Why We Still Love this Book

Tech and the City: The Making of New York’s Startup Community came out in 2013. Alessandro Piol and Maria Teresa Cometto wrote it, based on over 50 interviews, while New York’s tech scene was still proving itself. Thirteen years later, much of what they saw still holds, and some of it has changed. It is still one of the best books for anyone building in this city.

What the book covers

The book tells the story of how New York became a startup city. It starts with Silicon Alley, the cluster of internet companies that grew around Flatiron and Union Square in the late 1990s, and follows the people who rebuilt the scene after the dot-com crash. Then it tours the neighborhoods where the scene took root, interviewing the people who helped shape each one: the Meatpacking District and Chelsea; Lower Manhattan; and Brooklyn, home of a do-it-yourself revolution, with final stops in the Bronx and Long Island City.

The book’s strength is its people. Kevin Ryan led DoubleClick, then started Gilt Groupe. Brian Cohen became one of the city’s best-known angel investors and an early backer of Pinterest. John Borthwick founded Betaworks. Barry Silbert started SecondMarket, where shares of private companies could trade before they went public. Etsy, founded in 2005 by Rob Kalin, became one of the city’s signature companies under CEO Chad Dickerson.

Michael Bloomberg gets a chapter too. His argument is that New York gave him what every entrepreneur needs: skilled workers, money, customers and knowledge. Packed this close together, those advantages compound.

Ideas that stayed with us

New York tech is a peer, not a planet. The book’s sharpest point is how New York tech differs from Silicon Valley. In California, tech is its own world. In New York, tech sits beside finance, fashion, media and theater as one industry among many. Founders here are more openly commercial. They tend to take existing technology and apply it to real business problems rather than build the infrastructure underneath.

Trust built the community. One voice in the book credits camaraderie with starting New York tech. With so much money at stake, you would expect people to guard their turf. Instead, they trust each other. The book also credits industry leaders who mentor the next generation of founders.

The city never sits still. One interviewee calls New York “meta-unstable.” The city is always on the edge of falling apart, so New Yorkers are always fixing and upgrading it, always looking for a better and faster way. That restlessness makes a natural home for startups.

If you can scale here, you can scale anywhere. Dense, diverse and demanding, New York is a hard first market. FreshDirect is the book’s example. A company that works here has passed the toughest test.

Smaller funds, earlier bets. In Silicon Valley, the big venture firms run funds of a billion dollars or more. New York’s funds were smaller, in the $100 million to $200 million range, and more willing to back companies at the earliest stage. Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, Greycroft and Founder Collective are the book’s examples.

The book also found that women founded a larger share of startups in New York than in Silicon Valley or London.

What still holds

The commercial instinct is everywhere. During Advertising Week in October, we joined brand teams, creative directors, and founders at SpecialGuestX’s AI Forum. The room was not asking how to build a model. It was asking how to make AI something people want to experience. That is New York applying technology to its own industries, just as the book describes. The trust holds too. At Jev Demo Night at Betaworks in September, the presenters were competing for prizes, but they all sat together at one table. And Betaworks, founded by John Borthwick, is still a gathering place for the city’s builders thirteen years after the book profiled him.

What has changed

The scale. The book describes a scene of smaller funds and early bets. Today, New York startups raise rounds that would have been hard to picture in 2013. In the second quarter of 2026 alone, they raised $8.88 billion, the city’s best quarter since 2021, according to AlleyWatch. AI now drives much of that money.

The map has grown too. In 2013, the book saw a do-it-yourself scene in Brooklyn. Today, Brooklyn is a startup hub of its own, as we wrote in How Brooklyn Quietly Became New York’s New Startup Hub.

Who should read it

Read it if you are new to New York tech. Founders will find a playbook. Investors will see where the city’s habits came from. And anyone who goes to events here will recognize the people and the culture. One line in the book says we are still at the beginning. Thirteen years on, that still feels true. Here is the Amazon link to the book, we highly recommend reading it, click here.