“Capital has a psychology. Each city speaks a different financial language. Master them, and you move differently.”
1. The Myth of a Single Financial Centre
Every founder eventually asks the same question, even if only silently:
Where does the money live?
It’s the kind of question that creeps in when you’re about to raise a round or when your local investors start feeling small. You picture this mythical place where capital sits in vaults and skyscrapers, waiting for people like you to come knock.
The textbooks will tell you the centre of the financial world is New York City, Wall Street, the NYSE, NASDAQ, Goldman Sachs. A skyline that screams capital.
But travel a little and you realise it’s not that simple.
The world doesn’t have one financial centre. It has three.
Each with its own function, flavour of money, and psychology.
New York. London. San Francisco.
Together, they form what I call the triangle of money, the system through which most of the world’s serious capital is created, flows, and compounds.
For founders, understanding that difference isn’t trivia. It’s strategy.
Because knowing where to go, and when, can define not just your next raise, but the destiny of your company.
2. The Nature of Capital
Money isn’t one thing. It comes in flavours.
Creation capital – high-risk, high-reward money that seeds ideas and turns them into companies. Angels, seed funds, early believers. Designed for the zero-to-one leap.
Flow capital – liquidity that keeps global trade, FX, insurance, and cross-border deals alive. The grease in the machine of global commerce.
Growth capital – institutional money: public markets, pensions, sovereigns, hedge funds. Built to scale companies that already have weight behind them.
Each has a natural home:
San Francisco/London → Creation
London/New York → Flow
New York → Growth
Miss that distinction and you’ll spend years pitching the wrong people in the wrong place. Nail it, and suddenly you’re playing on the right field.
3. New York — Where Money Sits and Compounds
New York is the heavyweight. The undisputed champion.
The NYSE and NASDAQ together account for more than half of the world’s equity value. Hedge funds, private equity, family offices, all stacked across a few square miles of Manhattan.
It’s not just that New York has money.
It is money.
The US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. When oil trades, it trades in dollars. When capital seeks safety, it floods into Treasuries. All of that ends up cycling through New York.
For founders, New York represents scale and liquidity.
If you’re heading toward IPO, you’re not thinking about the LSE, you’re thinking NASDAQ. If you’re chasing a $200 million growth round, the deepest cheques come from Tiger Global, KKR, Blackstone, Coatue, all with New York DNA.
The psychology here is institutional.
New York money wants scale, stability, and story. It backs companies already in motion.
Shopify. Spotify. Both could have listed in Europe. Both chose the US. Because New York gives you the deepest pool of capital, the broadest analyst coverage, and the liquidity that compounds into valuation.
When I sold ContentCal, I saw it first-hand. The buyer was Adobe, a US giant. The exit ultimately flowed not through London — where we raised — but through the gravitational pull of US markets.
Lesson: When you’re ready to sit among giants, New York is where you go.
4. London — Where Money Flows
London doesn’t shout like New York, but its quiet strength is unmatched.
Every day, more US dollars are traded in London than in New York, roughly 40% of the world’s $7.5 trillion daily FX market.
That’s geography and history combined.
London was the financial heart of the Empire. It reinvented itself in the Eurodollar boom of the 1960s. Today, its timezone bridges Asia and America, open before New York wakes, closing after Asia sleeps.
But London isn’t just FX. It’s insurance, commodities, private equity, and sovereign wealth. It’s where European and Middle-Eastern capital meets global markets.
For founders, London is cross-border capital made tangible.
If you’re raising from an international syndicate, London is your hub.
If you’re building a product that touches multiple markets or currencies, London gives you leverage.
Revolut. Wise. Both born in London, both scaled globally by tapping into its infrastructure of flow.
The psychology here is cosmopolitan. London money understands complexity. It’s comfortable with regulatory nuance and global expansion plays.
When we raised for JAAQ, London made sense. Investors here understood international scale and backed the ambition to connect markets.
Lesson: If your business connects dots across borders, London is the power station.
5. San Francisco — Where Money Begins
Drive down Sand Hill Road and you’ll pass Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock. Unassuming buildings, world-changing capital.
San Francisco is where ideas become companies.
It’s not just the money, it’s the ecosystem: Stanford, Berkeley, Google, Apple, Meta. Talent, exits, capital density.
The psychology is possibility. Bay Area investors don’t ask for your P&L; they ask for your potential. Can you be a category-defining company?
That’s why OpenAI, Airbnb, Stripe, Uber all started here. The Bay Area still gives ideas oxygen like nowhere else.
Even if you’re not based there, a Bay Area backer signals ambition and plugs you into the most influential network in tech.
San Francisco is less about today’s money, more about tomorrow’s.
Lesson: If you’re building something new, San Francisco is where it starts.
6. The Global Money Triangle
Picture a triangle:
San Francisco → Creation
Money seeds ideas.
London → Flow
Money moves across borders, enabling scale.
New York → Growth
Money compounds into giants.
This is the rhythm of global capital.
A startup is born in San Francisco with venture money.
It scales through London’s international networks or grows with further US capital.
It IPOs in New York.
Of course, other hubs are rising, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong, but the big three still define the map.
For founders: understand the triangle.
Don’t pitch San Francisco investors with a super late-stage deck.
Don’t approach New York with an idea still on napkins.
And don’t skip London if your vision depends on global reach.
7. What This Means for Founders Raising Today
The practical playbook:
Seed / Series A → San Francisco. Validation capital. Even one Valley name on your cap table changes perception.
Series B / C → US/London. Build a global syndicate; use London’s cross-border liquidity to scale, US money for bigger tickets.
Pre-IPO / Exit → New York. The deepest, most liquid market in the world.
Understand the psychology at each stage:
SF money asks → Could this be huge?
London money asks → Can this scale across borders?
NY money asks → Is this stable enough to compound?
Answer the right question in the right place, and your odds rise exponentially.
8. A Founder’s Lens
When I raised for ContentCal, London was the hub. It understood SaaS and global markets. When we exited, San Fran’s tech took us, but New York’s money gravity pulled us there.
With JAAQ, it’s different. We’re building in London, raising globally — but our future chapters will lean on San Francisco and New York: the creation capital that believes in mental-health technology, and the growth capital that can compound it.
Even in an internet world, geography still matters.
Each city has its own rhythm and energy. The game is learning when to plug into which one.
9. Closing Reflection
So where is the financial centre of the world?
The truth: there isn’t one.
There are three.
New York — where money sits and compounds.
London — where money flows.
San Francisco — where money begins.
Confuse them, and you waste time.
Master them, and you move differently.
The founders who learn this triangle don’t just raise capital.
They raise it from the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
And that’s the game.