
Number 3 Startup Hub?  - far33d
So it's pretty obvious that the Bay Area is startup hub #1, and Boston is #2, but what is #3? <p>New York? Boulder? Chicago? Seattle? <p>Follow-up question - what cities that are not the top three seem to have the most potential to become #3? 

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menloparkbum
There is no #3. Boston is WAY behind the Bay Area, even though die-hard
Bostonians (er... I mean Cantabrigians) like to believe otherwise.

If you don't feel that the Bay Area offers any advantage to your startup, you
could probably be based almost anywhere.

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run4yourlives
Too US Centric no?

Canada has got some pretty interesting startup scenes, Vancouver, Waterloo
area and Ottawa come to mind.

And Europe is certainly not to be forgotten about, let alone India as well.

I'd be interested to see how things compare globally, although I think you've
got 1 and 2 pegged.

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comatose_kid
What's in Ottawa? (I grew up there)...

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electric
"What's in Ottawa?"

A lot of non-Web2.0 stuff. Like wireless, telecom, computing, etc.

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comatose_kid
Right - I'm aware of telecom (I worked for a telecom when I lived there), but
I mean does anyone know of interesting startups, web 2.0 or otherwise?

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oditogre
Re: Boulder: Why not Fort Collins? Close to Denver, beautiful area, nice
weather, college town, and - more than anything else - the place is just
loaded with young people, and local businesses seem geared towards a younger
market more so than most any place I can think of.

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ciderdude
I'm thinking of moving to Boulder from Silicon Valley (Palo Alto) simply
because the cost of doing business is so insanely high here. My apartment rent
has gone up $1200 over the past 5 years, the traffic sucks, taxes are high,
wages are inflated, and we don't need to raise capital.

There are ways to deal with these factors (BART, biking to work, cooking at
home, handing out equity in lieu of cash, etc...). But, why bother when there
are more affordable places to do business in the U.S.?

I'm looking for a place in the U.S. that meets three criteria: (1) a great
year-round outdoor lifestyle with lots of hiking trails, mountain biking
terrain, and possibly rock-climbing and/or skiing (2) young, smart people (3)
affordable living (rental prices, food prices, traffic) (4) a nearby
university with a top-40 School of Engineering (5) not a resort/retirement
community

Right now I'm looking at Ventura, CA (ocean sports are a good substitute for
moutain sports), Boulder, or Bozeman Montanta. Neither Ventura nor Boulder are
"cheap", but they are a bargain compared to Palo Alto. Ventura is within 40min
of UCSB (Santa Barbara is too expensive) and Boulder is obviously a college
town.

We're keeping our servers in a Bay Area datacenter, but there really is no
reason to stay here since our company is profitable and cash-flow positive (an
algorithmic hedge fund specializing in OTC energy derivatives).

I've never been to Fort Collins. How does it compare with Boulder?

There is no reason to be in Silicon Valley if your company is profitable,
cash-flow positive, and self-financing. If not, then Silicon Valley is a
superb place to raise capital; however, be prepared to pay dearly for it (both
in equity and in cost of doing business).

Thanks!

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rrival
I lived in Boulder from 2002 to 2005. I spent 2 months in Boulder this summer
trying to figure out if it's the place to be. I love it. I love the quality of
life. I love the relaxed atmosphere, the perfect weather & proximity to
skiing. TechStars is there, Boulder OpenCoffee Club is active and there is
some VC, as far as I can tell. There's a decent pool of relatively cheap
talent in the Denver/Boulder area, CU has a reasonably well regarded
engineering school, Sun and IBM have campuses there. StartupWeekend was born
there.

I couldn't find the energy. The pace is an opiate. I couldn't find the noise.
I couldn't find the 20-somethings actively changing things in tech; it seems
like if you have any drive there, you leave. The vibe is bohemian (it's
Boulder), and part of me would love to, as pg commented, move 10,000 geeks
there and give a $500m endowment to CU to try to architect a new SV in the
Rockies, but it's missing something. It seems like the scales are tipped 75/25
between play/work.

Please prove me wrong. I'd be there next week if I thought the startup
infrastructure (developers, investors, etc) was active enough.

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portLAN
You're in luck -- the last version of YC news on archive.org had it!

