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I had to move from NYC to Oklahoma to save SimulaVR (https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula). This was over a year ago, and I'm

I had to move from NYC to Oklahoma to save SimulaVR (https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula). This was over a year ago, and I'm still here. Because of this I have saved an enormous amount of money (such that I'm still able to work full time on SimulaVR while I search for VC funding elsewhere). The other co-founder of Simula is also remote (in Germany). Since this was pre-pandemic, it's been very hard to explain to VCs who are still pattern matching on previous waves of startups. With that said, there has also been an enormous cost to this: living somewhere besides a major city. Yes, it's true that SF/NY have horrific governance, regulatory policies, taxes, and so forth (which cause high rents). The groupthink there is also unbearable. Other than these issues, however, these cities are indisputably better in every way than anywhere else in the country. People work much harder (and on cooler projects) in these cities. There's an extravagance to them that you simply can't find anywhere else, and if you're not careful, living elsewhere can eat at you subconsciously. Reading (or listening) to books of people doing great things is a good way to combat this: your brain can't ever think that things are easy now that you're living in an easy city. You're still competing against the same odds (and in some cases: the same people) who are grinding 100 hours/week back in NYC/SF. As long as you account for this, moving elsewhere can be a great tool to save an enormous amount of money.

hguant 6y ago
>The groupthink there is also becoming unbearable I'm curious - do you mean groupthink in the governance/policy sphere, or in the groups of technically minded people working on the hard/interesting problems? Or little bit of both?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ProAm 6y ago
  It's the people in the field. It's a huge technocrat echo chamber. Feeds off itself and produces a generally poor social effect. This is a good (comedic) parody of it [G]. [G] https://twitter.com/yayalexisgay/status/1249057146051821568 https://twitter.com/yayalexisgay/status/1249057146051821568
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    I like to call it the “gifted program” vibe.
rubyn00bie 6y ago
Just wanted to touch on some of what you said, as I took a year to recoup from burnout in a fairly small-sized town... Saving money, and having "time" are great, but at least for me the people in small towns live very different lives. The pace is slow and it's easy to become complacent. Compounding that is by not following the pace of life there, you're going against the grain and it will cause friction in your life. Also, if you grew up in small towns, but haven't really been back in a while a lot of them are pretty depressing these days because of things like Amazon... Where I was most, if not all independent retailers/bookstores/etc had gone out of business. In fact, there wasn't a single book store for 90 miles despite roughly 200,000+ people living in the area. Want a tech talk? Probably not unless you're a real estate agent setting up a Wordpress ;P If anyone is thinking about taking the jump and moving back home, or somewhere cheaper, my one suggestion is put a hard time-limit on it "1 year." It helped keep me sane having a deadline. Glad I took the time away, but even more glad I came the fuck back.
- ethbro 6y ago
  The hollowing out of small town America by Amazon & Walmart is sad to see. You can talk all you want about free market cheaper prices raising all boats, but it doesn't jive with profits circulating within a community vs being shipped back to shareholders. Here but for the missed middle ground where profits were retained locally while leveraging an efficient, free market supply chain.
  - reacharavindh 6y ago
    It is sad indeed. A lot of character, creativity, and innovation goes with going big scale with Amazon, Walmart and co. However, thinking a little below the surface about it, it was also inevitable. If not Amazon, someone else is going to leverage the e-commerce scale and profit from it. I see it more like the transition from CDs/DVDs to streaming media. Sure, local video stores provided community, good exploring opportunity to look at movies that may not be in your bubble, kept profits locally etc. but it was inevitable when a more efficient means comes along. With that said, small towns will be forced to innovate yet again and do things that are actually needed and profitable to thrive. Shopping is lost to the big guys already. May be there is something else that is better done locally. Coffee shops, co-working spaces, fitness clubs, skills training centers, workshops, hobby development places etc.
_dwt 6y ago
Is it possible that there are places in the United States which are neither the Bay Area, nor NYC, nor Oklahoma? Surely at least some residents of these places, if they exist, might in fact dispute the broad-spectrum superiority of our most culturally legible cities. Some of these hypothetical humans might even work more than 100 hours a week, perhaps even outdoors!
- yardie 6y ago
  I've lived in a few countries and a many cities. Most of them would love to have the likes of a SV incubator/industry in them. And they will do almost anything to get it: grants, housing, tax credits. And nothing ever sticks. There are a few startups that found a comfortable niche in their small town or big town in small nation. But these are lifestyle companies, and little more than consulting firms. An outlier in a poppy field. A friend of mine just opened a local office in SF for a Florida based company. The talent wasn't coming to them and for what they wanted to do they had to go there.
- david38 6y ago
  College campuses. The Midwest had several large (student body and size) campuses with strong engineering departments.
  - screye 6y ago
    Will second this, college towns are excellent places to do this. Especially large public schools within a day trip to a major city or in a non-tech city in general. Examples- Ann arbor, Amherst, Pittsburg, College station TX, Phoenix, Champaign, Chapel hill, Madison, Boulder.
    - flemhans 6y ago
      How would it be like to move an existing startup to e.g. Amherst? Wouldn't it still feel like being in the countryside a bit? I'd imagine I would potentially slow down.
      - 6y ago
larrydag 6y ago
If you have a chance I suggest reading Masters Of Doom. http://www.davidkushner.com/book/masters-of-doom/ http://www.davidkushner.com/book/masters-of-doom/. If it's one thing it taught me is that geography is not an issue when building masterful apps. The id team moved from Shreveport, LA to Madison, WI to Mesquite, TX. All the while they were gathering talent, ideas from all around the country while grinding away at code.
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  Yes, exactly. I was shocked to read that and try to envision it happening today.
- discordance 6y ago
  It might have helped that they had a core group of similarly minded people from the get go. They then had enough passion and momentum to attract others. I would love to move to a smaller town, but would need at least a couple of other intellectual companions there to make it work.
selimthegrim 6y ago
Sometimes I worry living in New Orleans will ruin me for other cities and then I realize all my collaborators (barring one interesting startup I’m not doing anything with just this moment) are other places. It’s painful (and arguably indicative of deep structural problems).
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Yes, it's true that SF/NY have horrific governance, regulatory policies, taxes, and so forth (which cause high rents) No, it's true that SF and NY have lots of people willing to spend lots of money in order to live there instead of elsewhere, largely because they expect to be able to make more money there, which causes high rents.

