8 ms·

We moved to Turkey from San Francisco to continue working on our startup

126 points by shafyy 7y ago

ghaff 7y ago
>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.
- tedajax 7y ago
  Sweating in a VR headset for 8 hours a day sounds great doesn't it?
  - nr152522 7y ago
    Ahhh, but not with anti-sweat technology :)
- kevinflo 7y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    Maybe. But once you posit "long, long, long time" and the current iteration clearly not being suitable... Sure, some far future xR technology will almost certainly improve remote interactions and collaboration. But it almost certainly doesn't look like what we call VR today.
  - shafyy 7y ago
    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.
argd678 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  You aren’t supposed to tell people that! Also it rains and is dreary all winter there.
  - neilv 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      Those aren’t jokes but all accurate warnings. E.g. the slugs: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2fd5f3/banana_slugs_the_slimy_first_sign_of_fall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2fd5f3/banana_slug...
      - neilv 7y ago
        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.
  - 7y ago
superpermutat0r 7y ago
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.
- thinkingkong 7y ago
  Well your first mistake was leaving work.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- shafyy 7y ago
  Where do you live now?
  - superpermutat0r 7y ago
    Split, Croatia. Weather is equivalent, smaller city, lots of foreigners, and a growing IT industry. For a foreigner it's also very easy to just come and live in Croatia, they give staying permits to anyone who comes to just live and spend money (not work) but after you find work, getting an EU blue card is a piece of cake.
    - tzakrajs 7y ago
      What if we don't speak any language other than English? Is it difficult to live and work there as such?
      - treis 7y ago
        Every cheap country (Vietnam, Nicaragua, Thailand, Bali, etc.) will have a hodge podge of backpackers, ex-pats, retirees, etc. Enough locals will speak English to support providing necessities and socialization can happen with the other ex-pats. Working there is a different story, but generally you don't want to work there since the reason they're cheap is that the people are poor. The local jobs are low paid. The trick is to be able to work remotely or more rarely as a well paid employee of a foreign company.
skyraider 7y ago
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.
- shafyy 7y ago
  I agree. Message me if you need more info or just want to talk (email in my profile)
- maximente 7y ago
  you do you but i'd highly recommend moving to a non-income tax state (and city) beforehand, alongside drivers license, cell phone bill in new place, etc. NYC and NYS tax authorities are getting more and more relentless as upper/middle class ppl leave the city, so you'll need serious documentation that you aren't just leaving and coming back soon if you want to avoid getting stuck still paying them.
- magduf 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- ulucs 7y ago
  Bodrum is heaven. Quite boring during winter though.
  - shafyy 7y ago
    True, but summer season also sucks. So many tourists. In winter, you can concentrate and your work and do some sailing =)
gwbas1c 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  >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.
asdfman123 7y ago
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.
- baby 7y ago
  Or rent a house in Chiang Mai?
- dfundako 7y ago
  Are people literally burning investor money?
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  People in the Bay Area are just people anywhere and don't like burning 2 hours a day on the road commuting. You can hire them just as easily as remotes as necessary, given location appropriate salary.
- inferiorhuman 7y ago
  I mean, obviously, all the connections and resources are nice You pretty much answered your rhetorical question there.
rolleiflex 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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 :-)
cesarb 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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-collaboration-with-5G https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/3/real-time-music-coll...
- shafyy 7y ago
  No, super low latency (<10ms) is only important for fast-paced games. For working, you probably don't even notice 20ms or 80ms. Anyhow, as the sister comment says, 5G and further advancments are bringing down latency. By the time remote work will be done in VR in a mainstream fashion, this won't be a problem at all.
countryqt30 7y ago
We did 100% the same, moved from San Francisco to Germany (Munich, Berlin) and it was 100% worth it! <3
redm 7y ago
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-doubles-spending-on-homelessness-to-3-2-billion-since-2014 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-22/nyc-doubl...
- jaxbot 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- Zarath 7y ago
  We could just pay them to sweep the streets or do very simple tasks that make things nicer for all of us. Not sure why it is so difficult.
- evmar 7y ago
  NYC's budget is roughly 10x SF's budget. So proportionally, SF could spend ~$320m to match, which is actually right around what it does spend. (NYC is also ~10x the population of SF, etc., so that also lines up pretty well.)
balozi 7y ago
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 7y ago
  Well, if you work on your own startup you don't need work authorization. Just a tourist visa, which is pretty simple to get.
Shivetya 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 :-)
shin_lao 7y ago
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 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  Not sure if you read my entire post, but this is exactly my point, too :-)
Jun8 7y ago
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.
- chx 7y ago
  I just returned from a visit in Istanbul. For a certain kind of person -- and I suspect many of us here are such -- Istanbul or at least certain districts of it are hell on earth. The crowds in Besiktas are absolutely insane. I have never seen the like before. You could add the ever prevalent attitude of "fleece the tourist" and my brain got overloaded in seconds.
- shafyy 7y ago
  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).
jupp0r 7y ago
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-turkeys-detention-innocent-digital-security-trainers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/07/global-condemnation-tu...
throwaway5752 7y ago
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-mayor-election-erdogan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/world/europe/istanbul-may...
ridaj 7y ago
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?

