me the most reside.