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We cannot afford to drop everthing and move to SF. And considering where we are (Richmond in Virginia) and our roots here, we feel like we owe this town. There

We cannot afford to drop everthing and move to SF. And considering where we are (Richmond in Virginia) and our roots here, we feel like we owe this town. There are a lot of things we are surely missing out by not moving to the Valley, which is the startup ecosystem, the investors, the talent etc. But startups also have to deal with the noise, the saturation, and the "meh" when you launch. Where as in Richmond, we can possibly have a far bigger impact, with a lot more people who will love us, and we are right next to DC. I am sure we will not know if we made the right choice, for a long time. But I dont buy in to the belief that unless you are in the Valley, no one will give a damn (as touted by Vivek Wadhwa a few weeks ago). Any thoughts? EDIT: Needed to add a couple more thoughts that came out of the responses my post received. a) Its really hard to find talent in SF - Right now, we are one non-tech founder and two hackers. And finding android or iOS talent in Richmond is like looking for needles. But I believe that if you find a darn good hacker, then a new tool or language is just a speedbump. We are still trying to find a very good UX designer though. b) I agree with the Valley vibe. But it sounds more of a Goldrush than anything else. And I also agree with the vibrant support system that the Valley can provide. Right now, I get that through HN, blogs and my peers over email and phone.

sawyer 15y ago
Completely agree. I am in the same boat as a Canadian not wanting to move to the states. While it may be true that many investors will rule you out based on location; my firm belief is that first time entrepreneurs should spend their time acquiring customers, not investors. Customers generally don't mind if you're not in the valley (although it is true that if your product is built for tech oriented people the bay area may be a high customer saturation zone.)
- tlb 15y ago
  It matters to customers who are themselves in the valley, like me. I know the teams behind most of the products and web services I use, and it matters that I know who to call when something doesn't work. If customers in the tech world are important to you, you should be where you can go meet them for coffee.
- JofArnold 15y ago
  It's not just for investors. It's much harder to exit to a US acquirer if your tax/legal structure is that of another country. Due diligence is longer and more expensive and I have heard of cases where UK companies have been skipped due to potential issues of integrating founders re immigration and IP laws.
jon_dahl 15y ago
I'll be moving from Minneapolis to SF soon. Before spending significant time in the Bay Area, I thought that the noise/saturation/and "meh" were a problem, but my experience was different. It's a very supportive environment, with a lot of smart people willing to help out. There are three problems to the Bay Area: 1. Massive competition for engineering talent. It's probably harder to hire 20 brilliant engineers in SF than in any other major city in North America. 2. Cost. Our burn is increasing by 20%-30% because we're moving. 3. Echo chamber. Ideas tend to get reinforced here. This is often good or neutral; SV will sometimes recognize the significance of something before the rest of the country will. (There are a lot of people who still think Facebook and Twitter are hype and will go bankrupt soon.) But I imagine that there are ideas that make sense in SV that are ultimately bad ideas. And there are ideas that wouldn't resonate in SV that are probably huge opportunities. This is a little off-topic from the original article, which is fantastic. But circling back: startups are hard, and moving to SV isn't a panacea. It may help a little, but do it with eyes open - because you want to commit to the startup life, and SV is a good place to do that.
- Cherian_Abraham 15y ago
  All the three problem areas you identified are reasons why I would not move to SF until we are ready. If I see that the idea has traction, and revenue, and I didnt care about finding investors and talent, then I would think of moving to SF. Today, what we have built and is currently building, is still a pet project. We are keenly watching where it goes from here, but simply cannot move mid-sentence to the other coast. Good luck though. You are much better positioned due to the YC framework and which should open doors far more easily than to a couple of outliers like us.
  - dxbydt 15y ago
    You're too close to the forest to see the trees. Forget you are a hacker for a minute and think of yourself as say a screenplay writer. Where would you rather be, LA or some hicksville town ? If you are in LA and you bump into some two-bit actress moonlighting in a bar and talk about your script, soon, she'll connect you to someone who knows someone else who knows something who will soon reshape your unsellable script into something that can actually get made and within a span of a few weeks you'll be on a studio lot while they go over the makeup of a costar you only saw on TV until yesterday! Sounds like complete baloney, but that's how it really works!! You can read say William Goldman's book Adventures in Screen Trade where he spells it out in considerable detail - Why professors with PhD in literature are still working on the nth draft of their dream project in the English Dept at Andover while some street smart dropout hacks away at a script on a couch in some dinghy motel on Hollywood Blvd that actually gets made. It ain't fair but that's how it is. In you go to SF with your pet project which has no traction and revenue, it will suddenly have traction and revenue. Don't ask me how. It isn't exactly logical. Things happen. You'll meet people who'll tell you if only you change this feature and add that feature and do this and not that you'll have a saleable proposition. So you'll say what the hell and give it a shot and soon it becomes so! Its just not rational, and as a coder and mathematician I hate irrationality just as much as you. But that's how it is. Whereas with no such brutal feedback, you can labor away at some precious project until it becomes larger than life and super-brittle and soon even you don't want to touch it cause who knows which module will break which other module, and then you go looking for customers and nobody really wants it cause its gotten way too complex for anybody to decipher. I've heard ideas that are so lame ( an app that counts ONE TWO THREE while you do pushups. Really! Yeah, that's got funding to the tune of a couple mil! ) your 3 year old could have come up with it. So its not the traction, framework, revenue model etc. Its just finetuning an idea to the point where it becomes saleable. And for whatever reason, perhaps because its in their DNA, SV seems to have the sort of people who actually give you a listen and then tell you exactly how to go about it. They actually give a damn! If you have an idea, I think you should atleast spend 1-2 weeks in SV trying to pitch before writing it off as a futile exercise. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.
dxbydt 15y ago
I just came back from SF yesterday, and would certainly recommend dropping everything and going there. Better yet, relocate to Palo Alto. Every other office on University Avenue is a startup and the ones that aren't are either VC firms or gathering haunts like coffeeshops & restaurants. There is a certain electricity in the air. You have to be there to feel it. It is definitely quite surreal, like out of a parallel universe. 20 year olds in jeans & tees & sandals lugging their laptops & iphones, talking animatedly about monads and dependency injection and mock functions, while 60 year old asset managers in black suits and polished shoes walk around in reverence. I remember thinking that I would have to be an absolute rank idiot if I can't get some bloke to fund me a half mil on a quick-flip consumer web play. On top of that, the guy who was escorting me, a 25 year old hotshot ceo of a stealth startup, pointed out various coffeehouses and said things like "i pitched here", " i raised 200k there" and so on and so forth until it was clear i was a dumb fuck wasting my time in the midwest. So why am I back to the midwest ? Well, I'm not running a startup myself, atleast not yet :) And when it comes time to do so, I'll rush over there myself. I guess this is what it was like in the 1960s in Greenwich village in NYC, or Berkeley CA or Woodstock or whereever else. Its just quite surreal & I still haven't gotten over it.
- lawnchair_larry 15y ago
  I've lived there for several years, and in no way do I identify with this post. Not even close. It is good to be optimistic, but I'd hate for people to get this impression that the streets are paved with gold and make some really poor decisions.
  - jazzychad 15y ago
    Exactly, which is why I wrote this post. There is a lot of cool stuff happening here, and a lot of money floating around, but nothing comes easy.
    - michaelochurch 15y ago
      If it makes you feel better, my sense from what I've read is that you're more likely to have success once you get funding. You've been through a lot of pain, and you still believe in yourself and what you're doing. And apparently some very experienced and talented people believe in you too. That says a lot. As for the "Somebodies", it's not all about past success; there is a lot of luck and flair to it. There are, in any human culture, people who are utterly worthless but can make the magic happen. They don't know much technically, but they're great at using the herd mentality and certain exploitable vulnerabilities in weak minds in order to make other people like them, so getting funding and press comes easily to them. When they actually have to build a product and a team and a company, they're screwed, and they tend to flame out catastrophically. Whereas the people who actually work hard and have real capability will have slower paths to success but, when they get there, they'll be able to stay where they are because they've actually earned it.
freshfunk 15y ago
Most people I meet who visit SF to do a little recon end up deciding to move here permanently because the environment is so great and supportive for entrepreneurs.

