

Ask HN: Second-Best City to move for startups - DanielBMarkham

I'm going to move this year from rural America to somewhere that is much more startup-friendly.<p>For the sake of a lot of things: taxes, cost-of-housing, congestion, state debt, etc -- I am not moving to SV.<p>So. Where's the next best place for a guy with a family to move that has lots of tech-savvy people, a good community of investors, readily-available bandwidth, potential college interns, and the cost of living is low?<p>I'm thinking Austin. Anybody have a better place?
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brk
Boston meets all your criteria, except for cost of living.

If you live in New Hampshire (like I do) you can commute to pretty much any
place other than Boston proper, and reduce your COL significantly. And even
that, I worked in Cambridge for a while and it was manageable if I avoided
peak rush hour times.

The majority of the startup activity isn't IN Boston anyway, it's in the
general beltway between 495 and 128.

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DanielBMarkham
Boston was a very, very close second place.

My feeling was that I could get out into the cheap countryside much easier in
Austin, the cost of housing was generally much, much cheaper, and the traffic,
bad as it was, wasn't up to par with the Boston area.

I'd love to hear reasons why I missed something.

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JayNeely
I'm a 15-minute walk from Davis Square, where the subway is, and my rent is
only $425 / month.

Not only is Boston the #2 city by number of startups:

[http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup-
centers.ht...](http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup-centers.html)

It's the #1 city by number of universities. It's really a fantastic place with
a terrific startup scene, and one that's still growing and getting more
connected.

~~~
hga
The Davis Square area is certainly very nice, I lived in it for the last half-
dozen or so years of my stay in the Boston area (late '80s-very early '90s),
but there's no way a family is going to fit into a $425/month apartment that's
anywhere near it.

For the criteria of taxes, cost-of-housing, congestion, state debt and general
cost of living the Boston area is just plain bad and as far as I know getting
worse.

Commuting from southern New Hampshire isn't a great option either, the cost of
living there is still pretty high and unless you can do it off peak it's very
congested. And there are a lot of tasty startups in Cambridge, you'd need to
have a commute to there be practical.

While I believe there's a big separation from the Boston area to the next
largest startup areas in the nation, I think Daniel's criteria that rule out
SV also rule out it, although not as strongly.

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Scott_MacGregor
We moved to Austin to benifit from the much better tax structure and lack of
red tape when operating compared to California. Texas is very business
freindly on purpose. They focus on it, and so far seem to be doing a pretty
good job of it.

Austin is a nice place and the people are very nice, but in the summer the
humidity and heat gets pretty bad. Too bad its not right on the ocean like
California or Seattle.

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oakenshield
Atlanta. It's a huge metro with a fairly low cost of living. Fair winter
weather (no snow) and the summers are alright too. Lots of smart kids from
Georgia Tech, plenty of security-related startups, lots of finance companies,
etc. I also recently learned of an early stage tech statup seed funding firm
based here (Shotput ventures).

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bradleyjoyce
Dallas!!! Our startup community has grown like crazy over the past year and
just keeps getting better! We have cool stuff going on like ShopSavvy, Traxo,
Swingly, Woopra and more! Check out <http://launchdfw.com> as well. feel free
to ping me directly if you want to chat about it.

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credo
I think Seattle is one of the top 3-4 cities for startups (in the US).

As far as your criteria go, cost-of-housing etc. is going to be much lesser
than SV, but much more than Austin. No state income tax, just a sales tax.
Traffic congestion is pretty bad. Business pay 1.5% of total revenue (not
profit) as B&O taxes to the state.

Like the other top cities for tech-startups, heavily liberal in terms of
politics. I vaguely remember reading some report that said that Seattle had a
higher percentage of college-grads than every other major city in America.
evergreen forests nearby, "you can ski in the morning and sail in the evening"
is how my Microsoft recruiter described Seattle to me in the 90s :)

~~~
hga
It should be noted that there's a serious effort to institute an income tax in
Washington state.

It's probably hard to predict the likelihood of success, but today we can
safely say it'll happen a lot sooner there than in Texas.

The gross receipts business tax is obviously necessary to capture money from
Boeing in years it's not profitable, and didn't hurt eternally profitable
Microsoft when it moved there (from Arizona, the home of the personal
computer), but it can be a real pain for a not yet profitable startup and
obviously raises the level for ramen profitability.

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davidedicillo
Austin and Boulder are definitely active cities as far as Startups. NY and
Boston are great too but living costs are pretty expensive.

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Mz
Some years back, I knew someone with a hacker career who bought one of those
"Best Places" books and used the CD that came with it to do some custom
searches for someplace low cost, high tech. Much to their frustration and
chagrin, no matter how they tweaked it, the results showing low cost places
with good opportunities for high tech jobs strongly favored Texas.

Obviously, the data is old. But I would think Texas is still your best bet for
family-friendly prices and access to the tech scene. The state is quite large,
so there are several large cities you could look at. All you would need to do
would be to confirm this general trend, then check out which of the larger
cities had the other factors you are looking for. (I personally would avoid
Houston. It's horribly polluted. But that's just me.) So I don't think Austin
is a bad idea at all.

Good luck with this.

EDIT: You can do some city comparisons here for free:
<http://www.bestplaces.net/>

