New York built the infrastructure of the 20th century. It intends to do so again for the 21st-century digital economy.
New York City is a marvel of infrastructure planning and engineering. There are the visible landmarks — the Brooklyn Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Empire State Building — and also the invisible ones that run the city beneath its crowded streets, such as one of the world’s most complex water tunneling and reservoir systems. That infrastructure was built for the economy of the 20th century, a market that emphasized the manufacturing and trading of goods.
Infrastructure though has a very different meaning in the 21st century. The digital economy means we no longer measure the movement of products simply as tonnage on freight ships and trucks, but rather as bits and bytes flowing from data centers to devices. The shipping container once revolutionized 20th-century global trade, and now containerization is revolutionizing the way we think about delivering applications to end users.
While New York has more Fortune 500 companies than any other state, to date it hasn’t been a global leader in startups compared to hotspots like the Bay Area, particularly in the sorts of enterprise and data infrastructure startups that undergird the internet revolution.
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