hguant 6y ago

>The groupthink there is also becoming unbearable I'm curious - do you mean groupthink in the governance/policy sphere, or in the groups of technically minded people working on the hard/interesting problems? Or little bit of both?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ProAm 6y ago
It's the people in the field. It's a huge technocrat echo chamber. Feeds off itself and produces a generally poor social effect. This is a good (comedic) parody of it [G]. [G] https://twitter.com/yayalexisgay/status/1249057146051821568 https://twitter.com/yayalexisgay/status/1249057146051821568
- selimthegrim 6y ago
  I like to call it the “gifted program” vibe.

rubyn00bie 6y ago

Just wanted to touch on some of what you said, as I took a year to recoup from burnout in a fairly small-sized town... Saving money, and having "time" are great, but at least for me the people in small towns live very different lives. The pace is slow and it's easy to become complacent. Compounding that is by not following the pace of life there, you're going against the grain and it will cause friction in your life. Also, if you grew up in small towns, but haven't really been back in a while a lot of them are pretty depressing these days because of things like Amazon... Where I was most, if not all independent retailers/bookstores/etc had gone out of business. In fact, there wasn't a single book store for 90 miles despite roughly 200,000+ people living in the area. Want a tech talk? Probably not unless you're a real estate agent setting up a Wordpress ;P If anyone is thinking about taking the jump and moving back home, or somewhere cheaper, my one suggestion is put a hard time-limit on it "1 year." It helped keep me sane having a deadline. Glad I took the time away, but even more glad I came the fuck back.

