eBay in New York and the Rise of the New York Tech Scene

A lot of the coverage of eBay’s acquisition of Hunch has focused on the possibility of much better recommendations on eBay. And I’m sure we will see that. Think about login with Twitter and get personalized recommendations on eBay. Hunch’s technology can do that kind of magic and a lot more.

But I’m most excited about eBay’s decision to build an office in NYC. According to Mike Arrington,

That New York office will eventually grow to some 200 employees, I’m told, who’ll focus on recommendations. But the team will also analyze lots of Ebay data, and perhaps productize some of it or otherwise release it.

My parter Albert calls Google’s fortress on 8th Avenue “the gift that Google gave New York.” That’s because Google has well over 1000 engineers here in NYC and continues to build that team. Those engineers are exactly the kind of talent that web startups need. Some of Google’s talent bleeds out into the startup world. But also having that kind of ballast anchoring the engineering talent pool makes it such that young software engineers are more confident to come to NYC and build their careers here.

And now we will have eBay with a team of 200 engineers. And with Twitter’s acquisition of Julpan a few months ago, we have Twitter building an engineering team in NYC. Surely Facebook will come to town and start building an engineering team here too.

In the short term, this may put a further squeeze on the super tight market for software engineers in NYC. But if we invest in efforts to bring more engineers to NYC, as we are actively doing, then we can build the market together. And having some awesome large engineering teams working for big tech companies is super healthy for the NYC market long term.

So I’m pumped about this news. And congratulations to Chris and the team at Hunch on a great exit.