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If you are bootstrapping, and you are starting a company in an area that does not need the top tier of engineers (which is most of them, regardless of how they

If you are bootstrapping, and you are starting a company in an area that does not need the top tier of engineers (which is most of them, regardless of how they talk about hiring the best), I'd consider starting someplace low cost. I think college towns in the midwest / rust belt are untapped resources, or areas that used to have strong technically focused companies that moved away. I've personally seen founders bootstrap and launch successful companies (B2B with real revenue, not Uber for cats) in areas with little tech presence. The ability to not have to shell out huge salaries and equity was a real winner, there's also less distractions. You can get strong engineers (no, not SV / Seattle top end engineers, but people that can throw together a reasonable website) for < 100k in these areas, and they won't bounce around as much. You aren't competing with AmaFaceGoogSoft here, you're competing with HR companies and random consulting houses. There's disadvantages to being outside of the tech bubble, but advantages too. That being said, for an employee, you should at least try and do some time in SV / Seattle etc.

segmondy 9y ago
But I thought the internet removed all boundaries? Why do we need to be in the Bay area to have access to top tier of engineers? They are also everywhere else and let's say they are in the Bay area, that's what remote is for right?
- cachemiss 9y ago
  We aren't going to agree on this, around remote employees. I believe there is value to co-located teams, not everyone agrees and that's fine. The other point is, most startups do not need that talented of engineers, they think they do, but they don't. You don't want to pay bay area salaries if you don't have to, and in most of these areas, you don't have to. If you are somewhere else but the bay, and you are paying people bay area salaries, but you aren't in SV, so you aren't raising VC like SV companies, I don't think that's a winning move.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  I think people are still afraid of hiring people for remote work, especially for critical roles such as first few technical people in a company.
- vostok 9y ago
  > Why do we need to be in the Bay area to have access to top tier of engineers? Most people want to live in expensive areas. Top tier engineers can afford it.
- robertlagrant 9y ago
  "But I thought the internet removed all boundaries?" And yet inexplicably I still can't walk through walls.
rpeden 9y ago
Just an irrelevant side note - what do envision when you think of 'Uber for cats'? - A cat sharing service? - A 'cat on demand' service that allows you to reap the benefits of cat ownership without having to worry about acquisition and maintenance costs? - A taxi service for cats? I could envision paying for all of those, under the right circumstances. So such a company would likely have at least a few dollars of real revenue. :)
- Qworg 9y ago
  Not the GP, but... Obviously cat sharing, but you'll have to find a way to take a margin from what was nominally a goodwill activity. Maybe you pay cat owners in cathours (pronounced cath-ours), and have a marketplace where people can buy and sell cathours. Even better, make Catcoin (CC), set up an ICO, and get to work.
  - koolba 9y ago
    > Obviously cat sharing, but you'll have to find a way to take a margin from what was nominally a goodwill activity. This exists though not quite Uber / on-demand style. You need to go to the cats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_caf%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_caf%C3%A9 Very big in Japan.
    - rpeden 9y ago
      I've been meaning to visit the Toronto cat cafe: http://www.totthecatcafe.com/ http://www.totthecatcafe.com/ And of course, my old neighbourhood in Ottawa got a cat cafe not too long after I moved away: http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawas-furst-daily-cat-cafe-opens-wednesday http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawas-furst-daily... So it looks like the idea is spreading!
  - jon-wood 9y ago
    http://join3.borrowmydoggy.com/ http://join3.borrowmydoggy.com/ They had the genius idea of charging both sides of the transaction as well. Owners pay for dog sitting, borrowers pay for time with a dog.
humanrebar 9y ago
I share you bullishness about "untapped" cities, but: > ...starting a company in an area that does not need the top tier of engineers... As far as quality of talent, the "top tier of engineers" aren't all in SF, Seattle, or NYC. There are plenty of "top tier" engineers in all kinds of places. If you mean the "top tier" in pay rates are in those cities, that probably true. But those cities also have a ridiculous cost of living adjustment baked in. I might be misreading what you're writing here, but it sounds like you're saying, "Try founding a place in Champaign, Ill. The engineers aren't top notch, but they're cheap enough to be worth it." I just wanted to push back against this meme.
- cachemiss 9y ago
  It depends on what you are doing. If you are trying to build something like a database kernel, you want people who have done it before, very specialized. There aren't lots of them outside of the tech hotspots. I don't necessarily mean there aren't smart people outside of the hotspots, but there isn't the specialized skillsets that get built from working at the Microsofts / Googles etc. edit: In the number that you need. Champaign obviously has lots of smart people (my parents went there), but you may have issues finding specialized senior people there.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    > There aren't lots of them outside of the tech hotspots. Maybe. But how many people live in those places because that's where the well-paid jobs are?
    - cachemiss 9y ago
      Most of them I'd wager. Issue is, and it was for me, is that moving out of an area where I can walk down the street and get another great job to an area where the only great job is the one that this hypothetical company is offering just wasn't worth the risk. I have a wife and kids, and so do most specialized senior engineers.
      - 9y ago
technofire 9y ago
> you should at least try and do some time in SV / Seattle etc. I'm curious to know what your current thoughts are behind this. As someone who intentionally has steered clear of both those areas in order to try to optimize financially I sometimes wonder whether I'm missing out on something. Obviously one can learn more from better engineers, but don't the brightest ideas from the brightest engineers wind up being written about online and/or presented at conferences at user groups and broadcast across the Internet? Or does having the opportunity to put time into a name-brand tech company for a while really increase lifelong salary or career prospects sufficiently to recover the money thrown away on rent there? Or is there really sufficient value in serendipitous collaboration/socialization to justify moving to one of these places? Is there some other question I've overlooked?
- jandrewrogers 9y ago
  On your first question, there are many areas of deep, hardcore technical domain expertise in things like databases, high-scale systems, parallel computing, AI, etc where much of the existing knowledge and recent advancements are poorly represented in public literature, conferences, etc due to layers of operational secrecy. What you would learn from the public literature or is shown in conferences is often quite misrepresentative of the state-of-the-art. This becomes tribal knowledge. The way most people become experts in these domains is by working with or around people that are already experts, which requires being in an engineering environment where you are likely to come into contact with some. This type of expertise is far from evenly distributed.
- pcsanwald 9y ago
  Having done a lot of hiring in SF, NYC, and Baltimore, it's not clear to me that optimizing financially means avoiding SF and NYC. Market salaries for software engineers in Baltimore are quite a bit lower (like, 40-50% lower) than SF or NYC. Whereas for companies located in NYC/SF, they understand cost of living is high and are thus willing to pay a premium. I'm not making a counterargument here, just saying that salaries in different areas aren't usually apples to apples. Also, cost of living is relative: For 10 of my 17 years in NYC, I lived in a studio apartment with a 1k/month mortgage, and no car, no kids, and a lower cost of living than most of my friends in other cities. So it really depends on your family situation and what kind of environment you want to live in.

