4 ms·
California has been ridiculous for as long as I can remember. Come to New York, we have 20 million or so people who don't give a fuck about you and what you do
by CPLX 9y ago
California has been ridiculous for as long as I can remember.
Come to New York, we have 20 million or so people who don't give a fuck about you and what you do all day as long as you don't clog up the subway stairs. It's quite lovely.
- slededit 9y ago"You know what I love about this place? Nobody here gives a fuck about you." - An Irish tourist I met in a bar.
- lpa22 9y agoThat is more or less exactly the reason i made the decision to live in NYC over SF. It’s a beautiful massive anti-ant colony
- olympus 9y agoThis is a pretty good point. People complain about Californian culture being too sensitive but choose to stay there. If your startup can't survive unless it's right next to Silicon Valley then it probably deserves to die anyway. NYC has plenty of tech talent to work with. Altman is not staying in SV because he can't afford to move. He's staying in the area because he actually prefers working with the people he's complaining about.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago"If your startup can't survive unless it's right next to Silicon Valley then it probably deserves to die anyway." Do you actually genuinely believe these absolutist statements, or you make them just coz they make for good sound bites?
- kbenson 9y agoYou just classified a statement that includes "probably" as absolutist. Perhaps you should reexamine it and consider whether your own context is causing you to interpret it slightly differently than intended.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoYou can't just throw 'probably' in clearly inflammatory statements and expect the reader to pick up the burden of proof.
- kbenson 9y agoAnd yet I don't think it's clearly inflammatory. Again, perhaps what you are interpreting as clearly inflammatory was meant to express something other than that. Of course, this could all be cleared up if you actually explained what you thought was so horrible about the original comment. So far you've called it "absolutist" and "clearly inflammatory" but not actually explained why you think so. Obviously, at least one person disagrees, so perhaps backing up your statements with your reasoning would help.
- olympus 9y agoI'm cool with it being considered inflammatory to oversensitive Californians. Their reaction is exactly why people in the other 49 states don't like California. You can't remotely criticize CA at all, it's a wonderful magical land where everything and every person is better than everywhere else. They'll take offense even when they don't meet the profile that the criticism was intended for, just because it might offend someone else in CA.
- bpchaps 9y agoCould you please explain why you consider it to be inflammatory? I'm at a loss as to why you consider it to be so, when it's probably not.
- enraged_camel 9y agoIt's an opinion. Opinions require no proof, no matter how controversial.
- olympus 9y agoYes, I believe that statement. There are two things that being located in SV gets you: 1. Ability to hire elite programmers that are a few percent better than those in NYC. You'll pay for that quality though. Plus the cannon fodder programmers that you'll hire if you get big cost more in SV for the same quality as NYC. 2. VC money that is a bit easier to get for tech startups compared to NYC. Your business is not robust if it would be successful if you hired a 99th percentile programmer and had $5mm in investment in SV, but it would fail with a 95th percentile programmer and had $3mm in investment in NYC. People that don't think they could make their idea work in NYC aren't confident in their idea and just playing entrepreneur.
- leroy_masochist 9y agoWell that, and he runs a company whose value proposition is very explicitly tied to SV being the best place to start a startup, so it would be kind of awkward if he moved.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- olympus 9y agoFrom the YC FAQ: "Can we do it without moving to where you are? Sorry, no. We tried this once, and by Demo Day that startup was way behind the rest. What we do, we have to do in person. We would not be doing a startup a favor by not making them come to YC events in person." Their stated reason is more about dealing with people face to face, and less about SV. It also sounds like they only tried it once, which probably isn't a big enough sample size considering that most startups aren't successful in the first place. It sounds like they never gave places other than SV a fair shake.
- leroy_masochist 9y agoAgreed on the face-to-face point, but YC also used to have very strongly worded language on the FAQ that said, essentially, that setting your startup on the path to success meant moving to SV, due to the strong network effects. I can't find it now (probably because they've updated it) but it pretty closely tracked the language in this PG essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rrdharan 9y agoExactly why I moved to NYC after 10 years in the Mission. It’s an elegant way to avoid dominant cliques, tribalism, etc. of which I already had my fill. No one can truly own or define the Culture or the Right Way to live in New York, it’s simply too big and too diverse for that.
- btilly 9y agoBut your work for hire laws suck. Do something on the side while you have a main job, and guess what. By default your current employer owns the code that you wrote! Been there, done that. Never again.
- leroy_masochist 9y agoA competent lawyer can fix this if your NY-based employer attempts to put such language in your employment agreement. Speaking from experience several times over.
- btilly 9y agoIf there is no such language in your employment agreement, that is the default arrangement. I'm not going to bother having to get a lawyer to fix something that shouldn't be a problem in the first place. In California it isn't a problem. I'm firmly convinced that this fact is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is in California and not New York.
- leroy_masochist 9y agoSilicon Valley is in California because of historical reasons related to a) US defense R&D spending following WWII and b) the 60's counterculture, not because of differences in each respective state's employment law. IANAL, but declining to hire a lawyer out of principle because you think that certain aspects of a given state's employment law "shouldn't be a problem in the first place" is really dumb.
- btilly 9y agoWhatever the history, startups are fragile. Were California law different, it would definitely have a chilling effect on startups. As for hiring a lawyer, most of the people who really need to know this don't know up front that they should negotiate such terms. And most employees, including me, don't really want to start off a new job haggling over the contract. It really doesn't make a good first impression.
- rb808 9y agoI completely agree, but when I was walking to the train station this morning with a 25F blast of wind going straight through my coat I was actually thinking how great CA would be. :)