It's an interesting point. You could say the same about Austin, Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte, Toronto, etc., maybe even Seattle and Vancouver, not to mention any number of smaller towns with a startup culture presence.
I'd add two more bad things about the valley: faddish thinking / groupthink, and completely insane costs. I can only speak second-hand, but the Valley strikes me as very much a bubble with its own internal echo chamber and groupthink. If you're in the Valley, you are likely to get sucked into chasing trends that everyone else is chasing instead of finding a unique niche nobody's thought about. And the cost of living is simply absurd: think Manhattan except car ownership is an almost must-have.
I also hear that the availability of funding in the Valley is overstated. Early-round funding is scarce, and funding might be even more faddish than the startups themselves.
The advantage of the valley though is the talent pool. It's fresh, large, and highly skilled, though perhaps a bit fickle as the interview mentions.
Finally, having lived in Boston/Cambridge, I can mention one distinct disadvantage of that particular place: it's somewhat antisocial and has a conservative investor climate. I found it a somewhat stifling place to live. People don't have friends. They have colleagues. And investors there tend to be more risk-averse than California.
If I wanted a big startup hub that is not the Valley I would honestly pick Austin: lowish cost of living, lots of tech talent, nicer climate than the Northeast, and more fun than Boston. New York might be a possibility too, as it's more fun and diverse than Boston and probably less conservative.
Lame article and post. If you want to find cheap housing, you can. And it's unwise to overlook that Bay Area residents may actually prefer the current situation over unchecked sprawl.
The only place you could build up is San Francisco. San Jose is problematic due to the airport. Sprawl probably wasn't the right word, although the Lucas thing was sprawl. It's easy to say SF should build up but maybe the residents don't really want that?
Why should the residents of San Francisco be the only ones who have a say in how it is developed? San Francisco is not a sovereign entity. It is merely an administrative subdivision of the State of California. Do you think San Francisco would be more built up if all the other people in California who wanted to live there got a vote?
Do you think San Francisco would be more built up if all the other people in California who wanted to live there got a vote?
Nobody in California outside of San Francisco really thinks or cares much about The City, so nothing would be different. It's always been it's own weird microcosm of reality, and will likely stay that way forever.
Clearly people outside SF in California must care, since they're moving in...
Also, I've never come across this use of "The City" but there it is, according to Wikipedia. The term can refer to: New York, London, Rome, or San Francisco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City). I don't think "The City" would ever evoke SF to anyone outside of SF...
It's just anecdotal, but I don't think many people in California care about San Francisco's housing problems. Southern Californians tend to think SF is "weird" and "too cold." If they pine for a dense urban experience, it's in Manhattan.
That's why we have a representative government, and not a direct democracy. People tend to make dumb choices, and sometimes the government needs to make the unpopular decision.
Relatively cheap housing can be found if you live in bad, uncool and/or inconvenient neighborhoods. I just looked at a number of < $1500 apartments in Oakland (1200+ sq feet). In-law apartments in the outer Sunset and outer Richmond can be found for less than $1500. If you are buying, it seems like Alameda is where all the non rich engineers I know end up moving.
I'm somewhat shocked at the crime stories on my facebook feed (armed robbery, car break-ins, etc.). I never experienced that when I lived in Atlanta or outside of DC. The difference is made because here my friends are forced to move into bad neighborhoods because the cost of living is too high. In Atlanta, you can afford something nice where your chance of having a weapon pointed at you is low. Here, startup employees are moving to places like Oakland, the Tenderloin, and East Palo Alto that aren't safe.
> Finally, having lived in Boston/Cambridge, I can mention one distinct disadvantage of that particular place: it's somewhat antisocial and has a conservative investor climate. I found it a somewhat stifling place to live. People don't have friends. They have colleagues. And investors there tend to be more risk-averse than California.
Being based is Boston, I feel this quite a bit; it's absolutely true despite the pitiful cries of people in the area.
That said, this problem seems very much limited to the investor and financial attitudes of the area. The people we work with are awesome and excitable and friendly. People do help each other.
The way I look at it, Boston is great if you depend on domain-relevant talent and experience (in my case, medical). And when it comes time to raise money, you get on a plane and go where you need to go. That's not a constant thing, being instead quite episodic.
