Predicting that your city will be the next Silicon Valley is simple. But actually making it the next Silicon Valley is something else entirely — as New York is slowly finding out.
A few years ago, officials and executives in New York proclaimed their ambition: to build the city into a powerful hotbed for tech innovation. Officials funneled money into start-up incubators and approved a bid from Cornell University to transform Roosevelt Island into a two-million-square-foot, next-generation technology campus to rival Stanford’s. Social media darlings like Foursquare, in downtown Manhattan, and the crafts retailer Etsy, in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, were hailed as surefire breakouts.
Image: No New York start-up has been a breakout hit, the sort of blockbuster with a multibillion-dollar valuation that has become so commonplace in Silicon Valley. Credit Anna Parini
