Mayor Bloomberg got “friended” yesterday in the best possible way: Facebook announced it had selected New York City to open what would be only its third high-tech engineering unit in the country.
“This is a transformative event,” declared an exuberant Sen. Chuck Schumer, who joined the mayor at Facebook’s Midtown headquarters to make the announcement with COO Sheryl Sandberg and other company executives.
The mayor has been trying to position the city as an information and social-media capital to rival Silicon Valley in California and create high-paying jobs to help replace those in the shaky financial industry.
After scouring the nation, Facebook VP Mike Schroepfer said the company settled on the Big Apple because of the “huge momentum” achieved in fulfilling Bloomberg’s vision.
“We did a pretty detailed analysis and found, by a large margin, the best place would be New York City,” Schroepfer declared.
The mayor, standing inches away, never heard sweeter words.
Although only 100 of Facebook’s 3,000 employees now work here, focusing on marketing and global recruiting, Sandberg said the company plans to grow rapidly.
“We will be adding thousands of employees in the next year,” she said of hiring growth at Facebook’s various sites.
“Three thousand employees sounds like a lot to us. But when you think about 800 million-plus people using Facebook around the world, we really are small.”
Web engineers are in high demand, and some firms have had a hard time finding qualified candidates.
That shouldn’t be as much of a problem for Facebook, which is valued at more than $100 billion and is planning its first IPO next year.
Schumer said the fact that the world’s premier social-networking site had selected the city for its third engineering unit “says that we have turned the corner” as a certified hi-tech center.
Other Internet giants, from Google to Microsoft, are already in residence. As are such start-ups as Foursquare and Tumblr.
Two city officials who normally would have been on hand for the announcement, Deputy Mayor Robert Steel and economic development chief Seth Pinsky, were busy interviewing applicants for the world-class engineering school the city wants to lure with the promise of a $100 million investment. Stanford and Cornell appear to be the leading contenders.
Schumer suggested that Bloomberg expand the search to make room for two winners.
Schroepfer said New York can offer what most other cities can’t.
“One of the things that really makes a technology center work is a community,” he said. “So you may be working for Facebook, but you want to go and meet and exchange ideas and best practices with other people who are doing similar jobs. I think that community has been part of the fuel that made Silicon Valley a success. It’s clear New York has that community, as well.”
Between 2005 and 2010, the number of high-tech jobs in the city increased from 69,620 to 90,723. And the number of high-tech businesses grew from 5,454 to 7,147 over the same five years.
Silicon Alley
Facebook is the latest high-tech business to expand in New York City, which is fast becoming the East Coast version of Silicon Valley.
High-tech employment in NYC
2005: 69,620
2010: 90,723
Number of high-tech businesses
2005: 5,454
2010: 7,147
Number of patents registered to NYC inventors
1980: 931
1990: 1,010
2000: 1,760
2010: 2,716