Replying to parent to address a few different subthreads here.
I moved from Boston to Myrtle Beach, SC 6 months ago.
Boston living costs are crazy: 3-6x here - I can have such a longer runway in Myrtle Beach, and as noted by the article: get lots of media attention, as we have for events out of our coworking space: www.coworkmyr.com
We've created a tech community around the space, and we're building an investor community out of the rich retirees in the area, and those that choose to come visit.
I've made deeper friendships faster here in 6 months than 6 years in Boston, and I believe the smaller community of tech professionals empowers people to know one another's skills and interests better - to create more fulfilling opportunities when they do arise.
I'm sure there will be challenges, like finding talent, but that's still a challenge in Boston, just for a different reason!
I'd love to hear more from smaller cities that are creating tech communities: with the right combination of elements, you can go far with your startup, maybe even farther & easier than in Boston or SF.
Funny that the reason I love Boston so much as a tech scene is that it feels smaller and more accessible than SF, in the same way Myrtle Beach must feel even smaller and more accessible than Boston.
Sounds like there's a balance of many factors going on, with a sweet-spot depending on your needs and desires. Maybe someone can make a "startup location" tool that takes all the variables and spits out the perfect city for your startup!
I'm in my mid-20s and moved to Boston about two years ago. It's a fantastic city, but it absolutely is difficult to maintain friendships, despite everyone being incredibly nice. There was a HackerNews meetup several months ago; Reddit has a decent mix of impromptu, planned, and recurring meetups; and Meetup.com usually has atleast a couple good options every week. It's easy to meet people here, but there aren't many venues for seeing them often enough to turn it into a friendship. Essentially, if you and someone you get along with go to the same meetup monthly, and you can't make it one month, and they can't make it the next month, you end up with a 90 day gap between seeing eachother. I don't know if this is any different in NYC or SF though?
All said, if anyone wants to plan a meetup or just wants to grab a beer, my email's in my profile.
(1) Boston has an undeserved liberal reputation. Boston is extremely conservative, but in its own way. It's NPR-liberal, not fun loving socially open liberal, and definitely not San Francisco liberal. It's ideologically liberal but not culturally so.
It took me a year or two to wrap my mind around it as it's a sort of conservatism you just don't find elsewhere in the U.S. much. It took me aback. I had no conceptual framework to place it in. Eventually I realized it was an upper-crust blue blooded Ivy League thing, a bizarre hybrid where people are intellectually open minded but socially unbelievably reserved.
(2) Boston is a huge college town, and thus has a very transient population. People move there for school or work for a while, but they often do not settle there. Why make lasting friendships when everyone's just going to leave? Also: the social scene tends to revolve around the schools to a great extent. If you're a student you have those social networks, but there is less of a social scene for non-students.
(3) It's expensive and inconvenient to drive in Boston, and the public transit is unfriendly to socialization. The T stops running at 12:30AM, and cabs are insanely expensive-- far more costly than New York. So people don't want to go out further than they can walk or commute in a short cab ride. Go out to some place like North Cambridge or Quincy and you're looking at a $40+ cab ride home. I think this is a huge reason there is no quality club/music scene to speak of outside a few tiny islands here and there.
All that being said, people are very polite and friendly. It's not that people are hostile or mean, just that they don't socialize much and keep to themselves. I think it's a vicious cycle too-- it drives people away who would otherwise really like to live there. Boston is a wonderful city in many, many ways.
Having grown up in DC and now living in SF I think this phrase is farcical as well. SF liberalism is pretty shallow and restricted to a small number of topics (gay rights, environmentalism, and others). The cities off I-95 between DC and Boston tend to be more liberal on issues other than the Californian's one to three pet causes. Of course on an individual by individual basis there isn't a total monoculture in either place, and it's probably more complex than a binary liberal/conservative distinction.
Very much more complex, I think, stemming from diverse historical and cultural differences. I would put it that Boston is actually more truly liberal than even SF: Massachusetts, after all, put many policies into action that California even could not actually do (sure sure, it was the central valley, but still). Boston, being authentically liberal, and more generally authentic itself, is rather conservative about its liberalism. We still have some puritanical roots, and discussion still needs to be proper and polite, and politics is not brought to the table often for this reason. The general social protocol here is to be nice, pay attention to what you say, think carefully before you say it, don't offend, be agreeable.
