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Tech CEOs travel a lotthats not news. They fly to meet investors on both coasts, and to pitch or coordinate with strategic partners around the world. For Esipov, it was growth that led him to move eastward, since more frequent in-person meetings with East Coast partners like American Express made the jet commute less tolerable.

A leader whos here just a fraction of the time can still drive local job growth, however. On the Tech:NYC job board, there were about 5,300 positions open with tech-industry employers who are members. A search for remote yields about 600 positions, but many more express flexibility. The board includes all jobs that can be done in New York, regardless of the headquarters address or founders location. Hugging Face, a hub for open-source AI tools, maintains an office in Paris and in Downtown Brooklyn, and its founder reportedly dwells in Florida. We support our employees wherever they are, one of its job listings reads.

Even before Esipov made it official, about half of his employees were based in New York City, he said. The company leases 5,000 square feet in the Flatiron District for the group, which includes members of every company teamcore administrative, go-to-market, legal, compliance and product engineering. It has long been in both the enterprise and consumer tech playbooks to post sales or marketing teams in New York City, while keeping core development or product elsewhere. That was the script Esipov followed, keeping NovaCredits go-to-market team here near banks and credit card firms. Then in 2021 and 2022, three Bay Area-based engineers asked if they could make the cross-country move to New York. Its become the headquarters of the company, he said. A San Francisco office with about one-quarter of employees will remain open.

From an economic development perspective, provided they put people on the ground, including the tech team, the physical headquarters of a company is not its most relevant feature, said Maria Gotsch, president and CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City. In fact, Gotsch sees the question the other way: The growing talent pool attracts companies to come work here, since they know they will be able to hire. Anecdotally, leaders say the San Francisco-to-New York City move was a common journey for the countrys engineers during the great office untethering of 2020 to 2022.

Post-Covid we have more talent than ever, said Jonathan Lehr, partner at Work-Bench, which invests in enterprise tech firms. If we think about it company-wise, its a net positive. With talent, while not every founder or chief marketing officer is here, there is more talent than there was.

Still, the size of the tech pool is not growing as fast as in other places. Both Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area had double the tech talent growth between 2017 and 2022 as New York City, according to the CBRE data, and Dallas-Fort Worth and Seattle had increases of 28% and 29%, respectively. Austin, Salt Lake City and Phoenix are smaller markets that boasted even more growth.

The writer E.B. White said that newcomers give New York City its passion. He did not live to witness the enthusiasm of the tech nomads and recent arrivals.

Events like the packed Arthur panel are becoming more common, participants in the tech scene say. Lehr said he noticed that newcomers eager to get out into the city and build their networks had been driving attendance at events like his firms Enterprise Tech Meet-up over the last year and a half. New Yorks key place on the international circuit guarantees that not everyones here all of the time, but when they are here, they have business and socializing to do.

Morgan Barrett, who works in the tech group at law firm Lowenstein Sandler, said he has recently been running into industry acquaintances from Texas seeking a respite from the above-100F temperatures there on the streets of SoHo.

Because its the summer, and its so hot in Austin, it feels like half of Austin is here, Barrett said.

He discovered the irrepressible nature of the citys tech scene when he and 10 friends in the industry got together for a breakfast catch-up at Balthazar. We had such a good time, he said, we decided to do it again in a few weeks. The next time the group met, 30 tech types came, then 60. Eventually, he and co-host Ariel Purnsrian started hosting Breakfast Clubs at event spaces, and they were still packed.

I always try to host in SoHo, he said, because its like the center of the universe for startups. The density of New York Cityand the even closer geographic ties of the tech neighborhood in Manhattan below 30th Streetmeans most people can stop in easily to the meet-up on their way somewhere else.

Inquiries for events and dinners from tech-sector clients have grown exponentially over the last six to eight months at SoHo French restaurant La Mercerie, said Dana Rizzo, its director of hospitality. There are client dinners, board meetings and press events, she said: With in-person time less frequent, they want to ensure moments of gathering are memorable and elevated.

The restaurant has a 28-seat table in its private dining room that appeals to companies looking to carve out time to be deeply connective and creative, Rizzo said. Clients have included the big players like Google and Meta, as well as out-of-town companies, like Uber, which Rizzo said hosted an event with its San Francisco-based CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in attendance. Like Barrett, she said the SoHo location makes for an ideal central hub in a remote work world.

The party does not extend to the office. Tech companies with distributed workforces need fewer square feet for desks and conference rooms. Several larger tech firms have recently downsized or called off expansions, and Newmark reports that Meta, Verizon and Publicis are rumored to be returning blocks of office space to the market soon.

The connection between remote work and a slower demand for real estate, even for companies that are committed to New York, is clear.

It is true that technology companies, large and small, are cutting back on their space needs, Fred Wilson, partner at Union Square Ventures, wrote on his blog in July. But that is more a reflection of the era of remote and hybrid workforces than anything else. That, he pointed out, does not mean that tech is no longer a growth industry here.

The story of Dayforward is an example. Launched in 2019, Dayforward sells accessible life insurance plans online to young families. At the helm is Aaron Shapiro, one of the founders of the digital advertising agency Huge, a company whose presence in Dumbo helped define the neighborhood as a hub for creative work in the 2000s.

Shapiro lives in Manhattan but the company is fully distributed.

A lot happened accidentally, he told Crains. He intended for Dayforward to sign a lease in 2020, but with the pandemic, we thought wed wait a little, he said. By the time everything opened up, the team was comfortable working remotely, and several key hires were living elsewhere. For example, Dayforward found its head of underwriting outside of Cincinnati. The 25% of the team based in New York still meet several times a week, but instead of leasing their own office, they go to a space at Juxtapose, the NoHo investor, thats reserved for portfolio companies. Shapiro does not rule out signing a lease for Dayforward some day.

To be sure, for every real estate-agnostic start-up, there are tech companies in physical growth mode. VTS, which sells software for commercial and residential building managers, just took 34,325 square feet at 3 Bryant Park, in a sublease from Salesforce, which will double its local headquarters. Celonis, a process-mining firm started in Germany, leased one floor at 1 World Trade Center in early 2020 and leased a second floor in the spring of 2022. Datadog, a cloud security firm that went public in 2021, leases over 150,000 square feet at 620 8th Ave.; its office has become a different kind of anchor than the meet-ups or the AI panels, said John Dickerson, chief scientist of Arthur.

We are only just starting to get the big players in the space, he said, calling Datadog the shining jewel of the New York scene because of its firm presence and deep integration with scores of other tech companies who use its cloud services and may need to meet its representatives in personsimilar to how the citys finance industry attracts fintech firms like NovaCredit to be on the ground in New York.

In addition to smaller and distributed firms, he said, We need that style of company.

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New York's tech scene is back, but not in trophy headquarters - Crain's New York Business