segmondy 9y ago

But I thought the internet removed all boundaries? Why do we need to be in the Bay area to have access to top tier of engineers? They are also everywhere else and let's say they are in the Bay area, that's what remote is for right?

cachemiss 9y ago
We aren't going to agree on this, around remote employees. I believe there is value to co-located teams, not everyone agrees and that's fine. The other point is, most startups do not need that talented of engineers, they think they do, but they don't. You don't want to pay bay area salaries if you don't have to, and in most of these areas, you don't have to. If you are somewhere else but the bay, and you are paying people bay area salaries, but you aren't in SV, so you aren't raising VC like SV companies, I don't think that's a winning move.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
I think people are still afraid of hiring people for remote work, especially for critical roles such as first few technical people in a company.
vostok 9y ago
> Why do we need to be in the Bay area to have access to top tier of engineers? Most people want to live in expensive areas. Top tier engineers can afford it.
robertlagrant 9y ago
"But I thought the internet removed all boundaries?" And yet inexplicably I still can't walk through walls.

rpeden 9y ago

Just an irrelevant side note - what do envision when you think of 'Uber for cats'? - A cat sharing service? - A 'cat on demand' service that allows you to reap the benefits of cat ownership without having to worry about acquisition and maintenance costs? - A taxi service for cats? I could envision paying for all of those, under the right circumstances. So such a company would likely have at least a few dollars of real revenue. :)