SF is quite the opposite: discussion of anything is on the table, you say things first and think later or think by talking, everyone is expected to offend and to not be offended by anything, and if you cross any lines you're told so bluntly and argue back. It's a culture of debate, it's anti-puritan, anti-polite, and more free-as-in-speech free. But what you say becomes more important than what you believe, and your beliefs are allowed to be much more malleable and impermanent. Because of this, I say that it's less authentic, in that people are less solid in their ways and more apt to say what's popular or interesting at the time rather than what they solidly believe, and thus, they form fewer things solidly.
Disclaimer: I grew up in California, went to school in the Bay, and have lived in Boston for five years. I feel I survive well here because I actually fit in better with the slightly more intellectually conservative culture; or at least I feel like I understand it well enough. I think these cultural differences are fascinating because the cities share so many similarities otherwise.
I think the HubSpot article actually makes sense in this context—Boston folks do tend to be more loyal, have more of a sense of permanence both intellectually and socially, and know how to live through a good cold winter—a quality and gumption not to be overlooked!
Anyway, interesting and fascinating, and dripping with stereotypes and generalization, but in a good way. :)
> Eventually I realized it was an upper-crust blue blooded Ivy League thing, a bizarre hybrid where people are intellectually open minded but socially unbelievably reserved
Huh, I'd always thought Boston was widely known to be an intellectually liberal, upper-crust, blue-blooded, Ivy League city. My guess is that this isn't news to a lot of people in the US.
I really have to disagree with your characterization that people don't socialize much & keep to themselves. People may seem cold here at first, but once you make friends here they'll often be great friends for life and see each other often.
I've heard just the opposite from friends of mine that have moved to the west cost, i.e. that it's easy to make friends there but it's often not a long term thing.
Is SF any better with regards to transportation? The T stopping at 12:30 is definitely an issue. Boston has always felt strange to me in that you can walk from Forest Hills to Alewife in an afternoon, but like you said, if you want a cab or a ride at 2am, you're SOL.
Most of the people I've met tend to be 20s and 30s with jobs downtown. The college culture is pervasive, but I wonder how much it really affects those of us who aren't planning to leave any time soon.
The regular service in SF isn't much better. The regular Muni trains, streetcars, and buses shut down at 1am. BART starts shutting down around 12:30-1am, and the last Caltrain leaves SF at midnight.
Boston has an undeserved liberal reputation. Boston is extremely conservative, but in its own way. It's NPR-liberal, not fun loving socially open liberal, and definitely not San Francisco liberal. It's ideologically liberal but not culturally so.
It took me a year or two to wrap my mind around it as it's a sort of conservatism you just don't find elsewhere in the U.S. much. It took me aback. I had no conceptual framework to place it in. Eventually I realized it was an upper-crust blue blooded Ivy League thing, a bizarre hybrid where people are intellectually open minded but socially unbelievably reserved.
Coming from "that kind" (solidly middle-class economically, but culturally/intellectually what you described) I think that there is a fear in us of the impractical. We have a 400-year memory of weird religious fantasies, failed dreams, and dangerous frontiers. We are quite liberal, but also very cautious and it's bred into us. When someone tells us that he's gone "poly" and that he's quite fine with his "open relationship" (initiated by his more alpha girlfriend) we roll our eyes and see someone who got played. We have 400 years of experience with concepts far more impractical than that.
Also, we generally don't like taxes. We're fine with money going to important social programs (e.g. universal healthcare) of obvious value, but we're fiscally prudent and when we can't see where every dollar goes, it makes us suspicious.
Intellectually, I'm about as anti-conformist as it gets. But on some level, I feel like there are rules and traditions and boundaries that have some value. What I especially hate are powerful people (the current elite, who've eclipsed us, and who've outdone us economically by orders of magnitude by their willingness to associate with distasteful money, e.g. oil despots) who seem to have taken all the bad of our traditions (e.g. our haughtiness and faith in hierarchy) and thrown away the good (our respect for education and human dignity, our progressivism, our flair for the written word).
