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The long view of New York’s prospects is also what appealed to Andrew McLaughlin, a former Google executive who moved east and is now senior vice president at New York’s Betaworks, which bills itself as “a company that builds companies.” (The New York Times Company is an investor.) “If you’re placing a long-term bet on consumer tech,” he says, “then the mix of skills you’ll find in New York, while maybe less technical, seems like a better bet to make.” As a veteran of both East Coast and West Coast tech, McLaughlin captures the aesthetic gap as “the difference between a Palo Alto office park and a Bushwick loft.” For one thing, “New York takes authenticity very seriously,” he says, while “the West Coast doesn’t give a damn.” “Functionality” matters most, he says, and while he has enormous respect for Google, “no one at Google spends time thinking about how to make their office park ‘authentic.’ They want it to be awesome, with robots, driverless cars, that kind of stuff.” Another difference is that New York’s tech industry tends to work with, or on top of, what’s already there, whether physically or conceptually. “The West Coast thing is to destroy what came before,” while New York is “layering and working with what’s here already,” McLaughlin says, making reference to Rem Koolhaas’s seminal 1978 manifesto on urbanism, “Delirious New York.”
- tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com