4 ms·
Ask HN: Web entrepreneurs in Austin?
A new year is on the horizon and I've decided to switch up my day-to-day. I've decided I'm going to leave my job here in Dallas and move somewhere that I have not lived before. I'm a 25 year old hacker with little more than $10k in my bank account. My goal is to end up in an area where other hackers are easy to find.
This definitely seems to limit the choices down to a few of the most well known areas - SF, NY and .. Austin?
I'm interested in Austin because it's only about 3 hours away and I have some family and friends down there. I've read that it has an emerging tech entrepreneur scene, too. I know that at least Gowalla is based out of Austin.
Does anyone have any insight into the Austin tech scene? Have any HN readers recently moved out to Austin - how is it? Even more of a long shot, but has anyone here moved from San Francisco to Austin? What areas of Austin are known to have a higher concentration of web entrepreneurs?
- thewordpainter 16y agoif you got the IT skills, you'll be just fine in a tech hub like austin. check out all the startups crunchbase has within a 30mi radius: http://www.crunchbase.com/search/advanced/companies/596363 http://www.crunchbase.com/search/advanced/companies/596363 i get the impression @joshuabaer is one of the guys at the center of the austin tech scene. prob a great place to start. (i think he's the main guy behind capital factory among other things) on a related note, if we move our operation from athens, ga, austin is absolutely in our collective top 3 considerations. go for it man...we might just see you out there in 2011 ;) -adam
- Scott_MacGregor 16y agoBoth Alex and I are from California originally and moved to Austin because the business, legal and tax climate seemed a lot more friendly. It is! The economy in Texas right now is stable, good and on the upswing, while California seems to be having problems. Plus the complete lack of any personal income tax means more spendable income, which is nice for us and for our future employees. We looked at and weighed San Jose, Seattle and Austin (NYC and Boston were off the table due to high taxes and over regulation), and chose Austin purely for business reasons. From what I found before moving here, 78759 is supposed to have the heaviest concentration of tech companies in Austin. Most of the tech companies seem to be in the N/NW and downtown. As far as I know none are south of the river. Also I have heard Tech workers (for whatever reason) do not seem to live south of the river, which looks like a lot of older neighborhoods. As far as a place to live, the Zip codes seem to get expensive in Austin based on the schools. So, if you have kids, then you need to think about a zip code with "good schools". Facebook just setup operations in town, and both Microsoft and Rackspace have offices just south of town in San Antonio. A lot of other larger companies are here too. Redhat, Dell, ect... The VC scene here seems pretty active. I am surprised PG has not thought about re-basing YCombinator out here in Austin, at least part of the time. The State of Texas offers some very creative business tax breaks to business that relocate to Texas. Plus the cities sometimes offer additional incentives to move established businesses. Here are few local links for you to look at if you want: http://austin.startupweekend.org/ http://austin.startupweekend.org/ http://conjunctured.com/ http://conjunctured.com/ http://door64.com/ http://door64.com/ http://geekaustin.org/ http://geekaustin.org/ http://sxsw.com/home http://sxsw.com/home http://www.austintechhh.com/ http://www.austintechhh.com/ http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/business/too-many-jobs,-too-few-candidates http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/business/too-many-jobs,-too-few...