We are (as noted) terrible, as a set, at keeping in contact. This is probably why people perceive it as being hard to make friends in Boston. We will still consider a person a friend if we haven't seen him for 10 years... but we also tend to go 10 years without being in contact, which is a shame. We also go out of our way to be kind to people we barely know... but we're not exactly warm. This aloofness is certainly one of the northeastern traits I have that I don't like.
I'd agree compared to many places, but Boston is hardly cheaper than the Valley! It's cheaper than SF, but more expensive than Mountain View, San Jose, Santa Clara, etc. At least as far as apartment rentals go; I haven't looked at how purchasing a house would compare.
There are Boston suburbs which are cheaper, but unlike in the Valley, there is not much going on there. The South Bay has a bunch of tech companies (Apple, nVidia, etc.), community spaces like the Hacker Dojo, coworking spaces like NextSpace, etc. The parts of Boston where you can find an apartment for San-Jose-level rents don't really have anything like that.
Yeah - that person doesn't know what they are talking about. Route 128 rivals the Valley in that sense... just about anyone that grew up in that economy knows that.
> I'd agree compared to many places, but Boston is hardly cheaper than the Valley! It's cheaper than SF, but more expensive than Mountain View, San Jose, Santa Clara, etc. At least as far as apartment rentals go; I haven't looked at how purchasing a house would compare.
The costs drop precipitously when you aren't trying to live in Cambridge or in downtown Boston. I live fifteen minutes by train from downtown and 30 by train from Cambridge. I pay $1550 a month for a 1300-sq-ft 2-bedroom--I WFH so I needed an office, otherwise it'd be $1200 for a 1-bedroom.
Plus there's Allston/Brighton, which are part of Boston but priced pretty reasonably.
So I think Austin is totally overrated (Sorry Austinians!) Austin has horrible traffic, oppressively hot summers, costs are rising etc. In Austin you're going to have the "85%" rule. Everything's going to be 15% easier than the Bay Area (Costs, hiring, housing) But the Bay Area is just that much better that it's not worth the trade off. (I really don't have anything against Austin I just think it's window closed 5 years ago and keep hearing the 'it's cheaper and better lifestyle' stuff so regularly)
You can even extend it out and say the same thing about going overseas to other countries. They are often far behind the US, with not many tech entrepreneurs. You can bring US trends and concepts into foreign markets and face much less competition. If you're doing something that's completely new, even in the US, and needs lots of VC, this obviously wouldn't make sense, but otherwise there's a lot to be said about going to less "perfected" markets.
Think Manhattan except car ownership is an almost must-have.
This depends a lot on where you live. People outside the SF Bay Area tend to use "The Valley" rather indiscriminately, I've found. If you actually mean in Silicon Valley itself, then it's difficult to get around without a car (although not impossible, especially if you have a bike and both live and work within sane biking distance of a light rail station).
But our current dotcom boom is different from the 1999 boom in one significant respect--a much higher proportion of the action is happening in San Francisco. If you can manage to live in SF itself, Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, Daly City, or arguably even certain neighborhoods in cities on the peninsula, you may be able to get along very well without a car. I have several friends who don't have any issue without one. (I live in Santa Clara and could actually probably manage without a car given my specific neighborhood--even though I go into an office in San Francisco once or twice a week--but I wouldn't enjoy it.)
The costs certainly are insane, which is really the biggest problem I have here; I'm a middle-aged guy who still lives a lot like a college student: renting an apartment with a roommate. My roommate's job is moving farther east and our already-expensive apartment is likely to have another rent increase in the fall, which may leave me stuck between moving with him to a likely-cheaper abode with a much more inconvenient commute (a 30-minute drive to get to a train station which is farther away from SF than the one I go to now) or trying to find a one-bedroom place that I can afford on my own.
But, as much as I grumble about SOCIAL GAMIFICATION SOCIAL BADGE SOCIAL SOCIAL SOCIAL everywhere, I think the "groupthink" out here gets... hmm. I'm not sure whether it's overstated, or whether people tend to underestimate whatever groupthink exists in their locales, or maybe some of both. But it's actually not that difficult to find companies out here whose business plans are more inspiring than "give away shit for free, connect to every social network everywhere and hope Facebook or Twitter buys us."
