11 ms·

Cities and Ambition (2008)

185 points by joelrunyon 13y ago

ycmike 13y ago
This is one of my favorite ever PG posts. It's what is driving me to get out to the East Coast as soon as possible and eventually the Bay Area.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  I've often thought about the allure of moving to the Bay Area and being part of "startup central", but I can't help but suspect that I have an overly romanticized view of what it would be like. And there are existence proofs that a startup can be founded - and succeed - in North Carolina. So while I get what you're saying, I have some major doubts about moving out there. Higher cost of living, more traffic, more smog, more competition for talent, etc., etc. - these all strike me as factors that argue against moving. OTOH, the energy, the vibe, the ambition that pg talks about here... I so want to be around that and more like minded people. And while the Raleigh / Durham area has a burgeoning startup scene, I don't get the impression that it can come close to touching the energy in, say, Palo Alto or Mountain View, or San Francisco. Guess I need to just drag my ass out West and take it all in sometime. I keep hoping a consulting gig will take me out there and give me an excuse to go for a few weeks, so I can check it out. :-)
  - nickpinkston 13y ago
    I moved from Pittsburgh to SF, and I have zero regrets. I've found no where in the world better for people trying to build the future. I agree with PG that the best conversation is in Cambridge, MA, wealth-gathering in NY, but if you want to build your ideas - the Bay Area is the center of the modern enlightenment.
    - southpawgirl 13y ago
      I don't "get" SF, not as a place to live in (e.g. one that should satisfy all my needs, practical and intellectual). To me, SF is the mum in the Woody Allen sketch that keeps saying "Do your homework! Brooklyn is not expanding!" -- aka, no time for introspection or philosophical pursuits. I've found there, on top of social inequality, a curious brand of intellectual pragmatism, something like: if you cannot market it, then it's not interesting. But maybe it's a distorted perception?
      - _delirium 13y ago
        That was about 80% of my impression also. Not 100%, to be sure, but there was a huge pervasive pollution from the "what will the VCs think? how does this advance your career? how will you monetize?" mindset. Everything was dominated by a certain amount of what I might call intellectual strip-mining, rather than intellectual advancement: look for something that was already developed but not yet monetized, and come up with a monetization scheme for it, rather than inventing something genuinely new.
        nickpinkston 13y ago
        Yea, there's no doubt that's true, but it's true everywhere. The people who are doing novel things are of course everywhere, but the filter is harder. In SF, you can find a lot of people doing novel things, but you need to filter like anywhere else. It's just that the raw number of creatives here makes these groups larger. I still have yet to find the concentration of these types greater than anywhere else in the world.
  - impendia 13y ago
    I've lived in all of Durham, San Francisco, and Menlo Park (next town over to Palo Alto). Durham, in my mind, had a weird vibe. Despite growing up there, I think what I remember best is taking a swing dance workshop (in my mid-twenties) from Sharon Ashe. Sharon had been at the heart and center of the San Francisco lindy hop community, possibly the best swing dance scene in the world. She had co-founded the 9:20 Special, which still attracts a crowd of hundreds every week. But apparently she had burned out, and had too much of the cost of living and the competition (there isn't really any smog) and decided to move to Durham. She wanted a lower-key, quieter life, while still enjoying most of what she'd enjoyed in San Francisco. At the time, this struck me as a profoundly sad thing to do, and soon after I left town. I would say that compromise is at the heart of what Durham has to offer. This is ultimately why I left, but it has got great restaurants, good weather, a lot of culture going on, and above all a wide range of diverse, interesting, active, intelligent people. Just not quite as much of any of the above (except for the weather) than SF or Cambridge. Take that for what you will. e-mail in profile if you have questions.
    - benihana 13y ago
      Don't forget the beer. Durham (and all of the triangle) has amazing beer. I never really found the vibe to be weird. It seemed like a less pretentious Brooklyn (I live in BK now). And I can understand why you would think an area you grew up in is about compromise, but I respectfully disagree. Durham is a great mix of southern charm, unique quirky culture, down home feel, and high-tech progressiveness - I haven't been able to find that mix anywhere else. It's also large and varied - the area near Southgate mall is completely different than downtown Durham.
