
We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup - shafyy
https://shafyy.com/post/turkey/
======
jupp0r
Has the author watched the news in the last few years? German and Swedish
online security experts were thrown in jail in 2017 basically for organizing a
crypto party [1]. I know first-hand of several software engineers who
basically had to flee the country with their families in order to avoid being
disappeared. With all the possible countries to move your startup to, Turkey
would be pretty low on my list. I wouldn't even enter the country for a
vacation.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/global-condemnation-
tu...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/global-condemnation-turkeys-
detention-innocent-digital-security-trainers)

------
ghaff
>Obviously, VR will transform the nature of remote work.

The rest of the post makes perfect sense given their situation. This, however,
is pretty silly. I do firmly believe that there is a need for better remote
collaboration tools. I see pretty much zero evidence that VR is an essential
part (or even an optional part) of that.

~~~
kevinflo
I 100% agree with the author on this. VR in its current iteration is clearly
not suitable for this in any way, but down the line the fundamentals of VR
align perfectly with some of the pain points of remote collaboration. With all
current collaboration tools the parties are still bridging the gap of working
in different places. In VR, everyone is inhabiting the same virtual space.
It's just completely different. Practically, all things switch from n
representations to 1 representation. Psychologically we register the
interactions completely differently because the parties are saying things not
in their room with a video displaying them in your room. They're saying things
_next to you, to the person sitting across from you, while turning and walking
away_. The fidelity of interactions (and in turn the interpersonal bonds and
memories you form) is just an order of magnitude higher.

If hardware is good enough for this to be a practicality, we may be working in
AR 100% of the time anyways, and depending on if you want to be remotely
present with others, you just swap out your real environment for a shared
virtual one. In that dream scenario, the glasses or whatever are high enough
res anyways you'd rather use them to make virtual dynamic user interfaces than
stare at a static 2d monitor.

It's going to be a long, long, long time before any of this happens but I'm
guessing these are the kind of far-off things the author was implying.

~~~
shafyy
Thank you, exactly. I would say in 10 years it will be normal to work 8h a day
in VR. But we will see companies start doing it much earlier.

------
Jun8
Note that although OP's parents are Turkish they say they have never lived in
Turkey before, so there may have been a certain level of underestimation about
various factors of living in Istanbul (which is one of the most beautiful and
vibrant cities in the world IMHO.

* Traffic: For those of you who complain about SF traffic, Istanbul traffic jams has to be experienced to be believed. In addition, people drive, how to put this mildly, out of the norm. After living in the US for 20+ years, it takes me 1-2 days to get accustomed to driving there (I go back twice a year and learned to drive in Turkey)

* Salaries: Although I only have anecdata, I think the engineering salaries are not very low, e.g. compared to Europe. In the US and esp. in the SV it's relatively easy to find people who'll work for chicken feed for a while at a startup to gamble at a chance to be millionaires later. IN Turkey such exits are exceedingly rare so many young people want to play it safer (the talent is absolutely top notch, however).

* Food: This is _very_ cheap and great. 'Nuff said.

* Rent: Rent in Istanbul, depending on the neighborhood, can be stratospheric. This plays into the traffic problem: In order to avoid traffic you want to live closer to your office (at least on the same continent!) but this can be costly.