Austin would probably be a very good choice for a startup. If I were leery of the SF Bay Area, though, I don't think I'd be any less leery of NYC unless I had a really specific reason to pick it. It's the only metro area running essentially neck and neck with us for living costs.
Incidentally Bill Gates chose not to move Microsoft to the Valley (from Albuquerque, New Mexico) because he saw the way people changed jobs each year and figured this would not be good for his young company (From Paul Allen's book 'Idea Man')
I would argue that Microsoft has done fine without finding new ways for people to post pictures of food. Some of their products are so boring that people will run their business on those products.
Boston suits HubSpot as a company. Because it is such a big, diverse college town they have been able to hire great, hard-working sales and CRM people right out of school, which is truly that company's core competency.
It's not their engineering that has made them successful but a combination of sales/CRM and evangelical style marketing. I'm not sure SV could provide that - but please correct me if I'm wrong.
This feels like there is definitely a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the Bay Area. Having said that, I think he makes valid points. Mostly around employee retention and loyalty. Boston is also really "two cities". Once you get on the other side of the 128 people are the opposite of transient. They're there for life. What's interesting to me is that we're even having this discussion. For the longest time Boston was the Number 2 after the Bay Area. It has really slipped though relative to New York, Austin and other secondary markets over the last 5 years. It's a "no nonsense" place (the weather and puritan streak will do that to you) that values intellectualism. So it's no wonder with the explosion of mobile and consumer/media apps it's fallen behind and still focuses on B2B and medical.
This comes across strangely for me. As as a founder of a startup who moved from the west coast to the east coast, I certainly didn't do so to be a big fish in a small pond. Personally, I find that a bit of a copout--if what you are doing is awesome you'll work hard to make it work even in a tough environment. That said, I suppose it objectively makes sense.
I moved my project to the east coast for completely different reasons, primarily to make good use of the strong medical community in the Boston area. The advisors and collaborators we have here are amazing, and they understand some of the special challenges of being a medical/life science company (things like scientific validation).
Sure, you can do arbitrage with geographically distributed startup resources, but imo it's more important to focus on expertise and mindsets pertinent to your work.
Honestly, I think that VC-istan companies do a horrible job of instilling loyalty. Equity percentages are low enough that I'd rather take a full salary. True business partnership is worth going down in salary to "buy in", but if you don't get to know the cap table or at least know that there isn't some VP of NTWTFK (Non-Technical Who The Fuck Knows) getting 20x as much, then what's the point? You're getting paid in lottery tickets, you can be cliffed, the offer may be rescinded if you start asking about liquidation preferences, etc.
Also, these companies generally have tight deadlines (because they grew too fast and blew up their burn rate) and can never invest any time in doing things right, much less employee mentoring. With no loyalty to employees, these startups get none back.
Finally, when you're forced to implement bad practices (technical debt plus unhealthy work conditions) to meet these deadlines, you want to run as soon as you hit a macroscopic target, in order to (a) cash in while there's a glow on your face, making that social bump permanent, and (b) avoid suffering or being embarrassed when things start to fall to pieces.
I'd add two more bad things about the valley: faddish thinking / groupthink, and completely insane costs. I can only speak second-hand, but the Valley strikes me as very much a bubble with its own internal echo chamber and groupthink. If you're in the Valley, you are likely to get sucked into chasing trends that everyone else is chasing instead of finding a unique niche nobody's thought about. And the cost of living is simply absurd: think Manhattan except car ownership is an almost must-have.
I also hear that the availability of funding in the Valley is overstated. Early-round funding is scarce, and funding might be even more faddish than the startups themselves.
The advantage of the valley though is the talent pool. It's fresh, large, and highly skilled, though perhaps a bit fickle as the interview mentions.
Finally, having lived in Boston/Cambridge, I can mention one distinct disadvantage of that particular place: it's somewhat antisocial and has a conservative investor climate. I found it a somewhat stifling place to live. People don't have friends. They have colleagues. And investors there tend to be more risk-averse than California.
If I wanted a big startup hub that is not the Valley I would honestly pick Austin: lowish cost of living, lots of tech talent, nicer climate than the Northeast, and more fun than Boston. New York might be a possibility too, as it's more fun and diverse than Boston and probably less conservative.