      - impendia 13y ago
        > a less pretentious Brooklyn (I live in BK now). Interesting. My main complaint about Durham was that it was very suburban; the idea of traveling between any pair of locations other than by car was wholly ridiculous. (But last time I was there, there were a bunch of new bars and restaurants downtown! This is a quite recent development.) There is no "Southgate mall" in Durham. That said, I'm not disputing that it has a lot of good points. Including the beer :)
  - ycmike 13y ago
    I agree. I think if you're someone who really wants to make an impact with technology then get around people like you and stop trying to make the people around you like you. At this point, I am talking to myself :)
    - mindcrime 13y ago
      Yeah, I hear ya. I feel the same thing that another commenter here mentioned, it's the "nobody else around here is interested in the same things I am" thing. Even among the local startup community, we're one of a small number of enterprise software plays, and an even smaller number who are passionately focused on OSS. There are the OpenNMS guys, and I think Alfresco have an office around here somewhere, and Cloudera have something of a presence here... but still, by and large, I don't feel like there's much passion for enterprise stuff. And yeah, obviously Red Hat are here as well, but they're way past "startup" stage. Same for IBM, Cisco, etc. There are people here who do enterprise stuff, but they're mostly sequestered away inside big shops like IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, etc. and not really participating in the startup scene.
      - ycmike 13y ago
        I think it is best to optimize for collisions. Meaning, be in places where people running into to each to do interesting things just happens naturally. This phenomenon takes place in elite universities and startup hubs.
joelrunyon 13y ago
Seeing as this came out in 2008 - I'm really curious to see if PG has any updated thoughts on the cities he mentioned as well as some of the new rising tech centers (Chicago, Austin, etc)
- qntmfred 13y ago
  not to mention NYC, and especially so since he specifically mentioned whether New York could grow into a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    I like New York a hell of a lot more than the strip mall called Silicon Valley, but New York is nowhere near SV as a startup hub. First, the VC climate is different and employee option pools are just shitty (5 to 20%). You won't find good engineers willing to work for non-founder equity. The people who work for 0.1% of a mediocre startup are not good and you'll have to hire $200-400/hour freelancers to fix their work after you fire them. (One startup offered me $275/h to fix its Rails app and I've never even used Rails.) Second, the quality of startups is just not there. Granted, 97% of the startups in the Valley are total garbage as well, because the VCs have no taste or insight, but at least SV has that other 3%. New York doesn't. Most of the founders are people who failed out of finance but managed to snag enough connections (as a consolation prize) to raise VC. Third, there are startups that luck their way into a few good engineers for a little while, but in NYC, they never keep them. There's a lot of title inflation in NYC (Senior Engineer by 24, Managing Data Scientist by 26) but the people with any ambition leverage their inflated titles into better positions in finance (starting around $300k) or at companies like Google and Facebook. New York is the place where you use startups to get better Wall Street or Google jobs.
    - wcummings 13y ago
      A title describes your responsibilities, not your seniority.
gavinh 13y ago
Perhaps the title should be "Cities & Ambition & My Snarky, Arrogant Generalizations".
southpawgirl 13y ago
This post is brilliant. It puts into words an unspoken but pervasive sensation I had in the small town I grew up in, before leaving for greener pastures: it didn't ask me (or anyone else) to be anyone or anything better than I already was. I hated it for its leniency, for its forgiveness that ended up being suffocating. It makes sense to choose to live in a demanding place.
rarrrrrr 13y ago
My city does a pretty good job saying "we like you just the way you are."
