NYC Gains Office Space but Company Founders and HQs Often Go Elsewhere

Last month, Anthropic announced it would lease all sixteen floors of a building in Hudson Square and double its New York City workforce to a thousand people. City officials, tech executives, and venture capitalists cheered. And they should. Those are jobs and tax revenue in a city that could use both.

New York is now Anthropic’s second-largest office, behind its San Francisco headquarters, and its expansion in Hudson Square is a large and welcomed satellite. But a company’s center of gravity—its founders, its earliest employees, and many of the people who leave to start companies of their own—sits at its headquarters. New York shouldn’t mistake the office for the company.

We talk about “tech jobs” as if they were a single thing. They’re not. Early employees become founders and founders become investors and mentors for the next generation. This compounding is what built Silicon Valley. Satellite offices create good jobs; headquarters create the conditions for an ecosystem to grow.

The question isn’t how to attract more offices. It’s how to become the place where founders choose to start their companies. Right now, New York is losing that competition. Not for lack of talent or capital, but for lack of a deliberate strategy.

In September, Anthony Shorris will assume his post as the new President and CEO of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). He inherits enviable assets: world-class universities, unmatched access to finance and enterprise customers, and the nation’s second-largest startup ecosystem. Turning those advantages into a place founders choose to build will require a deliberate strategy.

New York is the second most important tech ecosystem in the country, and its rise has been meteoric. A decade ago, New York trailed Boston. But as of 2024, the city has more funded startups than Boston and LA combined. Three years ago it peaked: more companies raised early-stage rounds in Manhattan than in San Francisco.

Then the AI boom, and that race became a rout. While New York stayed steady at 17 percent, the Bay Area’s share of U.S. seed dollars climbed from 45 percent in 2025, up from 28 percent in 2023.

Capital is just a lagging indicator. A clearer signal is where founders choose to live. Y Combinator’s batches are a great proxy. San Francisco’s share of Y Combinator founders jumped from 21 percent in 2021 to 73 percent this year, a program record. Meanwhile, top computer science graduates of 2025 are twice as likely to start a company straight out of school as the class of 2022. Increasingly, they are choosing San Francisco.

The reason isn’t mysterious. For over two decades, San Francisco’s founders and investors built a dense lattice of centers of gravity: generational companies, accelerators, residencies, hacker houses, and communities that pull ambitious founders to the city and surround them with peers, capital, and status. These centers of gravity are constantly being minted. This summer, according to The Wall Street Journal, fifteen Yale students raised money from their own alumni to rent a house in San Francisco and build together.

Those students can and should be building in New York. No city offers better access to the enterprise customers that make a company real. But those ingredients sit unassembled. There’s no clear front door for a graduate deciding where to start, no coordinated bridge among our campuses, and too few affordable spaces for founders to live and build together. We lack enough centers of gravity and the entry infrastructure to translate New York’s advantages into stronger founder pull.

This should matter to every New Yorker. Seizing this opportunity for economic growth and pursuing a fairer economy are not opposing goals. Companies headquartered here create jobs across the economy, and New York’s tech workforce is the most diverse among major hubs. Black and Hispanic workers make up roughly a quarter of it, compared to 8 percent in the Bay Area. Startup policy is economic development and workforce policy. If we build the next generation of companies here, we will advance both.

New York has solved problems like this before. Fifteen years ago, city leaders concluded that a shortage of advanced engineering talent threatened New York’s future. Through the NYCEDC, they marshaled the city’s full weight—universities, business leaders, philanthropists, and government—around a single global competition, and built Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island. Ninety-four percent of the companies started there are still headquartered in New York City.

New York should be the best place in the country to start and build a company, but we need this level of ambitious strategy again if we are to compete for future generational companies. NYCEDC, in concert with leaders from the private and civic sectors, could put the city’s weight behind concrete experiments: independent operators running founder residences in underused buildings; a citywide network that connects the most ambitious student builders across Columbia, NYU, Cornell Tech, and CUNY and gives them mentorship and community; and an expansion of the customer-lab model that made New York a fintech leader, so young companies have a real path to their first customers. The list goes on!

New York is already a city where technology meets nearly every industry that matters, and where people come from everywhere to build for the world. The next defining companies are being dreamed up right now, by people deciding which city to bet on. Our job is not to win them back after they succeed somewhere else. It is to give them a reason to start here.

Virginia Maloney represents City Council District 4 in Manhattan. and is Chair of the Economic Development Committee and Co-Chair of the Manhattan Delegation.

Matthew Weinberg is a general partner at Max Ventures and served as an Obama administration appointee in the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Investment and Innovation.