Return of the Diaspora: After a Taste of the Valley, New York Techies are Coming Home - Adrianne Jeffries via Betabeat

Jeffries profiles a number of young entrepreneurs who have returned to NYC after a brief tour of Silicon Alley.

Adrianne Jeffries via Betabeat

Whatever the reason, a passel of companies have recently boomeranged back to the city after a season on the far shore. The longtime tech mantra of ‘go West, young founder” is being revised for the simple reason that New York’s tech scene is up-and-coming, more social and more fun. Recent Y Combinator grads Codecademy, The Fridge, MessageParty, Hirehive and Tutorspree all moved back the New York within the past 18 months. Sam Rosen, plucked from Flatiron’s General Assembly for the Mountain View accelerator 500 Startups by superangel Dave McClure, returned after the program ended. “My friends in New York City—one would be in marketing, my good friend was a producer at MTV, other friends are lawyers. Whereas in the Valley you go to the party and everyone is in tech,” he told Betabeat in January. “It’s not like I’m tired of talking about my company, but it’s all we talk about.” Josh Weinstein, founder of the Facebook competitor CollegeOnly who later pivoted to interactive web television with a startup called YouAre.TV, ventured out to the Valley to work with a cofounder and be closer to investor Peter Thiel. In September, he returned—mostly because the cofounder bailed on him, but partly because he felt “isolated,” he said.

And in that last case, maybe because Josh Weinstein discovered the Thiel is barking at the moon nuts, too, and not just the insularity of the monoculture tech world in San Francisco.