_delirium 13y ago
Living for a few years in the Bay Area, I didn't really end up with the same impression, though that could be my fault. My biggest impression was that the Bay Area wants to be extremely wealthy, but feels slightly inadequate about it. There was a constant palpable rivalry with both NYC and Southern California, a rivalry that was mostly one-directional. And on the Peninsula, in particular, there was a strangely obvious class structure. In particular the startup scene around Stanford was super-weird. I didn't know the Googlers (wrong years), but the kids I knew ranged from "comfortably upper-middle-class" to "extremely wealthy". Mostly my peers were their employees, not in the founder social group; the founder social group had a remarkable ability to raise "friends & family" money despite having no product (the most recent raised $750,000 from a company in China owned by an uncle, to develop mobile games). The demographics are so unbalanced that Stanford actually will give an automatic full-ride scholarship to any accepted student whose family makes under $100,000/yr, since not many admitted students qualify for it anyway. Overall I don't really miss it, though I did like eating VC food and drinking VC beer at the ubiquitous lavish parties. But the culture might be even weirder than NYC, in terms of what it promotes.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  In particular the startup scene around Stanford was super-weird. That's very interesting. Would you elaborate a bit more about this? What was it like, beyond the fact that those people have connections that most people don't?
  - _delirium 13y ago
    I guess that's the main part, the Stanford founders I met (mostly second-hand, via friends who did work for them) seemed to have access to connections and surprisingly large amounts of "friends & family" seed funding. Maybe they were doing a ton of work behind the scenes to get it, but from my perspective it seemed like some pretty surprising piles of money accessible to pretty unproven companies (piles of money much larger than YC gives). My friends got decent pay out of it (even if below-market), so I'm not particularly bitter about it, but it was sort of an eye-opening "wow, people have friends/family who can kick in $750k just like that?" kind of moment. Also quite different compared to the vibe around other vaguely nearby universities: Santa Clara University, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly SLO, etc. They all come across as more "working class", socially, which contrary to what I might've thought some years ago, seems to correlate against being startuppy. The working-class Cal-Poly/Santa-Clara/etc kids seemed mainly interested in getting a stable job with a big tech company, while the upper-class-background Stanford kids were all into startups.
danhak 13y ago
He had me until he said this in the fifth section: "DC and LA seem to send messages too, but I haven't spent long enough in either to say for sure what they are." ...and then went on to opine on both those places, with relatively shallow stereotypes.
- meritt 13y ago
  What is LA about if not fame, vanity and an acceptance that it takes hours to drive a few miles?
  - _delirium 13y ago
    Depends on where, but the nice parts of LA seem more down-to-earth and transit-friendly to me than the nice parts of San Francisco, believe it or not. If you consider only the Westside, bounded roughly by the 10 / Culver Blvd. on the south, Hollywood Hills on the north, the Pacific Ocean on the west, and Elysian Park on the east [1], which is roughly comparable in area to SF, imo it's much more livable than SF. Better transit & cheaper housing overall. [1] Roughly: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1738808199#map=12/34.0541/-118.3664 http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1738808199#map=12/34.0541/...
  - dima55 13y ago
    Heh. Thing about LA is that it's huge. If you look for that stereotype, you'll find it. But you can also find anything else.
  - wwweston 13y ago
    It's true that there are some people who are there in LA because they've gotten the message that entertainment fame (vs a startup) is the only way they'll matter in the world, that there's vanity, and that traffic can suck away your will to live or do anything if you don't figure out a way to avoid it. It's also true there's lots of people who participate in entertainment because they love it. They love making stories, they love acting, they love singing, dancing, they love making sets, effects, animation, soundtracks, songs, whatever. They know their products can change minds and change the world, too. A lot of these people aren't so different from your typical hacker. There's also a lot of shenanigans and bullshit from people looking to hustle a buck or make their next fortune. I'm sure you can find the analog. I'll also note that I live in West LA in a few miles from my job, which takes me 10 minutes to commute to, and which pays wages which are probably average for an SF webdev job (though possibly somewhat above average for an LA webdev job). And you can find 2 bedroom apartments are available for under $2000, 1 bedrooms between $1000-$1500 (though you can get a luxury place or something by the beach if you really want to pay a lot more). It's certainly not a perfect place (I'd be happier with it if there were more varied weather, and more access to nature and quiet space), and of course, not everybody's experience with LA is like mine. In fact, LA is so big and so varied that what I've come to suspect over my experience there is that there simply isn't any single summary that can capture it.