[http://www.darrenherman.com/2007/04/04/where-are-the-tech-
st...](http://www.darrenherman.com/2007/04/04/where-are-the-tech-startups/)

The O'Reilly Radar post is here:
[http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup_centers.ht...](http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup_centers.html)

The numbers are a year old but Seattle was #3 and NYC was #4. Although Tacoma
is grouped in with Seattle, I'm not sure how meaningful that is -- it's kind
of like grouping Oakland with Mountain View.

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mattculbreth
I'm hoping for Atlanta to your second question. Quite sure it's not #3 now but
there's a few of us working on it.

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samb
it's not chicago, but it should be.

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rrival
What's the story with Chicago. You'd think with 37signals, feedburner and ...
I can't think of a prominent 3rd, you'd get a local startup community slightly
more active than TechCocktail...

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bmaier
Chicago is just getting close to reaching critical mass. The startups that
succeeded here before did little to foster community. The startups here now
are coming around to the idea of a start up community. It should be
interesting to see how it plays out. The other problem here is that a bunch of
the good hackers go to places like Citadel rather than do a startup.

~~~
rrival
Sounds like we should get a Chicago news.yc meetup going. I'm thinking
something more frequent than Tech Cocktail, is there a Chicago OpenCoffee Club
yet? I know someone's working on a StartupWeekend here:
<http://startupweekendchicago.wetpaint.com/>

~~~
bmaier
A news.yc meetup here would be great. OpenCoffee Club here has been ruined by
MidPhase but theres no reason we can't set up a weekly or monthly meeting time
at a coffee shop where news.ycers can come and go, with some way to identify
ourselves like a post-it note on your laptop or something. Anyone up for it?

~~~
bmaier
Campfire set up for organizing and just general ChiTown talk.
<http://ycombinator.campfirenow.com> if you want an invite mail
cubend#gmail.com Works well as a message board or a chatroom. I'll be in there
off and on all week

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dpapathanasiou
No, not NYC... most hackers are paid too well by i-banks and hedge funds to
risk joining a startup, and those startup founders who do succeed don't stay
here to become angels (as they do in SV and other startup hubs).

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epi0Bauqu
What metric do you think one should use to do the ranking? Absolute # of
startups? Size of VC investment? Biggest nerd community?

~~~
far33d
Whatever metric you want. By whatever metric that everyone agrees that the bay
area and boston are 1 and 2.

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ivankirigin
Seattle, I'm told.

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pg
Yes, probably Seattle, or maybe Austin.

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far33d
Austin. I didn't even think of that. Who's the catalyst there?

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zach
Austin is like the only city in 750 miles with a substantial high-tech
background and a creative-class culture, isn't it?

I've spent time in Dallas (home of Texas Instruments) and while it is a nice
working-class metroplex, Austin seems to have far more of the character of a
startup hub. Same thing with St. Louis, I understand.

On the other hand, Lawrence, Kansas has the character but not the high-tech
(and it's kinda little).

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mrevelle
Austin also has Univ. of Texas - ranked seventh in CS research. The startup
I'm involved with is planning on opening up offices there when it's time to
grow.

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ivankirigin
Also, the slogan of the town is "Keep Austin Weird". I like it.

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ahsonwardak
I would hope that it would be DC, but it's probably not. If we're talking
about web startups. Could it be NYC?

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mangodrunk
DC is for enterprise Java programmers and only big government contractors. I
think the general job market in DC is ranked #1 though.

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rmason
Seattle, followed by Austin and then Ann Arbor and Madison in a tie for fifth

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dotcoma
Seattle is probably number 2, isn't it?

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danw
London?

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danw
My reasoning for London:

Lots of Big Co's have offices here such as Google, Yahoo, BBC, Skype, etc

Lots of great startups: Last.fm, Moo, Crowdstorm, Mind Candy, Gottabet, etc

Some great universities: Imperial, RCA, near to Oxford & Cambridge

Good VCs: Index Ventures, Accel, Atlas plus Seedcamp

Plenty of events: Ranging from weekly openCoffee's to big barcamps and Hackday
and conferences like Future of Web Apps. Last nights Facebook Developer Garage
pulled in 200 or so.

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rabpdx
Portland, OR

