Good morning. It seems oddly fitting that a New York fire marshal essentially shut down a massive party to celebrate “30+ years of Silicon Alley” on Friday night, and that my son, 20, responded to that news by asking, “What’s Silicon Alley?”
The term came out of the Flatiron and Soho neighborhoods in the 1990s where companies like DoubleClick, Razorfish and About.com were born. That was a time when the media-minded startup community in downtown Manhattan competed for mindshare, if not money, with the tech scene springing up around Stanford and Sand Hill Road in northern California. Like the battle between East Coast and West Coast rap, though, it’s a relic of another era. While Silicon Valley drew about 46.3% of all U.S. venture funding in 2024, with New York getting 13.3%, VC spending is a small fraction of startup funding and an even smaller portion of overall investments in innovation.
“Nobody talks about Silicon Alley anymore; it’s just tech,” said attendee Stephen Messer, who co-founded LinkShare with his sister Heidi in New York in 1996, sold it to Rakuten for $425 million in 2005, and later co-founded Collective[i], an enterprise AI firm that operates on both coasts. “New York’s tech scene is so large now that there’s no center.”
