Really? I found New York pizza to be pretty mediocre in general (Joe's on Bleecker is pretty good if you're okay with burnt dough). DNA Lounge's pizza is not known to be great though. Out here, Patxi's does a good deep dish vegan pie, and there are plenty of places to get a good New York style slice.
SF has good deep dish (Little Cesar and Paxtis), and maybe one good true Italian/wood/brick pizza in Northern Beach but that's it.
In NYC you have good pizza every other block (as well as crappy $1, or $2/slice type of places ). Once you try few places, you find which ones are good/legit, and stick with them, and avoid the crappy ones.
For pizza and bagels there is just no comparison between the two places.
But pizza? Your typical place in New York isn't a whole lot different from what you'd find at New York style places (e.g. Escape From New York, Serranos, Arinell's). The 99 cent chain isn't as bad as folks make it out to be IMO.
Out here you've got plenty of wood fired places 'authentic' and not (e.g. Zuni, Tony's, Una Pizza Napoletana, Pizzaiolo); Indian (Zante, Brother's); California (Zuni again, Goat Hill, Arizmendi / Cheese Board -- their sour dough puts puts anything I had in New York to shame); deep dish (Little Star, Patxi's, Zachary's); and, of course, Delfina.
The typical New York pizza isn't significantly different in overall quality than the stuff you find in the Bay Area. If you go looking for it you can find excellent pizza in New York I'm sure (but the same is true in the Bay Area).
That ain't pizza.
With that said, we're still nowhere on the level of NYC.
For Neopolitan, you've got Tony's (actual restaurant, not the takeout shop), Il Casaro, and Carmel Pizza Co. in the North Beach area. Elsewhere, you have A16.
Golden Boy is good pizza, but it's in its own category of American pizza.
I think that pizza is probably a blind spot for many SF/SV startup people. Not surprised this startup is based in NYC.
Is there an avocado toast startup?
Edit: come to think of it I had vegan pizza in NYC a year and a half ago (and on other days while I was visiting, I had some non-vegan pizza). I wonder if it was at a pizza place run by Albanians.