New York Talent Arbitrage

A geographic instance of underpriced talent

Eric Glyman makes the case that New York is a structurally underpriced place to build a hypergrowth company, a geographic version of the mispriced talent pools logic Ramp applies to individuals.¹ The argument treats a location the way one treats an undervalued hire, as a place where the same capability can be acquired for less because fewer competitors are bidding.

The argument

Glyman's case has several parts.¹ First, the know-how now exists locally. The prior decade produced genuinely homegrown New York successes, and Glyman names Datadog, MongoDB, and Cockroach Labs, along with a first generation of direct-to-consumer companies. He treats hypergrowth as a specific skill and argues that having people who have lived that journey from every part of it matters, and that the city finally has alumni of it.

Second, raw talent density exists without commensurate startup competition. Large engineering offices from companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, and Stripe opened in the city, yet, in his framing, there are still not many companies growing the way Ramp is. The market is smaller than the Bay Area, but the ability to compete for and find extraordinary talent is, in his phrase, immensely high.

Third, and the part he emphasizes most, is a loyalty differential. "It's not like being in the Valley where people are mercenaries," he says. "Average career tenure is 12-14 months. It takes time to really understand a company, to do great, great work." Longer tenure compounds context, which makes it the hiring-side complement to the idea that speed depends on people who deeply know the system they are changing.

Fourth, latent supply: people who are, as he puts it, unnaturally in other parts of the world only because that is where the hypergrowth companies happened to be, and who would rather live in New York. Fifth, domain advantages specific to the city, including its position as the financial capital of the world, which for a fintech means proximity to customers, regulators, and talent, and its standing as a center of taste, design, and media.

Why it matters, and its limits

The pattern explains a selection effect: rather than a broad, Valley-style field of competitors, the thesis predicts a few outliers absorbing a disproportionate share of local talent, which is how Glyman characterizes Ramp's position in the city. It is also, by his own logic, an arbitrage with a clock. The pitch works precisely because few hypergrowth startups compete locally, so every new company of Ramp's scale narrows the gap, and the window at the time of a later observation is plausibly tighter than when he first made the case.

Two tensions sit with the argument as stated. The twelve-to-fourteen-month figure for Valley tenure is asserted rather than sourced, and the mercenary churn Glyman treats as pure cost also carries an upside he does not grant, namely the cross-pollination of know-how that high mobility produces. And the case is, structurally, a founder talking his book: a New York chief executive recruiting a New York audience at his own headquarters has an interest in the conclusion.