gavinh 13y ago
The Valley urges its inhabitants to become more powerful... by creating cat photographer social networking iOS fart apps?
awakeasleep 13y ago
I have to call out Paul Graham's idea that social class is dropping of the list of important things. What it means changed a little, and I think it's now more important than ever. The thing is, someone like PG never sees or interacts with anyone lower than upper middle class. Other 'incompatible' classes are invisible to us. There is a whole world of people in this country that he wouldn't even be able to talk to. Depending on your state, between 59 and 80% of people graduate high school. That 20-40% isn't dropping out because they're running a startup. There is a class of people that takes advertisements at face value, as sources of information. There is a class of people that doesn't value education... There are millions of people that don't even have the same goals or life values as a middle class people do. PG you used the cliche "second class citizen" a bunch of times in this article without thinking about what it actually means!
- barry-cotter 13y ago
  There is a class of people that takes advertisements at face value, as sources of information. Not in America there isn't. Well, not a social class. The amount of tv the average American watches is insane, something like 4 hours a day. It is impossible to watch that much tv without developing some rudimentary media literacy. Maybe less, and less sophisticated than smarter, more educated people but the number of people who think drinking Bud Light will actually make them more popular and win them a hotter mate is pretty damned small. I agree with almost everything else you said. I do suspect that every YC cohort has at least one American who grew up poor by American standards though. I'm sure they're underrepresented though.
  - ricardobeat 13y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite is true. It's unbearable to watch 4 hours of TV if your mind is constantly analyzing the content. Regardless, studies show that your ability to rationalize propaganda doesn't make you immune to it. The effect is much more subtle.
    - nicklovescode 13y ago
snogglethorpe 13y ago
This was a slightly silly essay that seems to essentially be more "places PG likes" than any sort of objective analysis... Great cities certainly do have a vibe, but Cambridge (MA), although it's a very nice place to live and obviously has tons of smart people, is actually a pretty sleepy place in general; for all it's charms, it isn't a "great city." The "density of the unfamiliar" which I think tends to characterize great cities isn't really so evident in Cambridge (the presence of MIT / Harvard / etc does generate some of this, but universities tend to be somewhat closed societies).
- secstate 13y ago
  Toss in a healthy dose of MIT becoming a shell of its former hacker-self, and Harvard being, well, Harvard, and I'd say Cambridge is the least exciting aspect of the greater Boston area. Besides the fact that Bostonians are most definitely infatuated with pop culture and hipness. Maybe across the bridge things get more intellectual, but not so you'd notice. I will say in PG's defense that I've never seen a city more excited about selling you a master's degree as the key to your new future life ; - ) So I suppose they do value education (an brick-for-brick there's probably more post-secondary schools in the area around Boston than almost anywhere else in the U.S. or even the world.).
- fjabre 13y ago
  Completely agree with you about the universities being akin to closed societies. I've lived in Boston most of my life and if you aren't currently attending said universities and are not a gushing alum constantly attending university sponsored events then you will find Boston and surrounding areas to be very sleepy indeed. The puritan spirit is still very much alive and kicking in the bay state.
deleted 13y ago
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WWKong 13y ago
Having lived both in LA and Bay Area the biggest difference is that Life in LA doesn't come with any baggage. You don't have to change the world. You don't have to launch the next big idea. You don't chase money as hard as Bay Area (yes). You don't have to keep telling yourself and the world that "my city is awesome". You just live a good life with good food, good people, good work.