* Other: I left off the political situation from the discussion. Depending on your leanings, this may or may not be a problem.

~~~
shafyy
I agree, if you don't speak Turkish or don't want to learn speaking it a
little, life can suck. It's possible, but when you speak Turkish you have so
much more to explore and experience with the kind Turkish people.

Yeah, agree. Istanbul traffic is like LA traffic.

We pay $700 for a great apartment Ortaköy, which would probably be worth $4k
in SF (or $3k in Zurich). It's short-term and completely furbished, too.

There are definitely more hip areas, but I like Ortaköy, you can walk to
Besiktas, and can take the tram to Karaköy (Walk + Tram I mean).

------
rolleiflex
I'm a startup founder living in San Francisco, currently in Istanbul, Turkey,
for a half work trip, half hiring. First of all the same caveat applies: if
you want to live in Turkey, you _have_ to know Turkish. Turkey is closer to
France than Thailand in terms of tolerance for English, tourists get a pass,
but otherwise fiercely protective. If you're not a visitor, you are expected
to know at least basic Turkish or be a social pariah.

The second thing is, also the reason I'm here — Turkey does have a good market
for engineers, but the wages are fairly close to the US average in PPP terms.
I think Udemy does have a team in Ankara, and there are quite a lot of local
and profitable startups, so the competition for talent, while not at SF
levels, is not nil. This is being exacerbated by the relative ease of leaving
Turkey, lots of good developers have already left because of the illiberal
climate of the past decade, for jobs in London, Berlin, Stockholm, New York
and San Francisco. They're in pretty high demand far as I can see, because
they do provide a good balance of western-ish values, decent langauge skills
and an up to date tech stack.

Their willingness to move to the USA is pretty low, however, far as I can see.
Berlin seems to be much more palatable to them. If the country recovers and
ends up being a more livable place, I do suspect Turkish engineers'
willingness to move to even Berlin will likely drop commensurately.

Third, the country is cheap, but it's not India, Philippines or Thailand
cheap. It's a good deal for someone from Switzerland to live in an Aegean
paradise and still be in the broad EU time zone, within 2 hours flight
distance to Zurich. But it's probably not cheap enough to pull people from San
Francisco, unless they're Turkish.

Why am I not moving there? Well, I need access to investors, potential
customers, collaborators, and yes, even employees in San Francisco. Istanbul
is a great city to live in, but it definitely has its fair share of predatory
investors that you don't ever want to talk to — in fact, that's the vast
majority of investors here, as you'd expect from any non-tech-hub — and mid-
to-upper class tech talent, but SF / NY / Seattle still wins in terms of
average skill. I do visit every 6 months, though, and I would love to have an
office here eventually.

(If you live in Istanbul, we're hiring for a remote Go engineer position for
Aether. Email in profile if interested!)

~~~
shafyy
> _If the country recovers and ends up being a more livable place, I do
> suspect Turkish engineers ' willingness to move to even Berlin will likely
> drop commensurately._

After yesterday's vote, we're on a good path for this to happen :-)

~~~
eralps
I was going to ask if yesterday's election was a decision point for moving to
Istanbul from Bodrum?

I think people underestimate the language barrier here. I think it is not
going to be "hard", it is going to be impossible. Even in Istanbul, especially
in some districts you can't find a single person who can speak English.

I am a Turkish student in the US right now getting my masters. Turkey would be
the last place I would move to for many reasons. First being the language
barrier and the corruption. I know the advantage in expense but I would guess
there are countries with better opportunities.

------
asdfman123
As an outsider, at this point I have no idea why anyone would want to do a
startup in SF. I mean, obviously, all the connections and resources are nice,
but you are literally burning investor money on $5k/mo rent. That's absurd.

Rent out a house in Austin, Texas for $2k and each of your co-founders can
share a room. There's investors and as deep a talent pool as you'll ever need
unless you're GoogleAmazon and you need a constant stream of talent to feed
your machine.

Heck, I live in Houston. I'm working on a startup idea in .NET Core and Vue.
If it ever takes off, it will be extremely easy to find 5-10 .NET developers.
Hell, if I ever need another really good senior developer I can poach them for
$140k, which is a really good salary here. Aren't they paying juniors in SF
that much now?

If I ever need to hire 500 developers and a few experienced distributing
computing PhDs I'll be too busy rolling in cash to care. I'll just sell my
company to someone else and be too busy sailing around the mediterranean to
care about talent shortages in Houston.

For the record, I live in a 3 bedroom house right near downtown that costs
less than a year's senior dev salary in SF. Are any of you SF people going to
be able to get that, unless you become fantastically wealthy?

I'm not trying to be all sour grapes, it just doesn't make sense to me.

~~~
inferiorhuman
_I mean, obviously, all the connections and resources are nice_

You pretty much answered your rhetorical question there.

~~~
dgudkov
The main connections a startup needs is customers. The vast majority of
customers live outside of the Bay area.

------
argd678
> It’s true, though. The concentration of talented, hard-working, smart people
> in SV is astonishing.

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for a long time, and recently moved to Seattle; I
find the rank and file talent in Seattle to be a good noch or two above SV.
I’ve also heard that from startups too who looked to Seattle after not finding
the talent they needed.

~~~
jdsully
You aren’t supposed to tell people that! Also it rains and is dreary all
winter there.

~~~
neilv
Even a little before dotcoms, there was a perception in the Pacific Northwest,
of Californians moving in and driving up prices, and there were the jokes: "It
rains all the time! Always gray! And slugs _everywhere_! We have to check
inside our shoes before we put them on!"

~~~
jdsully
Those aren’t jokes but all accurate warnings.

