Mayor Bloomberg: NYC Challenges Silicon Valley for Tech Startups

NEW YORK New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he believes New York could soon replace Silicon Valley as the go-to location for high-tech startups to sprout.

Speaking at IBM s THINK Forum here, also known as “THINK: A Forum on the Future of Leadership,” Bloomberg said New York has replaced Boston as the second-place location for startups.

“In terms of technology, I’m proud to tell you our city passed Boston to become the second largest recipient of venture capital funding for technology company startups behind only Silicon Valley.”

Bloomberg said a city project in the works that will enable a top university to build a new science and engineering center in the city will change the technology landscape and make New York a magnet for technology entrepreneurship. In short, New York’s so-called “Silicon Alley” could grow to truly rival Northern California’s Silicon Valley, Bloomberg claimed.

Noting that “We can’t be second at anything; we’re New York,” Bloomberg said his deputy mayor for economic development, Robert K. “Bob” Steel, a 30-year veteran of Goldman Sachs and former Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury, “has come up with a program where we’re offering to provide prime New York City real estate at virtually no cost in exchange for a university’s commitment to build or expand a world-class science and engineering campus here in our city. These are the fields that really put a premium on innovation and will become increasingly important in the 21^st century.”

According to Bloomberg, Stanford University is trying to partner with a local university to get an edge up. A Wall Street Journal report indicates that the local university is the City University of New York (CUNY).

“They’ve formed a committee to raise a billion dollars to finance their part,” Bloomberg said. “The president of Stanford is here at least every two weeks. The good news is that that’s not the only university doing that. Cornell is making a very extensive effort to win the competition, and there are schools from around the country and around the world that are forming partnerships and we expect some great proposals by the end of October. We’ll then select one or possibly two and that probably will change the landscape for New York City for the next 50-odd years because all of the new high-tech companies that you see being started up in Palo Alto will be started right here.”

According to the WSJ, the joint Stanford/CUNY proposal is the leading or favored bid in the competition and the partnership plans to build an engineering and applied sciences campus on Manhattan’s Roosevelt Island. In addition to Cornell, other schools based in the state of New York have also tossed their hat in the ring, including Columbia University and New York University.

To read the original eWeek article, click here: Mayor Bloomberg: NYC to Surpass Silicon Valley in Tech Startups