ethbro 6y ago
The hollowing out of small town America by Amazon & Walmart is sad to see. You can talk all you want about free market cheaper prices raising all boats, but it doesn't jive with profits circulating within a community vs being shipped back to shareholders. Here but for the missed middle ground where profits were retained locally while leveraging an efficient, free market supply chain.
- reacharavindh 6y ago
  It is sad indeed. A lot of character, creativity, and innovation goes with going big scale with Amazon, Walmart and co. However, thinking a little below the surface about it, it was also inevitable. If not Amazon, someone else is going to leverage the e-commerce scale and profit from it. I see it more like the transition from CDs/DVDs to streaming media. Sure, local video stores provided community, good exploring opportunity to look at movies that may not be in your bubble, kept profits locally etc. but it was inevitable when a more efficient means comes along. With that said, small towns will be forced to innovate yet again and do things that are actually needed and profitable to thrive. Shopping is lost to the big guys already. May be there is something else that is better done locally. Coffee shops, co-working spaces, fitness clubs, skills training centers, workshops, hobby development places etc.

_dwt 6y ago

Is it possible that there are places in the United States which are neither the Bay Area, nor NYC, nor Oklahoma? Surely at least some residents of these places, if they exist, might in fact dispute the broad-spectrum superiority of our most culturally legible cities. Some of these hypothetical humans might even work more than 100 hours a week, perhaps even outdoors!

yardie 6y ago
I've lived in a few countries and a many cities. Most of them would love to have the likes of a SV incubator/industry in them. And they will do almost anything to get it: grants, housing, tax credits. And nothing ever sticks. There are a few startups that found a comfortable niche in their small town or big town in small nation. But these are lifestyle companies, and little more than consulting firms. An outlier in a poppy field. A friend of mine just opened a local office in SF for a Florida based company. The talent wasn't coming to them and for what they wanted to do they had to go there.
david38 6y ago
College campuses. The Midwest had several large (student body and size) campuses with strong engineering departments.
- screye 6y ago
  Will second this, college towns are excellent places to do this. Especially large public schools within a day trip to a major city or in a non-tech city in general. Examples- Ann arbor, Amherst, Pittsburg, College station TX, Phoenix, Champaign, Chapel hill, Madison, Boulder.
  - flemhans 6y ago
    How would it be like to move an existing startup to e.g. Amherst? Wouldn't it still feel like being in the countryside a bit? I'd imagine I would potentially slow down.
    - 6y ago

larrydag 6y ago

If you have a chance I suggest reading Masters Of Doom. http://www.davidkushner.com/book/masters-of-doom/ http://www.davidkushner.com/book/masters-of-doom/. If it's one thing it taught me is that geography is not an issue when building masterful apps. The id team moved from Shreveport, LA to Madison, WI to Mesquite, TX. All the while they were gathering talent, ideas from all around the country while grinding away at code.

selimthegrim 6y ago
Yes, exactly. I was shocked to read that and try to envision it happening today.
discordance 6y ago
It might have helped that they had a core group of similarly minded people from the get go. They then had enough passion and momentum to attract others. I would love to move to a smaller town, but would need at least a couple of other intellectual companions there to make it work.

selimthegrim 6y ago

Sometimes I worry living in New Orleans will ruin me for other cities and then I realize all my collaborators (barring one interesting startup I’m not doing anything with just this moment) are other places. It’s painful (and arguably indicative of deep structural problems).

dragonwriter 6y ago

> Yes, it's true that SF/NY have horrific governance, regulatory policies, taxes, and so forth (which cause high rents) No, it's true that SF and NY have lots of people willing to spend lots of money in order to live there instead of elsewhere, largely because they expect to be able to make more money there, which causes high rents.