sawyer 15y ago

Completely agree. I am in the same boat as a Canadian not wanting to move to the states. While it may be true that many investors will rule you out based on location; my firm belief is that first time entrepreneurs should spend their time acquiring customers, not investors. Customers generally don't mind if you're not in the valley (although it is true that if your product is built for tech oriented people the bay area may be a high customer saturation zone.)

tlb 15y ago
It matters to customers who are themselves in the valley, like me. I know the teams behind most of the products and web services I use, and it matters that I know who to call when something doesn't work. If customers in the tech world are important to you, you should be where you can go meet them for coffee.
JofArnold 15y ago
It's not just for investors. It's much harder to exit to a US acquirer if your tax/legal structure is that of another country. Due diligence is longer and more expensive and I have heard of cases where UK companies have been skipped due to potential issues of integrating founders re immigration and IP laws.

jon_dahl 15y ago

I'll be moving from Minneapolis to SF soon. Before spending significant time in the Bay Area, I thought that the noise/saturation/and "meh" were a problem, but my experience was different. It's a very supportive environment, with a lot of smart people willing to help out. There are three problems to the Bay Area: 1. Massive competition for engineering talent. It's probably harder to hire 20 brilliant engineers in SF than in any other major city in North America. 2. Cost. Our burn is increasing by 20%-30% because we're moving. 3. Echo chamber. Ideas tend to get reinforced here. This is often good or neutral; SV will sometimes recognize the significance of something before the rest of the country will. (There are a lot of people who still think Facebook and Twitter are hype and will go bankrupt soon.) But I imagine that there are ideas that make sense in SV that are ultimately bad ideas. And there are ideas that wouldn't resonate in SV that are probably huge opportunities. This is a little off-topic from the original article, which is fantastic. But circling back: startups are hard, and moving to SV isn't a panacea. It may help a little, but do it with eyes open - because you want to commit to the startup life, and SV is a good place to do that.