126 points by shafyy 7y ago

>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.

tedajax 7y ago
Sweating in a VR headset for 8 hours a day sounds great doesn't it?
- nr152522 7y ago
  Ahhh, but not with anti-sweat technology :)
kevinflo 7y ago
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.
- ghaff 7y ago
  Maybe. But once you posit "long, long, long time" and the current iteration clearly not being suitable... Sure, some far future xR technology will almost certainly improve remote interactions and collaboration. But it almost certainly doesn't look like what we call VR today.
- shafyy 7y ago
  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.

argd678 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
You aren’t supposed to tell people that! Also it rains and is dreary all winter there.
- neilv 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    Those aren’t jokes but all accurate warnings. E.g. the slugs: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2fd5f3/banana_slugs_the_slimy_first_sign_of_fall/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/2fd5f3/banana_slug...
    - neilv 7y ago
      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.
- 7y ago

superpermutat0r 7y ago

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.

thinkingkong 7y ago
Well your first mistake was leaving work.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shafyy 7y ago
Where do you live now?
- superpermutat0r 7y ago
  Split, Croatia. Weather is equivalent, smaller city, lots of foreigners, and a growing IT industry. For a foreigner it's also very easy to just come and live in Croatia, they give staying permits to anyone who comes to just live and spend money (not work) but after you find work, getting an EU blue card is a piece of cake.
  - tzakrajs 7y ago
    What if we don't speak any language other than English? Is it difficult to live and work there as such?
    - treis 7y ago
      Every cheap country (Vietnam, Nicaragua, Thailand, Bali, etc.) will have a hodge podge of backpackers, ex-pats, retirees, etc. Enough locals will speak English to support providing necessities and socialization can happen with the other ex-pats. Working there is a different story, but generally you don't want to work there since the reason they're cheap is that the people are poor. The local jobs are low paid. The trick is to be able to work remotely or more rarely as a well paid employee of a foreign company.

skyraider 7y ago

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.

shafyy 7y ago
I agree. Message me if you need more info or just want to talk (email in my profile)
maximente 7y ago
you do you but i'd highly recommend moving to a non-income tax state (and city) beforehand, alongside drivers license, cell phone bill in new place, etc. NYC and NYS tax authorities are getting more and more relentless as upper/middle class ppl leave the city, so you'll need serious documentation that you aren't just leaving and coming back soon if you want to avoid getting stuck still paying them.
magduf 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
ulucs 7y ago
Bodrum is heaven. Quite boring during winter though.
- shafyy 7y ago
  True, but summer season also sucks. So many tourists. In winter, you can concentrate and your work and do some sailing =)

gwbas1c 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
>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.

asdfman123 7y ago

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.

baby 7y ago
Or rent a house in Chiang Mai?
dfundako 7y ago
Are people literally burning investor money?
throwaway5752 7y ago
People in the Bay Area are just people anywhere and don't like burning 2 hours a day on the road commuting. You can hire them just as easily as remotes as necessary, given location appropriate salary.
inferiorhuman 7y ago
I mean, obviously, all the connections and resources are nice You pretty much answered your rhetorical question there.

rolleiflex 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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 :-)

cesarb 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
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-collaboration-with-5G https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/3/real-time-music-coll...
shafyy 7y ago
No, super low latency (<10ms) is only important for fast-paced games. For working, you probably don't even notice 20ms or 80ms. Anyhow, as the sister comment says, 5G and further advancments are bringing down latency. By the time remote work will be done in VR in a mainstream fashion, this won't be a problem at all.

countryqt30 7y ago

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

redm 7y ago

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

jaxbot 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
Zarath 7y ago
We could just pay them to sweep the streets or do very simple tasks that make things nicer for all of us. Not sure why it is so difficult.
evmar 7y ago
NYC's budget is roughly 10x SF's budget. So proportionally, SF could spend ~$320m to match, which is actually right around what it does spend. (NYC is also ~10x the population of SF, etc., so that also lines up pretty well.)

balozi 7y ago

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 7y ago
Well, if you work on your own startup you don't need work authorization. Just a tourist visa, which is pretty simple to get.

Shivetya 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 :-)

shin_lao 7y ago

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 7y ago

> 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 7y ago
Not sure if you read my entire post, but this is exactly my point, too :-)

Jun8 7y ago

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.

chx 7y ago
I just returned from a visit in Istanbul. For a certain kind of person -- and I suspect many of us here are such -- Istanbul or at least certain districts of it are hell on earth. The crowds in Besiktas are absolutely insane. I have never seen the like before. You could add the ever prevalent attitude of "fleece the tourist" and my brain got overloaded in seconds.
shafyy 7y ago
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).

jupp0r 7y ago

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

throwaway5752 7y ago

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-mayor-election-erdogan.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/world/europe/istanbul-may...

ridaj 7y ago

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?