David Karp lives by the principle that the world doesn't need more flashy gadgets and fancy software - which would be fine, had he not founded Tumblr. "I DON'T LIKE SCREENS very much," says David Karp, founder and chief executive officer of Tumblr, the popular microblogging platform. "Big bright monitors drive me nuts"; screens in the bedroom are "gross." He takes his rule seriously, for in Karp's newly renovated loft, in south Williamsburg, Brooklyn, screens are scarce, as is, for that matter, anything particularly shiny or smooth. It is, instead, a dedication to all that is aged, rough or both: ancient bricks, weathered concrete, blackened steel and reclaimed oak. While Karp designs the future, his personal aesthetic is worlds apart from the Star Trek flight deck or the Google campus that form our usual idea of what is to come. Karp doesn't believe, he says, that the next century is necessarily about "more screens covering more surface area." He is an apparent paradox: a high-tech design leader with a home and possessions that display little affection for anything postwar; frankly, most of the 20th century seems suspect to him. Nothing in his home looks particularly futuristic, or technological, at least as we've usually understood those terms. A house may be a machine for living, but Karp says, "I don't want our house doing very much." It's a quiet space, with few distractions; one feels that stone tablets might not be entirely out of place. The newest-looking machine in the house is the metal carcass of a classic 1969 Honda CB160 motorcycle, apparently in the midst of a living-room repair job. The apartment is built with "analog technology," says John Gachot, the principal designer, who worked with Karp on the renovation. Gachot specializes in solid, old-school design; working with his wife, Christine, their recent projects include the Acme restaurant in NoHo, the West Village home of Marc Jacobs and a shuffleboard club now being built in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Gachot compares Karp's loft to a submarine, where everything is made of tested, reliable materials that are designed to work together perfectly. "It's mildly steampunk," he adds, pointing out a few of the details, like tin ceilings and brass screws, at least "in the sense of looking backward." The materials and methods are genuinely old: the reclaimed oak that dominates the living room comes from an old dairy farm in Pennsylvania, and the brick and concrete have aged with the building. "It's very open and honest," he says of the design. Everything is exposed, and you can see all the connections. Switching metaphors, he compares the home to the design of classic motorcycles, one of Karp's obsessions, which are naked machines, all working parts exposed. Above all, Karp's home is about as different as it is possible to be, style-wise, from the tech palaces of the West, or the smart homes of the 1990s that were once supposed to be the future. In the popular imagination, tech leaders don't live this way. They inhabit some kind of indistinct place, defined less geographically than temporally, for the technologist is meant to live slightly ahead of the rest of us. One imagines Google's Sergey Brin spending his days encased in advanced wearable technology, orbiting the earth in a driverless spaceship, landing only to introduce humanity to new products from the mother ship. On the West Coast, the credible technologist simply must use devices and materials more advanced than the masses use. One wouldn't want to be caught lugging around an old Dell laptop, or, God forbid, a BlackBerry. Karp's style may not fit the public's idea of homo futurus, but it is perfectly consistent with the image of New York's tech industry. New York tech, where Tumblr is based, is distinguished from its Silicon Valley cousin less by technical merit, and more by its design aesthetic and its close relationship with the creativity and culture of the city itself. While still small, New York has had legitimate hits and is now being taken increasingly seriously. Tumblr, the company Karp founded with his friend Marco Arment, offers free personalized home pages and as such is technically a competitor to Facebook and Twitter. However, the comparison ends there. Tumblr is minimalist and easy to use but also infinitely customizable; it is a genuine creative tool. Using Facebook, meanwhile, demands about all the creativity you'd need to renew a passport. As Karp puts it, "here's your vanilla white profile page: now fill in your interests, add your friends." He built Tumblr in reaction to Facebook, which he regards as "insanely restrictive." Indeed, much of the New York tech industry can be understood as a reaction to the one-size-fits-all ethos of Silicon Valley. "There's something very prescriptive in how the Valley builds its tools," Karp says, "even the ones that are supposed to be expressive." Consider Etsy, which is a kind of eBay for the design-conscious; or Kickstarter, which provides a platform for financing creative projects; Shutterstock, which licenses images; or BuzzFeed, a social news Web site. The major New York tech firms, with the exception of Foursquare, New York's popular social-networking app, either cater to creators, or