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If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women. Honestly, there is no easier venue, and the chance to
by maxawaytoolong 16y ago
If you already are running a startup from your dorm, the main reason to stay in college is to meet women. Honestly, there is no easier venue, and the chance to have a captive audience of thousands of women looking for a boyfriend will never happen again in your life. You should be one of the most ballin' dudes at Bentley.
NYC is the second easiest place in the USA to meet women. It's not as easy as when you're in college. But it's about 100x better than Silicon Valley.
Relationships might seem unimportant when compared to your potential bazillion dollar website, but even the most autistic geeky weirdos want companions - see all of livejournal as evidence. I did startups in SV/SF for 10 years and could count the number of women I worked with on 2 hands. If you're working 12 hours a day, when are you going to meet the other women who aren't working at startups? At the bar, after work. But, you could go to any bar and there would be no women there, either. You end up condemning yourself to a life of near chastity hoping your startup sells so you can maybe attract a mate based on your bank account. That probably won't even work, there are loads of rich dudes in SF/SV who can't get a date.
The NYC startup scene is OK but kind of stupid.
There is a lot of dumb money. For example, GroupMe got $10M for a product that took 24 hours to build and has already been built by a dozen other companies over the years. The guys working on it are basically drunks and stoners and guys who follow jam bands around. (Check their twitter history, I'm not just being snide.) I actually think they are cool dudes but I'm just using them as an example that the bar for funding in NYC is way lower compared to SV. The nouveau startup wunderkinds in SF/SV are now all straight-laced type-a achievers who went to Philips Andover, Yale, Stanford, MIT, etc.
(This is actually really weird, cuz it's the opposite of the previous bubble where SV/SF was a bunch of bipolar freaks and dropouts with purple dreadlocks, and you needed to go to Choate and Princeton and wear a suit to get a job in NYC)
I spent about 2 years in NYC hanging out with startups and came to the conclusion that most of them are just "playing startup." The startups that make the most sense there are startups that target the NYC market first, like Gilt and Foursquare and media/blog empire things like Gawker, Tumblr, and DailyBeast. GroupMe works well in NYC, too, as the main activity is to go out at night and you can use it to sync up. So if your plan is to service the NYC market first and then see how it spreads from there, it's not a bad place to be and it should be trivial for you to get funding $$$.
- billclerico 16y agoJared and Steve (founders of GroupMe) are some of the best entrepreneurs I've ever met. Your characterization is ill informed and just plain wrong. The fact that they were able to take a simple idea and implement it so successfully speaks to their ability as operators. I also don't think quality entrepreneurs base decisions about where to start a company on where it's easiest to get laid. Most quality entrepreneurs that I know have no problem meeting women wherever they are because they are passionate, outgoing, interesting people. Also, GroupMe's major investor is Khosla Ventures, which is a west coast firm. So I am not sure how that speaks to NYC as a "dumb money" scene.
- maxawaytoolong 16y agoI call bullshit on you as I know everyone involved. They are great, but can you deny the part about jam bands and a history of drunk tweets by their engineers? There's a whole website about "things X says when he's drunk" where X is the engineer I'm talking about. If you don't think it's important to get laid, good on you, you've transcended to the next level of hacker zen. If you think it's easy to get laid in Silicon Valley, you are a bartender with a huge dick, not the VP of Product for Whatever.com. As a New Yorker I am allowed to call bullshit, too.
- SeoxyS 16y agoFirstly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with drinking about debauchery in general. I live in SF, work at a Palo Alto startup and attended college in Berkeley and found that entrepreneurship and debauchery went very well together. The startup I work for exited to a Fortune 50 company for a great deal of money, and has a fridge stocked with beer. I drink a lot—and yet still get great work done. Meeting girls has not really been a problem either. Palo Alto has Stanford, tho its girls tend to be way too smart for me. SF is the world's most promiscuous city (SF State girls are great!), and Berkeley is a huge college town.
- billclerico 16y agoI also know everyone involved. As a former New Yorker transplanted to Palo Alto, I can attest that there are less girls here, but I have not had trouble meeting them. Why is drinking and listening to jam bands reflective of their ability as a company? I can cite many examples of famous entrepreneurs who have well documented episodes of drinking or using drugs. Steve Jobs would be the most obvious.