Cherian_Abraham 15y ago
All the three problem areas you identified are reasons why I would not move to SF until we are ready. If I see that the idea has traction, and revenue, and I didnt care about finding investors and talent, then I would think of moving to SF. Today, what we have built and is currently building, is still a pet project. We are keenly watching where it goes from here, but simply cannot move mid-sentence to the other coast. Good luck though. You are much better positioned due to the YC framework and which should open doors far more easily than to a couple of outliers like us.
- dxbydt 15y ago
  You're too close to the forest to see the trees. Forget you are a hacker for a minute and think of yourself as say a screenplay writer. Where would you rather be, LA or some hicksville town ? If you are in LA and you bump into some two-bit actress moonlighting in a bar and talk about your script, soon, she'll connect you to someone who knows someone else who knows something who will soon reshape your unsellable script into something that can actually get made and within a span of a few weeks you'll be on a studio lot while they go over the makeup of a costar you only saw on TV until yesterday! Sounds like complete baloney, but that's how it really works!! You can read say William Goldman's book Adventures in Screen Trade where he spells it out in considerable detail - Why professors with PhD in literature are still working on the nth draft of their dream project in the English Dept at Andover while some street smart dropout hacks away at a script on a couch in some dinghy motel on Hollywood Blvd that actually gets made. It ain't fair but that's how it is. In you go to SF with your pet project which has no traction and revenue, it will suddenly have traction and revenue. Don't ask me how. It isn't exactly logical. Things happen. You'll meet people who'll tell you if only you change this feature and add that feature and do this and not that you'll have a saleable proposition. So you'll say what the hell and give it a shot and soon it becomes so! Its just not rational, and as a coder and mathematician I hate irrationality just as much as you. But that's how it is. Whereas with no such brutal feedback, you can labor away at some precious project until it becomes larger than life and super-brittle and soon even you don't want to touch it cause who knows which module will break which other module, and then you go looking for customers and nobody really wants it cause its gotten way too complex for anybody to decipher. I've heard ideas that are so lame ( an app that counts ONE TWO THREE while you do pushups. Really! Yeah, that's got funding to the tune of a couple mil! ) your 3 year old could have come up with it. So its not the traction, framework, revenue model etc. Its just finetuning an idea to the point where it becomes saleable. And for whatever reason, perhaps because its in their DNA, SV seems to have the sort of people who actually give you a listen and then tell you exactly how to go about it. They actually give a damn! If you have an idea, I think you should atleast spend 1-2 weeks in SV trying to pitch before writing it off as a futile exercise. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.

dxbydt 15y ago

I just came back from SF yesterday, and would certainly recommend dropping everything and going there. Better yet, relocate to Palo Alto. Every other office on University Avenue is a startup and the ones that aren't are either VC firms or gathering haunts like coffeeshops & restaurants. There is a certain electricity in the air. You have to be there to feel it. It is definitely quite surreal, like out of a parallel universe. 20 year olds in jeans & tees & sandals lugging their laptops & iphones, talking animatedly about monads and dependency injection and mock functions, while 60 year old asset managers in black suits and polished shoes walk around in reverence. I remember thinking that I would have to be an absolute rank idiot if I can't get some bloke to fund me a half mil on a quick-flip consumer web play. On top of that, the guy who was escorting me, a 25 year old hotshot ceo of a stealth startup, pointed out various coffeehouses and said things like "i pitched here", " i raised 200k there" and so on and so forth until it was clear i was a dumb fuck wasting my time in the midwest. So why am I back to the midwest ? Well, I'm not running a startup myself, atleast not yet :) And when it comes time to do so, I'll rush over there myself. I guess this is what it was like in the 1960s in Greenwich village in NYC, or Berkeley CA or Woodstock or whereever else. Its just quite surreal & I still haven't gotten over it.

lawnchair_larry 15y ago
I've lived there for several years, and in no way do I identify with this post. Not even close. It is good to be optimistic, but I'd hate for people to get this impression that the streets are paved with gold and make some really poor decisions.
- jazzychad 15y ago
  Exactly, which is why I wrote this post. There is a lot of cool stuff happening here, and a lot of money floating around, but nothing comes easy.
  - michaelochurch 15y ago
    If it makes you feel better, my sense from what I've read is that you're more likely to have success once you get funding. You've been through a lot of pain, and you still believe in yourself and what you're doing. And apparently some very experienced and talented people believe in you too. That says a lot. As for the "Somebodies", it's not all about past success; there is a lot of luck and flair to it. There are, in any human culture, people who are utterly worthless but can make the magic happen. They don't know much technically, but they're great at using the herd mentality and certain exploitable vulnerabilities in weak minds in order to make other people like them, so getting funding and press comes easily to them. When they actually have to build a product and a team and a company, they're screwed, and they tend to flame out catastrophically. Whereas the people who actually work hard and have real capability will have slower paths to success but, when they get there, they'll be able to stay where they are because they've actually earned it.

freshfunk 15y ago

Most people I meet who visit SF to do a little recon end up deciding to move here permanently because the environment is so great and supportive for entrepreneurs.