- javajosh 13y ago
  My sense is that people in LA really want to get to be on stage. No, you don't have to be a superstar, but people in the business want to keep working in show business, more than anything. And for exactly the same reason game developers keep doing it: because they love it. They love doing things just because people enjoy it, and not because it has to be done. There is joy in frivolity.
sanj 13y ago
This may be my favorite line from a PG essay of all time: So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather. I say this as I build out an addition on my already expensive house, while holed up in a AirBnB victorian with drafty windows watching wet, sloppy snow make the streets into mess. On the other hand, I've chatted about web stacks with my landlord, auto-correlation functions with a dinner guest, toy accordion repair with my neighbor, and depth-perception optical nerve cross talk with my other neighbor. That's in the last two days. I love it here.
- swalsh 13y ago
  You'll find some of the most intelligent public conversations that can be had on the Red Line.
oscargrouch 13y ago
thats why i prefer nature over cities. The messages it sends is: You can be whatever you want.. The observations and love for nature is one of the big secrets of geniuses like Da Vinci and Newton.. florence or england, just give them the means to achieve their goals.. Cities are stuck in the era they shine most.. and if you listen to them now, you will be listening to the 20, 19 or even 18 century echoes.. not the XXI we are supposed to I think real genius has a transcendental and private path to somewhere, where they can listen whatever, and bring it back to our reality.. if they happen to listen to cities its just to give them new interpretations of it.. so we (the voyeurs of their work) can see it with new eyes.. If you listen up to most cities, you will see more what them want you to see than its own reality.. unless you belong there for more than 10 years.. and you already know it... its pretty much fake, delusional.. I dont know you, but i happen to like the real thing, i care more about the truth.. thats why nature is more seductive to me than city people or concrete walls
- secstate 13y ago
  I couldn't agree with you more. I'm here reading hacker news in a rural town in Maine (a summer town on the coast, granted, but hey, it's winter ... ). I love your note about cities being stuck in the era they shine. That's brilliant and so unbelievably true. I love cities and urban environments. I grew up in Chicago and spent time living in our fair city (Boston) before moving north. But I settled up here to be close to family and to not let my ambition get to heady. You can wind up feeling really important and powerful in a city, and the discovery that barring 0.01% of the population you aren't actually very important or powerful will destroy you if that's what you built your life on. Instead I've built a life around family, farming and hacking (which incidentally, farming basically invented ... every farmer has their own solution to a problem).
  - kpennell 13y ago
    Cool!
- kpennell 13y ago
  Excellent comment. Thank you. I love how classless camping is. You can just be human to each other. Festivals can sometimes bring this out as well.
eshvk 13y ago
> New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. The only defining common factor of all the VC shops in the bay area is money. Sure a lot of them made that money in tech but it is money that lets them have power. Also some anecdotal impressions: I lived in SF for two years. I think the constant humdrum of tech (specifically a strange breed of big data + machine learning + web tech) is making the place intolerably insular. When I first moved there, I thought the opinionated twenty something year olds who think that their youth and opinions mean that they matter were cute. Now, it is just fucking insufferable. Building a company shouldn't be purely about getting sold, acqui-hired or building products that no one outside your iphone addled tech circle will use. I think there is utility in moving out of the bay area to build real products. I recently moved to NYC. The tech scene feels refreshingly small, surprisingly under-dog like, I am reminded of Austin. Most tech folks I meet here are mellow, there is also a large overlap with incredibly smart ex-finance people who are humble and sociable. Everything also doesn't seem to be focused on shipping your shitty product and tweeting about it, there is focus on building something that is not primarily focused on acqui-hired or VC-driven. Also, more importantly, NYC is superior to San Francisco as a place for your social life. The men:women ratio is way more balanced, you are constantly reminded that your "coding skills" are not all that define you. When I first came to interview here, I had serious misgivings about the place (the climate is miserable), yet I think the thing that made me decide to move here was a conversation I over-heard in a coffee shop between two girls. It was about Python. The snake, not the language.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - onedev 13y ago
    If you have nothing useful or insightful to post, please don't post it. This isn't reddit.
