5 ms·

The Pros of Planting Startups in Smaller Cities

12 points by dpapathanasiou 18y ago

tokenadult 18y ago
It's interesting that this article is actually based on an attempt to do research rather than just relating one author's personal opinion.
- silentbicycle 18y ago
  It's also kind of sad that that's novel... The heat map is good, too.
  - gojomo 18y ago
    The heat map is good, too. It's pretty, but quite a bit unclear. There's no legend, for example -- do the red areas or the yellow areas have the highest per-capita startup rates? Since even the article is talking about small cities, and the cities on the map tend to be redder dots, I'll assume redder means more startups per capita. Still, what does the map tell us? It seems a little surprising that the big open-spaces counties of the west, especially around Idaho, Wyoming, and Vegas/Northern Arizona are so red. But we can't be sure this isn't an artifact of their shading choices. An eastern city-plus-surrounding-counties might hide all its 'red' in a tiny dot, making its region look yellower than a western county, when the eastern rate over the same total area is actually higher, and even no more concentrated. (It just looks that way because of the smaller counties.)
thomaspaine 18y ago
I currently live in San Francisco but I'm originally from Ohio. The other day I decided to look up programming jobs in Cincinnati on Craigslist for fun, and a search for python yielded 197 jobs in the bay area, 1 in Cincinnati, and 3 in Cleveland. The talent pool for good hackers isn't as deep as the bay area, but I know there are good hackers living in those cities that you would be able to attract to your startup. A hacker could also easily live for <$1000 a month in Ohio if you wanted to do the whole bootstrapping thing. That being said, I don't see myself moving back anytime soon. Other than that I just happen to like living in California a lot more than Ohio, the other day I went to a javascript meetup held at the Facebook office. Core contributors from mootools and jquery were there, and I remember getting the sense that people out here really are on the bleeding edge when it comes to technology. There's really no comparison for that level of community in Ohio.
- sachinag 18y ago
  Yeah, you're essentially trading lower cost of living for the network effect when you don't live in a hub for what you're trying to do. The interwebs make it a little easier to catch up, but you're still playing catch up.

It's interesting that this article is actually based on an attempt to do research rather than just relating one author's personal opinion.

silentbicycle 18y ago
It's also kind of sad that that's novel... The heat map is good, too.
- gojomo 18y ago
  The heat map is good, too. It's pretty, but quite a bit unclear. There's no legend, for example -- do the red areas or the yellow areas have the highest per-capita startup rates? Since even the article is talking about small cities, and the cities on the map tend to be redder dots, I'll assume redder means more startups per capita. Still, what does the map tell us? It seems a little surprising that the big open-spaces counties of the west, especially around Idaho, Wyoming, and Vegas/Northern Arizona are so red. But we can't be sure this isn't an artifact of their shading choices. An eastern city-plus-surrounding-counties might hide all its 'red' in a tiny dot, making its region look yellower than a western county, when the eastern rate over the same total area is actually higher, and even no more concentrated. (It just looks that way because of the smaller counties.)

thomaspaine 18y ago

I currently live in San Francisco but I'm originally from Ohio. The other day I decided to look up programming jobs in Cincinnati on Craigslist for fun, and a search for python yielded 197 jobs in the bay area, 1 in Cincinnati, and 3 in Cleveland. The talent pool for good hackers isn't as deep as the bay area, but I know there are good hackers living in those cities that you would be able to attract to your startup. A hacker could also easily live for <$1000 a month in Ohio if you wanted to do the whole bootstrapping thing. That being said, I don't see myself moving back anytime soon. Other than that I just happen to like living in California a lot more than Ohio, the other day I went to a javascript meetup held at the Facebook office. Core contributors from mootools and jquery were there, and I remember getting the sense that people out here really are on the bleeding edge when it comes to technology. There's really no comparison for that level of community in Ohio.

sachinag 18y ago
Yeah, you're essentially trading lower cost of living for the network effect when you don't live in a hub for what you're trying to do. The interwebs make it a little easier to catch up, but you're still playing catch up.