Bicoastal VCs Jeremy Levine And Bijan Sabet Compare Investing In NYC Vs. Silicon Valley

The tech community has gotten the HBO treatment through new show "Silicon Valley," which has prompted some tech navel-gazing while also reinforcing the San Francisco-centric view of techies in popular culture (though the nerds of "The Big Bang Theory" are supposed to live in Pasadena). But cue the tech communities everywhere else's simultaneous envy and relief that they're not getting the spotlight.

Almost every hub of some size in the U.S. can claim a win right now. Take three of the headline tech IPOs of last week: Opower hails from the Washington, D.C., area, and GrubHub is a Chicago-based company. Then there's Rubicon Project going public from Los Angeles, which also scored a win with Oculus acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. Zulily's from Seattle; Austin's got Indeed, Spiceworks and Dell . Boston has IPO-bound retailer Wayfair and newly billion-dollar company Actifio. And New York City's tech community is always hungry for recognition, right now pointing to billion-dollar companies in MongoDB, Etsy and Gilt, ad tech players like AppNexus, and recent major exits like Tumblr. (Plus plenty of international successes from Rovio and Supercell in Finland to King in Dublin, Waze and Wix in Israel, and a bunch of IPOs looming in China.)

But as HBO's show reinforces, Silicon Valley is still tech's spiritual center. And it's where the money lives: 72% of investors on the 2014 Midas List live in the Bay Area; 18% on the East Coast. So some top investors still find themselves racking up serious airline miles trying to find deals on both coasts. Forbes caught up with two of them, Midas Listers Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners and Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, to compare startup-spotting on each coast.

For Levine, a New York City resident who spends much of his time in Silicon Valley, the problem is still one of volume. "The ratio is skewed very heavily. There are lots of great companies on both coasts, but the number of really interesting companies in California outstrips the number of companies on the East Coast by somewhere between 10 to 1 and 100."

That means while Levine says he'd love to find more New York companies, his best deals have come on the West coast, through LinkedIn , Pinterest and Yelp. He's especially proud of Pinterest because as a Palo Alto startup, he snatched that deal from "under the noses" of his Silicon Valley peers.  Perhaps because its founders lacked technical coding expertise, "Somehow everyone overlooked it," he says.

Sabet, meanwhile, is a consumer specialist who invested in Twitter in San Francisco and Tumblr and OMGPOP in New York. Sabet lives in Boston but invests primarily in New York and Silicon Valley, where he lived for 10 years. He's back there every three weeks and says his goal is to invest without a regional bias. That meant aggressive hunting for unknown companies in Spark's early days in New York, and now building a network across both communities.

Spark invested early in Oculus in Los Angeles and Runkeeper in Boston [Update: Sabet has clarified he led Runkeeper, but parter Santo Politi led the Oculus investment]. Sabet's now backing Twitter cofounder Biz Stone in his new app, Jelly, on which he preaches patience after the app hasn't seen explosive growth right away. "Jelly signed up more users in its first 30 days than Twitter did in the first year, these things take time," Sabet tells Forbes. "It's rare these YouTube things that happen overnight, it's extremely rare. My personal mentality is that I'm in it for the long haul."

And that means that while some Silicon Valley investors famously only look locally, from SV Angel to Sequoia Capital, investors like Levine and Sabet will be wracking up frequent flyer miles for the long haul, too.

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