I have long followed your work, on and off hn, for a couple years now. Huge respect. Before you consider Spain etc., please give the midwest a chance. Idealogically and workwise, you will find that Indiana, Ohio, Michigan strongly align with your values. You can pick any flagship university here and draw a circle with 20 mile radius. You will find plenty of manufacturing capital, cheap land, and a rooted workforce looking for stable jobs in the industrial sector(rather than 150k swes). State funding & support for R&D, tons of expertise in aerospace/robotics/cad/mech/… purdue for example is a top-10 in several of these, with several hundred oncampus professors and over 50k students, most of who are midwest natives who prefer to stay put rather than catch the first flight to llm valley.
After a very long stint in CA, I made the move to the midwest and couldn’t be happier. Life is short. A certain amount of friction is fine, but if you are swimming against the tide every single damned day of your life, it quickly drains you. I find the midwest much more supportive of my values and politics.
> I find the midwest much more supportive of my values and politics.
What's going on in the US is so disheartening, demoralizing and sad that I just don't know what to think any more. A society in the grips of destructive ideological forces, from our schools up through our media and government. We are headed straight for the "Argentina experience" and people seem to be too ignorant to understand it. Sad.
My wife is now actively engage in evaluating potential European destinations with a reasonable mix of quality of life and support for entrepreneurs. I was just in Zurich a few weeks ago and everything I learned was encouraging. I met with entrepreneurs doing non-trivial projects in Spain and learned about how the government is working hard to promote the kinds of things we should be doing in the US. The same is true of other locations in Europe. Not saying it is utopia, just saying they might be waking up to what has to be done to stay relevant in a global stage. They also seem to finally have understood how much of a mistake it was to allow uncontrolled migration into various nations. Something we still don't seem to grasp here.
I also spent time in North Carolina. Interesting. It does feel promising. Waco, TX is also an interesting ecosystem. If they had a high-speed train to Dallas it would almost be a no-brainer. Phoenix, AZ, also interesting. Although, now we get into potentially punishing weather.
I don't know. Frankly, I feel like the country I love and call home has fully bought into a plan for self destruction. OK, maybe I am being too dramatic. I'll concede this. And yet, we have a government that thinks nothing of letting ten million people come in when we did not create --and cannot create-- ten million new jobs for them, much less good jobs for everyone else who needed them before they came in. In a nation ruled by sanity, this kind of thing would not happen. How can anyone trust that we are going to behave rationally when this is the best we seem to be able to do?
And so, yeah, I am exhausted, sick, tired of this. Why continue to fight for a team that despises me as an entrepreneur? Why? Why does my government make me pay $30K per year in health insurance? Why do they create the conditions that cause my home insurance to go from $800 per year to over $7K per year? Why are we paying nearly $8K in car insurance for normal vehicles and no issues at all, instead of $500? Why do we pay hundreds of dollars per year in car registration when in other parts of the nation it's tens of dollars? Why is gasoline, I don't know, over $5 per gallon? Why are we paying insane amounts of taxes with every gallon of gasoline and the roads are shit compared to other places in the nation and other countries? Why have we allowed our society to become so violently abusive and divisive?
I don't know. All I know is that I've had enough. And, I don't know when or where, but we are pretty much decided we are not playing any more. I am starting another company and we've been talking to partners in the UK and Switzerland to see what might be possible. Next month I am going to spend two weeks in Argentina. Things are changing. I want to see what happens.
Anyhow, not a rosy comment. I know. Anyone honest and reasonably rational should conclude that the US has become a circus. This isn't how to stay a world leader at all. This is how you destroy a nation from the inside. That is the only thing we are doing well. Which is sad.
Lose enough entrepreneurs and we are done. I was astounded to learn just how many foreign companies are recipients of funding from the laughably-named "Inflation Reduction Act". It's a joke. The whole thing is a sad joke.