- hnriot 13y ago
  I think you must have missed the good parts of SF, if you felt that your coding skills defined you. Try Cole Valley, or the Lower Haight and skip SOMA. I would take issue also with your men:women ration nonsense, SF is full of women. I suggest you stop eavesdropping conversations girls are having near you and get out more! NYC isn't the answer. NYC is an amazing place, it's full of life and vitality, but so is San Francico. NYC has better galleries, but SF has better weather. Might I remind you right now it's 70's in SF while you have snow...
midwestthrowawy 13y ago
I'm a 25 year old living in a smallish midwestern city. PG's "you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do" is something that really resonates with my experience here. Anyone want to play fortune teller and suggest places I should visit/consider moving? Some important personality points: - builder/hacker - eager learner - I'll step up for tasks right away - I deeply care about making people feel loved/included and finding people who care about me - likes public transportation
- argonaut 13y ago
  All of those points, except public transportation, are in favor of SF, IMO. And if housing is too expensive you can live in Berkeley or Oakland, near a BART station which is a good enough option to get you to SF. Assuming you get a job. SF has a strong hacker culture, tons of meetups and talks going on every week (education), and SV in general has a strong pay it forward culture.
- _delirium 13y ago
  If you can get a visa, Scandinavia. :) (Offer not valid for people who like sun between November and March.)
- analog31 13y ago
  Maybe we live in the same city! But... >>> no one around you cares about the same things you do is what I like. The diversity. I can get completely lost in a tech problem that I'm working on, and when I go out and talk to a neighbor, or chat with parents at soccer practice, the topic might be astronomy, biology, politics, or agriculture.
- ycmike 13y ago
  You need to get out! I'm in the Midwest too and am planning my escape route.
- etjossem 13y ago
  I moved to SF from Des Moines and it's definitely working out well. There is a strong builder/maker culture in the tech community here. Make sure to surround yourself with the right people - just like anywhere else - but everything else should fall into place. Good luck!
malandrew 13y ago
pg, out of curiosity, what's your view on Berlin and other international cities of note?
- ycmike 13y ago
  I believe in the post he said that his views are by no means nationalistic and that he feels someplace like Atlanta has the same problem as Munich. But I actually think this was in a "Startup Hubs" essay.
- MatthiasP 13y ago
  I guess he would have a much harder time getting a feeling for a city where he could not casually pick up what people are talking about due to language barriers.
  - wellboy 13y ago
    Though, at entrepreneur meetups/event, it's funny EVERYBODY speaks English. Just yesterday at hy berlin, all the pitches were in English and 1/3rd of the people getting food/drinks are non-Germans. So almost every conversation between 3 people had one english speak and was thus held in English.^^
malandrew 13y ago
"Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won't matter where you live physically. But I wouldn't bet on it. I would say that this is somewhat the case already, it's just that recognition online doesn't translate to the real world. Many people in open-source community wield as much power as the CEOs in Silicon Valley. Depending on what you've open-sourced, you have power over the powerful. Linus Torvalds and the community he fostered for example is responsible for empowering many of the powerful in technology.
ptc 13y ago
I'll just leave this here: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
- grey-area 13y ago
  What a hateful, small-minded little diatribe.
Jd 13y ago
Here are some cities I've lived in: Tokyo, Xi'an, Harbin, Rome, Assisi, Florence, Jerusalem, Berlin, Munich, Lyon, Palo Alto, DC, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia My general assessment is that American cities feel more vibrant while European cities feel more sleepy. Cambridge is one locus of intellect for its own, perhaps the best left although I think American pragmatism chokes great thinking. For true intellectual engagement I think you have to poke around Europe and find the older generation of scholars and artists. As for Florence, pg should know folks like Pietro Annigoni that at least were keeping old traditions alive. Europe is in many ways like a very wonderful museum with a few old curators, but that old museum beats most new museums by a large margin.