E.g. the slugs:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2fd5f3/banana_slug...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2fd5f3/banana_slugs_the_slimy_first_sign_of_fall/)

~~~
neilv
In all seriousness, you don't realize how many slugs there are in the PNW
until you walk barefoot on the grass in your backyard after dark. It's a
minefield.

And when a slug sadly squishes underfoot (worst: between your toes), it's this
weird slick adhesive that you can't wipe off, but has to be scrubbed off
before the noticeable slickness is removed. Then you probably want to keep
scrubbing, for grossness.

When visiting the coast, in the morning we woke to find multiple large slugs
scattered around up the glass patio door window that faced the ocean. It was a
mixed view.

------
shin_lao
Great post.

It's important to be close to your customers. If your customers are in SF,
then being in SF can make sense. Another reason why you may want to be in SF
is you need access to SaaS veterans at the VP level.

Having someone in the team who has already done it is the best growth hack.

But then, NY is getting as good as SF for that, and, you get to live in an
awesome city (I live in NY).

All other reasons often raised like "pool of developers" or proximity to
investors are BS.

Like mentioned in the post, you don't need to be close to developers and
having coffees with investors is a waste of time especially in the early
stages.

I lived for 3 months in SF. It was very unpleasant. The reasons are listed in
the comments and in the post. And I am affluent enough to afford to live alone
in a 1BR, dine out, drive my way around.

Raised money, got the hell out back to the east coast.

------
ulucs
> We can’t grab a coffee with a random investor tomorrow. We don’t meet as
> many driven people who are interested in tech. We can’t go to fancy
> networking events.

In Bodrum, that's correct. That's where people go for vacations. But compared
to Istanbul's 16m, San Francisco is a village with a population of less than a
million people. Even the whole Bay Area has half the population of Istanbul
despite being five times bigger. There are many, many universities located
there which results in a huge number of startups, investors, incubation
centers and alike. I feel this perception comes from a very biased viewpoint.
SF isn't the center of the world.

> And there aren’t millions of coders who live nearby to potentially hire

Hell, just mail me the position details and I can max out your inbox with
people who would love to work for less then a quarter of SV rates.

~~~
shafyy
Not sure if you read my entire post, but this is exactly my point, too :-)

------
Shivetya
Given the only images many of us have of Turkey is the Western press what can
you tell us are the biggest misconceptions and misrepresentations of living
and doing business in Turkey.

~~~
shafyy
Good question. I have only been living here for 2 months, but let me try:

\- The cuisine is super diverse (not only kebap)

\- The people are exteremly friendly, helpful and tolerant

\- A bit like the US Trump thing, if you live in Turkey, in your daily life,
you don't really notice that the government is shitty.

\- The downside of being easy-going and torelant is that Turks often don't
give a shit about rules (the opposite of Swiss), e.g. if there's a no parking
area they will still park their car there. Also, people are less punctual or
dependable (not in a sense that they will fuck you over but it's just normal
not to show up and just reschedule or be late).

\- Of course, these are generalizations, so take it with a grain of salt :-)

------
throwaway5752
I think it's an interesting story, but one should be aware of political
instability in Turkey that may be getting acutely worse in the short term:
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/world/europe/istanbul-
may...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/world/europe/istanbul-mayor-
election-erdogan.html)

------
skyraider
I'm looking to move to Bodrum from NYC for many of these same reasons :-)
Turkey has a lot of potential to be a remote work hub.

~~~
magduf
Turkey is run by a near-dictator and is right next door to a country in the
midst of a civil war; it certainly doesn't look like a safe place to move to.

~~~
shafyy
Istanbul and Bodrum are probably safer than most US cities. Also, go search an
google for yesterday's mayoral elections in Istanbul. A BIG step in the right
direction.

------
countryqt30
We did 100% the same, moved from San Francisco to Germany (Munich, Berlin) and
it was 100% worth it! <3

------
ridaj
But was Turkey a convenient default option, e.g. because of some extended
family support that you're getting there? What other countries, or what other
cities in the US did you consider before deciding on Turkey as the best
option?

------
balozi
I would imagine that the legal huddles alone (obtaining work authorization for
instance) would present a multi-year mind-numbing experience, even with the
advantage of deep pockets and well-heeled legal.

~~~
shafyy
Well, if you work on your own startup you don't need work authorization. Just
a tourist visa, which is pretty simple to get.

