Everyone I met at NY Tech Week this year seemed to have recently moved to New York or be planning to do so.

Founders from Austin to Auckland seemed eager to join those who have already arrived and settled in Williamsburg, Bushwick and FiDi.

The consensus among for startups and VCs seemed to be that the city is increasingly the place to both raise and build.

Luke Campbell, co-founder of a legal services startup VXT is looking to move from Down Under. He said the draw is the ability to raise capital and meet advisors easily.

Hakim Isa and Kirubha Perumalsamy, who co-founded Rollfi, an embedded payroll system, moved from Florida. They said that so many founders are moving to Williamsburg that they rented in FiDi to avoid distractions.

I met Hakim and Kirubha at a party hosted by Litquidity Media, the pseudonymous publisher of the Exec Summ newsletter popular with junior bankers. Litquidity himself now splits his time between his hometown of Miami and New York.

Zeke Torres, founded the health benefits company Alympos.com in San Antonio, but said he would like to move to New York because “it’s easier to raise money in person than on Zoom”.

Kyle Al-Rawi, co-founder and CEO of an investment firm aimed at Gen Z called Hedge, is officially based in Los Angeles, but increasingly bicoastal and spending more time in New York.

Abby Huang, founder of Dime, a startup that helps brands connect with Gen Z, told me at an Andrew Yeung party in September that she moved from North Carolina because the energy is here. Her friends did the same.

Toby Thomas-Smith, co-founder of Kiki, an operator of short-term home rentals, shut down operations in Australia and relaunched in New York after raising $6 million from VCs in days.

It’s about access to money, but also about access to people.

Silicon Valley has long been the preferred place to find talent and capital.

But seismic shifts have occurred since the pandemic. Crime in San Francisco and an exodus of talent living downtown has eroded community.

New York, meanwhile, has benefited from new institutions like Cornell’s tech campus on Roosevelt Island and the Flatiron Institute funded by Jim Simons.

New York has also seen an explosion of new startup funding and the emergence of scouts, part of a decentralization in the industry.

What Tech Week reminded me was that New York – despite its many drawbacks – is attracting the young and the restless who drive innovation because of the in-person opportunities.

I met a Phd student in computational chemistry who wondered into one of the tech parties. He raved about the opportunity to both take classes with his NYU professor Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, and drop in on presentations at the Flatiron Institue.

Few places can match that.

And only one combines it with rooftop parties with spectacular views of lower Manhattan.