It’s not about the technology. You can get that anywhere. And it’s not so much about the money. There’s more venture capital in Silicon Valley.

But New York has seen a boom in companies that mash technology and creativity on the web and mobile devices. And it’s the creativity that’s the key to the growth of such companies, a panel of young entrepreneurs with hot startups said at the New York Forum this afternoon.

Every one of the panelists including Nora Abousteit, co-founder of BurdaStyle, Dennis Crowley, CEO of Foursquare, Hillary Mason, chief scientist at Bit.ly, Joel Spolsky, CEO of Stack Exchange, and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures said the mass of talent in fields like media, fashion and music attracted them to the Big Apple.

That, and an entrepreneurial spirit to the city that stretches back across 300 years of history.

“It’s not about algorithms. It’s about soul,” said Abousteit, a German who moved to New York to start her company selling fashion dress patterns over the Internet. She was able to tap into the creative talent here, as well as the entrepreneurial spirit. “We are more about fashion and content than we are about tech…any kind of talent we needed, it was so accessible.”

And that’s especially true of companies like hers where aesthetic appeal is at least as important as price. There’s just nowhere like New York.

Spolsky put it more bluntly. With more web companies relying on a mashup of content and technology, New York is just a better place to get content.

“We create culture here,” he said. “Silicon Valley tries to make culture and it utterly fails.”

Of course, there may be some designers at Apple who might argue with that assertion, but the growth of the New York startup scene is undeniable.

Wilson, whose firm invested in companies like Foursquare, the popular application that allows users to check in from their locations as they explore their surroundings, and social game maker Zynga, said the growth of the New York tech scene is not hype.

“The stats show that there are more technology startups being started and funded in New York than anywhere in the world except San Francisco,” he said. “That’s a relatively new phenomenon. The … thing is a dense environment where there’s a lot of diversity creates a lot of creativity.”

And the lock on technology that Silicon Valley used to have has evaporated, he said, allowing for tech companies to start anywhere in the world, including New York.

So just as there’s been no place like New York for Abousteit to tap into creative talent, there’s been no place like the densely packed city for Crowley and his 70-person team to perfect Foursquare’s system for users to log in and record their location through social networks.

“It’s been my own personal research lab,” he said of the city.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com