There's lots of good advice in this thread already but I would add a pitch to take a look at Brooklyn. While not cheap, it's generally way less expensive than manhattan and there's an awesome mixed community of people from all kinds of different backgrounds.
As far as office space, there are are couple of co-working spaces mentioned already, but there's also a great place called GreenDesk [1]. GreenDesk lets you rent anything from a single desk to an office for 6-7 people, it's relatively inexpensive, it's month to month so you're not locked into a lease, and it's in a pretty nice neighborhood with good subway connections.
Finally as far as culture, I'd say the NY tech scene is a more fractured than SF (there's a lot of finance folks here who usually don't interact much with the startup world) but within the startup space it's very active and friendly. One of the best things you can do to get involved and to get to know people is go to various meetup groups [2]. There are groups for virtually every neighborhood, specialization, and technology.
Good luck with the move and hopefully see you around NYC soon!
As far as office space, there are are couple of co-working spaces mentioned already, but there's also a great place called GreenDesk [1]. GreenDesk lets you rent anything from a single desk to an office for 6-7 people, it's relatively inexpensive, it's month to month so you're not locked into a lease, and it's in a pretty nice neighborhood with good subway connections.
Finally as far as culture, I'd say the NY tech scene is a more fractured than SF (there's a lot of finance folks here who usually don't interact much with the startup world) but within the startup space it's very active and friendly. One of the best things you can do to get involved and to get to know people is go to various meetup groups [2]. There are groups for virtually every neighborhood, specialization, and technology.
Good luck with the move and hopefully see you around NYC soon!
[1] http://greendesk.com/index.html [2] http://www.meetup.com/find/?userFreeform=10001&radius=5&...