depend on some tie to the creative or media industries as their comparative advantage. That New York tech has more style than its West Coast counterpart cannot be doubted. But the nagging question is whether the East has substance as well, and more particularly, whether it can actually compete with the power, money and experience of Silicon Valley. Tumblr, which is among New York's most successful tech firms, sold for $1.1 billion to Yahoo earlier this year, which is a trifle compared with Microsoft (valued, at press time, at $263 billion), Google ($299 billion) or Apple ($423 billion). Nonetheless, Karp, who admits "we've got a ton to prove," is optimistic about New York tech over the long run. "Historically, single-industry cities eventually collapse," he says, referring to Silicon Valley and effectively throwing down the gauntlet. It's the New Yorks, the Londons, the cities that have multiple industries, that are able to survive. That's what history teaches, he says, but "it's really easy to forget that when you're at the forefront of whatever industry." The long view of New York's prospects is also what appealed to Andrew McLaughlin, a former Google executive who moved east and is now senior vice president at New York's Betaworks, which bills itself as "a company that builds companies." The New York Times Company is an investor. "If you're placing a long-term bet on consumer tech," he says, "then the mix of skills you'll find in New York, while maybe less technical, seems like a better bet to make." As a veteran of both East Coast and West Coast tech, McLaughlin captures the aesthetic gap as "the difference between a Palo Alto office park and a Bushwick loft." For one thing, "New York takes authenticity very seriously," he says, while "the West Coast doesn't give a damn." "Functionality" matters most, he says, and while he has enormous respect for Google, "no one at Google spends time thinking about how to make their office park "authentic." They want it to be awesome, with robots, driverless cars, that kind of stuff. Another difference is that New York's tech industry tends to work with, or on top of, what's already there, whether physically or conceptually. "The West Coast thing is to destroy what came before," while New York is "layering and working with what's here already," McLaughlin says, making reference to Rem Koolhaas's seminal 1978 manifesto on urbanism, "Delirious New York." Koolhaas argued that New York was a "collective experiment" in a "factory of man-made experience." The city is the center of culture, creativity, advertising and finance: the question is whether New York tech can somehow help tie it all together. The physical spaces inhabited by the main New York firms reflect the layered approach being built into the city's infrastructure, rather than exiled in the suburban office parks, and echo the original Bell Labs in the West Village. Tumblr's offices are in the Flatiron district, housed on two floors in an old building with rough wooden floors. Betaworks occupies a handsome industrial space in the meatpacking district with 22-foot ceilings and cast iron pillars, surrounded by fashion labels like Alexander McQueen and Tory Burch; the building once belonged to the publisher of Collier's Encyclopedia. Kickstarter's offices are in a rough Lower East Side loft with reclaimed cabinets and tin ceilings. The firm is currently refurbishing a new space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, out of a building that once belonged to the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company. Most of New York tech remains in Manhattan, but Karp has moved to Williamsburg, which, to state the obvious, is not a traditional C.E.O. hangout. It turns out that Karp and his girlfriend, Rachel Eakley, tried the West Village for a while but didn't like their location. He went on a search for "old buildings," and in Brooklyn he found more of what he loves, unblemished by "too much drywall," which, according to Karp, has spoiled neighborhoods like TriBeCa. Karp's loft also enjoys perfect views of the east Manhattan skyline. He looks out at the Niemeyer-Le Corbusier United Nations complex, with its broad tower reflecting water and sky. It was that view that sealed the deal and convinced Karp he could leave the island. He started thinking that looking out on Manhattan would be "so much frickin" cooler than being in the West Village and seeing the Jersey skyline." But not all is perfect: his view also includes an eruption of nondescript condos that have infected the Brooklyn bank of the East River. "I get so nauseated when I see these big glassy things," he says, which look like "something out of Florida." He denounces the spread of "generic, superbland architecture by people who decided that contemporary architecture is big glassy buildings. The stuff bums me out. Once upon a time, to make it in the tech industry was to migrate from east to west, where the engineers and the venture capital could be found. Yet it seems highly unlikely that either Karp or Tumblr will move to the Valley anytime soon, for matters of taste as much as anything. "If there's any broader issue I have with the Valley," Karp says, it's that "you'd have to be out of your mind to live in Palo Alto."