The Primary NYC Summit has been a reminder to think about why NYC is a great and unique place to start a company, let me lay out seven reasons.

Diversity:  NYC is the most diverse city in the country.  I would argue it’s one of the most diverse cities in the world.  There are 8M+ people in NYC, 20M+ in the metro area and over 800 language spoken in NYC.  3.2M of the 8M people in NYC are born outside of the US.  Truly unique.  The exciting opportunity is that only a small sliver of people living here are involved with tech startups, a lot of upside in terms of building awareness, training people and cultivating entrepreneurs in communities that aren’t yet involved.

Customers:  Manhattan (a smaller part of NYC) has the highest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the country.

Funding:  some of  the big investors in the world are HQ’d here:  Insight, Tiger, Goldman Sachs, Blackrock, KKR, Blackstone, General Atlantic, Coatue, Apollo, Warburg Pincus, Deerfield, Providence, etc.  The past few years, many outside firms have added people in NYC:  GGV Capital, NEA, Battery, General Catalyst, Wellington Management, NextView, Flybridge and soon to be named firm (to be announced soon).  There are more VC dollars being invested here than any of these cities:  Boston, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, Tel-Aviv, etc.; NYC is only behind the Bay Area and Beijing.  The best VC firm in the world, Sequoia Capital, is the most active non-NYC based firm investing here.

Healthcare:  there is a huge opportunity for healthcare related startups.  There are many customers to sell into:  patients, physicians, hospitals, medical schools, pharma companies, etc.  Flatiron Health was a massive $2.1B exit.  Oscar is getting a ton of momentum, $3B+ valuation and almost 1,000 employees.  Capsule just raised a $200M.  A sleeper company, Komodo Health, is a firm you should be tracking.  Wet/dry labs are being set up in Manhattan and Brooklyn, J&J , Alexandria , etc.  .  Deerfield and Columbia struck a big deal.  One of the best life science investors is HQ’d here, OrbiMed.  In addition, New Leaf, Versant, Lux, Aisling, Venrock, Canaan, Oak HC/FT are also in the metro area.

International magnet: Founders from Europe and Israel are moving their offices here , more so than other regions such as Boston and Bay Area, which is where they historically moved.

Industries: many of the largest industries have a large presence here:  retail, food, marketing, advertising, legal, healthcare, financial services, media, education, government, etc.