Like Shanghai, New York in the 21st century has built an urban tech economy on a complex matrix of land, labor, and financial capital. The city not only provides big markets for digital apps and digital data, it acts through the local state as a strategic planner, real estate developer, and investor. But the New York city government is limited by the amount of land it can control, a preference for funding infrastructure rather than specific companies, and a reliance on public-private-nonprofit partnerships. How, then, has it been possible for New York to become the second-largest tech ecosystem in the United States, after Silicon Valley and San Francisco? How can innovation move past the covid-19 pandemic and into future growth areas? And how can the city be an “innovation economy” without granting power to big tech companies?