

The Pros of Planting Startups in Smaller Cities - dpapathanasiou
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/mar2009/sb20090327_385972.htm?campaign_id=rss_smlbz

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thomaspaine
I currently live in San Francisco but I'm originally from Ohio. The other day
I decided to look up programming jobs in Cincinnati on Craigslist for fun, and
a search for python yielded 197 jobs in the bay area, 1 in Cincinnati, and 3
in Cleveland. The talent pool for good hackers isn't as deep as the bay area,
but I know there are good hackers living in those cities that you would be
able to attract to your startup. A hacker could also easily live for <$1000 a
month in Ohio if you wanted to do the whole bootstrapping thing.

That being said, I don't see myself moving back anytime soon. Other than that
I just happen to like living in California a lot more than Ohio, the other day
I went to a javascript meetup held at the Facebook office. Core contributors
from mootools and jquery were there, and I remember getting the sense that
people out here really are on the bleeding edge when it comes to technology.
There's really no comparison for that level of community in Ohio.

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sachinag
Yeah, you're essentially trading lower cost of living for the network effect
when you don't live in a hub for what you're trying to do. The interwebs make
it a little easier to catch up, but you're still playing catch up.

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tokenadult
It's interesting that this article is actually based on an attempt to do
research rather than just relating one author's personal opinion.

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silentbicycle
It's also kind of sad that that's novel...

The heat map is good, too.

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gojomo
_The heat map is good, too._

It's pretty, but quite a bit unclear. There's no legend, for example -- do the
red areas or the yellow areas have the highest per-capita startup rates?

Since even the article is talking about small _cities_ , and the cities on the
map tend to be redder dots, I'll assume redder means more startups per capita.

Still, what does the map tell us? It seems a little surprising that the big
open-spaces counties of the west, especially around Idaho, Wyoming, and
Vegas/Northern Arizona are so red. But we can't be sure this isn't an artifact
of their shading choices. An eastern city-plus-surrounding-counties might hide
all its 'red' in a tiny dot, making its region look yellower than a western
county, when the eastern rate over the same total area is actually higher, and
even no more concentrated. (It just looks that way because of the smaller
counties.)