Qworg 9y ago
Not the GP, but... Obviously cat sharing, but you'll have to find a way to take a margin from what was nominally a goodwill activity. Maybe you pay cat owners in cathours (pronounced cath-ours), and have a marketplace where people can buy and sell cathours. Even better, make Catcoin (CC), set up an ICO, and get to work.
- koolba 9y ago
  > Obviously cat sharing, but you'll have to find a way to take a margin from what was nominally a goodwill activity. This exists though not quite Uber / on-demand style. You need to go to the cats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_caf%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_caf%C3%A9 Very big in Japan.
  - rpeden 9y ago
    I've been meaning to visit the Toronto cat cafe: http://www.totthecatcafe.com/ http://www.totthecatcafe.com/ And of course, my old neighbourhood in Ottawa got a cat cafe not too long after I moved away: http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawas-furst-daily-cat-cafe-opens-wednesday http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ottawas-furst-daily... So it looks like the idea is spreading!
- jon-wood 9y ago
  http://join3.borrowmydoggy.com/ http://join3.borrowmydoggy.com/ They had the genius idea of charging both sides of the transaction as well. Owners pay for dog sitting, borrowers pay for time with a dog.

humanrebar 9y ago

I share you bullishness about "untapped" cities, but: > ...starting a company in an area that does not need the top tier of engineers... As far as quality of talent, the "top tier of engineers" aren't all in SF, Seattle, or NYC. There are plenty of "top tier" engineers in all kinds of places. If you mean the "top tier" in pay rates are in those cities, that probably true. But those cities also have a ridiculous cost of living adjustment baked in. I might be misreading what you're writing here, but it sounds like you're saying, "Try founding a place in Champaign, Ill. The engineers aren't top notch, but they're cheap enough to be worth it." I just wanted to push back against this meme.

cachemiss 9y ago
It depends on what you are doing. If you are trying to build something like a database kernel, you want people who have done it before, very specialized. There aren't lots of them outside of the tech hotspots. I don't necessarily mean there aren't smart people outside of the hotspots, but there isn't the specialized skillsets that get built from working at the Microsofts / Googles etc. edit: In the number that you need. Champaign obviously has lots of smart people (my parents went there), but you may have issues finding specialized senior people there.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  > There aren't lots of them outside of the tech hotspots. Maybe. But how many people live in those places because that's where the well-paid jobs are?
  - cachemiss 9y ago
    Most of them I'd wager. Issue is, and it was for me, is that moving out of an area where I can walk down the street and get another great job to an area where the only great job is the one that this hypothetical company is offering just wasn't worth the risk. I have a wife and kids, and so do most specialized senior engineers.
    - 9y ago

technofire 9y ago

> you should at least try and do some time in SV / Seattle etc. I'm curious to know what your current thoughts are behind this. As someone who intentionally has steered clear of both those areas in order to try to optimize financially I sometimes wonder whether I'm missing out on something. Obviously one can learn more from better engineers, but don't the brightest ideas from the brightest engineers wind up being written about online and/or presented at conferences at user groups and broadcast across the Internet? Or does having the opportunity to put time into a name-brand tech company for a while really increase lifelong salary or career prospects sufficiently to recover the money thrown away on rent there? Or is there really sufficient value in serendipitous collaboration/socialization to justify moving to one of these places? Is there some other question I've overlooked?

jandrewrogers 9y ago
On your first question, there are many areas of deep, hardcore technical domain expertise in things like databases, high-scale systems, parallel computing, AI, etc where much of the existing knowledge and recent advancements are poorly represented in public literature, conferences, etc due to layers of operational secrecy. What you would learn from the public literature or is shown in conferences is often quite misrepresentative of the state-of-the-art. This becomes tribal knowledge. The way most people become experts in these domains is by working with or around people that are already experts, which requires being in an engineering environment where you are likely to come into contact with some. This type of expertise is far from evenly distributed.
pcsanwald 9y ago
Having done a lot of hiring in SF, NYC, and Baltimore, it's not clear to me that optimizing financially means avoiding SF and NYC. Market salaries for software engineers in Baltimore are quite a bit lower (like, 40-50% lower) than SF or NYC. Whereas for companies located in NYC/SF, they understand cost of living is high and are thus willing to pay a premium. I'm not making a counterargument here, just saying that salaries in different areas aren't usually apples to apples. Also, cost of living is relative: For 10 of my 17 years in NYC, I lived in a studio apartment with a 1k/month mortgage, and no car, no kids, and a lower cost of living than most of my friends in other cities. So it really depends on your family situation and what kind of environment you want to live in.