6 ms·

This doesn't make much sense. I have yet to meet an entrepreneur who struggles to come up with a great idea; in fact, most people have lots of good ideas. The

• cperciva 18y ago
  I have yet to meet an entrepreneur who struggles to come up with a great idea; in fact, most people have lots of good ideas. I'm not sure about that. Most people have lots of ideas... but in my experience the overwhelming majority of these are very bad ideas. I think it's worth considering the possibility that living in the bay area benefits startups by letting founders see lots of what does and doesn't work, and thereby helping them avoid spending time on some of their very bad ideas. (Of course, this cuts both ways: I doubt you'd see an Amazon.com come out of someone who had spent years in the bay area -- more likely you'd get a response along the lines of "You want to sell books online? Like... dead trees? Which you have to store in warehouses and ship across the country? You should write a facebook app instead, that would be so much cooler.")
  • aneesh 18y ago
    I agree that it helps to be surrounded by smart, creative people. I also think there are decreasing marginal returns to this benefit - are 1,000 smart people really that much more useful than 100 people for bouncing ideas off of? Is Seattle, Chicago or New York really so bad? More than the Bay area, it's how resourceful you are. Now I'm not saying the Bay Area is a bad place to be, just that you don't need to be there to come up with and work on an awesome idea. Better reasons to be in the Bay Area: Investors, investors, investors.