Have you actually lived in the Valley?

The "bubble" indeed exists but there are so many things about the Valley that outweighs that negative.

What are the chances in NYC that I go into a cafe and meet a startup founder?

For me, being in the Valley means I'm surrounded by people who understands what I'm going through. It keeps me motivated.

I haven't been to NYC for years but I'm pretty sure that when I walk in a cafe there, I won't think that the people there are probably building the next great web startup.

As someone who lives in SF and is moving to NYC, your odds are pretty low. But I think there's a better question here:

What are the chances in SF that I go into a cafe and meet a startup founder working on something big and impactful?

I don't know about you, but my time in SF has netted me a lot of opportunities to talk to founders who are working on [insert social/mobile/local thing here] which IMO simply aren't big enough (or original enough) for me to care. For every Square there are dozens of Square copycats who aren't really executing anything substantially different. For every Zynga there are dozens of startups in SF egging their exact formula and not really mutating it in a meaningful way.

Certainly very, very few are working on anything that has relevance outside of the tech community, with impact IRL - I'm talking about the AirBnbs and the Squares. Stuff that will change the lives of people who aren't plugged into the pulse of the California tech scene.

SF is full of startups, sure, but the vast majority aren't doing anything interesting. I'll trade quantity for quality, though I'm not asserting where one might find higher quality between SF and NYC.

Thank you for including this.

You have great odds if you're in the right area (Union Square/Flatiron). Probably no different (or not significantly different in practice) than the Bay Area.

That said, are you randomly approaching people in cafes to accomplish this?

That said, I find myself have so many tech company comvos in NYC that I'd not want to have any more tempting me. That said, fun techie convo and hangouts at the high end of the spectrum (the only sort of tech folks I enjoy having as good friends) are a bit sparse, but they're sparse population wise everywhere (though the absolute number of folks in that possible pool is likely larger in the sf area. )

I must confess that the large population of young college grads who are neither engineers nor dudes is also a fun attribute of union square area