------
cesarb
> Obviously, VR will transform the nature of remote work.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't network latency be an important
consideration with VR-based remote work?

~~~
basitmakine
5g is so fast right now, you can even do real-time music collaborations.

[https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/3/real-time-music-
coll...](https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/3/real-time-music-
collaboration-with-5G)

------
gwbas1c
> We tried to raise money from VCs in SV twice, and we failed. Why? Our
> product wasn’t good enough and we didn’t have enough growth.

Maybe it's time to stop, or take your experience and re-apply it elsewhere?

The thing with software is that it's very quick to prove (or disprove) a
business model. If you're working on something for years and don't have the
profits (or free users) to show, it's unlikely that you'll succeed.

Now, let's be honest: Meeting people in VR is really cool. I'm sure that you
can figure SOMETHING out that will apply in the K-12 space, even if it's not
what your original vision is.

~~~
naravara
>The thing with software is that it's very quick to prove (or disprove) a
business model. If you're working on something for years and don't have the
profits (or free users) to show, it's unlikely that you'll succeed.

Uber is a pretty strong empirical case study in why this argument is wrong.
The entire DotCom bubble, in fact, has been a similar case study. When you
prop things up with VC funding it actually becomes very hard to disprove bad
ideas because price signaling and market logic stops working. It becomes
entirely driven by the animal spirits that govern pitch meetings for as long
as the BS stream can be maintained.

I mean, people are still pouring money into cryptocurrency! And it's quite
likely that lots of good and potentially successful ideas are being starved of
funding because of oxygen being taken up by sexier and flashier ones that will
flame out quickly.

------
redm
I keep hearing that SF spends so much money on the homeless, but I don't see
that to be the case. NYC spent $3.2b in 2019 [1]; they guarantee a bed for
every person, every night, etc. If SF wants to solve the issue, look to NYC,
and open it's checkbook.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-22/nyc-
doubl...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-22/nyc-doubles-
spending-on-homelessness-to-3-2-billion-since-2014)

~~~
jaxbot
Hold on a second. NYer here. Yes, we spent a lot of money on the problem. But
we did not 'solve the issue.' Not even close. Our problem doesn't seem as bad
as SF's (perhaps just less visible due to more clearing), but we still
regularly have human feces to deal with, train cars trashed, people
screaming/disturbed, etc.

I think it's key to remember the difference, albeit overlapping, between
homeless and emotionally-distressed. You can be homeless and nobody would know
-- living in shelters, working a job, etc. You can also have a home and
appear, as far as we're all concerned, to be homeless, by begging on trains or
acting in other anti-social ways.

~~~
lazyasciiart
I don't think they are saying that New York has solved it, but that SF can't
solve it without doing at least as much as NYC.

------
superpermutat0r
I can't even work in SF. The time wasted to drive to work kills me, I can't
get desensitized to all the homeless shitting on streets, stabbing themselves
with needles, talking schizophrenically in a dead language, every time I go
grab a coffee or lunch in a cheaper area, it's like watching animal slaughter
every day. Quality of life definitely much better in Mediterranean city I live
today.

~~~
dmortin
It's strange that a rich area can't take care of this problem. E.g. supporting
the homeless some way, cleaning them up and helping them to find some job and
housing.

~~~
natalyarostova
They spend vast amounts of money on the problem, but the way they approach the
problem makes the solution intractable. To the extent the drug addicted and
severely mentally ill homeless can want things, and want the right to continue
their current life, they are afforded that right. That is to say, it is their
fundamental _right_ to use drugs, live, and defecate on the street (I know
these things are illegal, but really, legality is determined by enforcement,
not what is on the books. And as far as enforcement goes, these things are
legal for all intents and purposes).

So long as they don't want help, and so long as it is their right to refuse
and continue as they are, nothing will change. The alternatives are many, but
they all start with some type of enforcement agency willingly stripping these
peoples rights, and forcibly and potentially violently taking them into
government custody, which the citizens of San Francisco find far more
appalling than solving the problem.

Note: What I said above doesn't generalize to 'the homeless,' and people out
of a job and down on their luck, It specifically is targeted to the worst
offenders who scatter the city with waste and needles.

~~~
silvestrov
SF spends $250 million in 2017. 1/3 on actual homeless, 2/3 on preventing
homelessness (e.g. rental subsidies).

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Bu...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/heatherknight/article/Businesses-
must-contribute-more-to-city-s-13178743.php)

~~~
rolltiide
other rich areas violate civil rights. when people say "take care of it" they
mean "we'll tolerate wild indiscretions"

