New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA

As the number of technology jobs in New York City grew 30 percent in the past 10 years—twice the rate of its population growth—it has welcomed one unicorn after the next: BuzzFeed, Warby Parker, Etsy, WeWork. The city has also become the center of the boom in direct-toconsumer companies—startups, like Glossier and Away, that use highly targeted advertising to market their brands from their own websites. “New York’s always been a finance city, and it’s always been an advertising city, and direct-to-consumer businesses are primarily marketing and financial-modeling exercises,” says Jesse Horwitz, a lifelong New Yorker who founded Hubble, a direct-to-consumer seller of contact lenses, in 2016. Meanwhile, Newark— NYC’s long-troubled neighbor—has begun carving out its own startup identity. Audible, Newark’s largest tech company, recently funded the creation of Newark Venture Partners, a $50 million fund that aims to host early-stage businesses hatched there, like A.I.-powered healthmonitoring technology startup Ejenta. And the audiobook subsidiary’s parent, Amazon, is about to dig its tentacles even deeper into the region with its new Long Island City outpost.