jqm 13y ago
Interesting observations. I have noticed the inverse is also true (as a few posters have already pointed out). Some places just scream ignorance and sloth. But hey... do you want good conversation or good weather? If you do want good conversation how much is it worth to you? Enough to spend 50% of your income on housing? Sometimes being alone is where you get real thinking done. Not always, but often.
bane 13y ago
I grew up outside of DC and can probably say this about the city: Washington D.C. thinks of itself as the center of power of the entire universe. And in a lot of ways it is. But it's a weird city. Power in D.C. is indirect and complex. You can't really start at the bottom and work your way up to positions of extreme power (though it's a popular story)...hard ceilings are everywhere. To be clear, I'm not talking about the more or less irrelevant city government. The best way I can explain it is this, power in D.C. is build on a tripod. You must have all three of these things to be powerful: money, widespread popularity, and cunning (not intelligence). This is different than other cities, where elements of this tripod exist, but aren't necessary to be powerful in that city. For example, in NYC, money is sufficient to be powerful. But even billionaires have failed to attain power in D.C. In NYC political connections are useful for making more money, but aren't strictly necessary. In D.C. political connections are critical. In NYC, you have to have alpha-like mammal aggressiveness (not necessarily intelligence), but in D.C. it's reptile like cunning that's needed. You can draw different but similar differences with other cities and power. Power in D.C. is also incredibly transient and fickle. In theory, power in D.C. can accumulate to the point that a single individual can more or less wipe out all life on the planet, then just a couple years later has trouble keeping reporters off of his vacation property. It's a tower of power that's built on sands that shift so fast it makes the stock market look like a simple linear function. Everybody falls from power in D.C. It's the tallest tower there is, but the downward drop is inevitable. The key is making a soft landing when you do. That way you can take a "fall back" position to power in NYC on the board of an investment company or the Bay Area where you can become an Angel investor. But you'll notice that people who are really powerful in one place rarely move from where they know how to operate, and when they do, rarely gain positions of equivalent power in their new homes. They just operate differently. Throwing money around in D.C. might make you popular for a bit, but without cunning you'll just be that guy who throws lots of parties. It reminds me of the old saying "Rich is being a millionaire basketball player, Wealthy is being the guy who signs the checks" add to that "Powerful is the guy who proposed the bill that got turned into a law with teeth that regulated the NBA and bankrupted the wealthy owners."
- sounds 13y ago
  "cunning (not intelligence)" - well said. Intelligent people often think intelligence trumps cunning. Truth is, cunning people are very, very successful. Don't underestimate them. (I have.)
hawkharris 13y ago
I can relate to the intellectual energy that PG describes. Going to a high school in Cambridge, equidistant from Harvard and MIT, I used to feel intimidated by the city's collective brain power. It was the kind of place where confidence intervals are a subject for smalltalk and ads for genetic research are geared toward everyday commuters. I can't speak for everyone, but I think something interesting happens when you live in a place like Cambridge for several years. You start to feel less intimidated by the competition for knowledge. Don't get me wrong — you still try to keep up — but Cambridge begins to calibrate your ego. You realize that you're never going to be the smartest person in your domain, let alone every domain. For this reason I appreciate the city more as I get older, and I'm glad I moved back to work as a software dev.
manuelflara 13y ago
Loved the article and its key idea that big cities send some kind of message about what people living there care the most about. Barcelona's message is clearly "enjoy life".
wwweston 13y ago
"Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you can read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thoughts. What ever that majority thought might be- that word is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there." - _Eat Pray Love_, Elizabeth Gilbert.
hnriot 13y ago
" in London you can still (barely) hear the message that one should be more aristocratic." spoken like a true tourist. that is just nonsense.
- cperciva 13y ago
  You know PG was born in England, right?
k0mplex 13y ago
Paul is describing an 80's New York. Paul doesn't use the word culture once in the essay. The word art only appears in reference to Europe and Paris. The strongest signal from New York is now much more about art, culture, and taste than about money.
- midas007 13y ago
  Perhaps he got an advance preview on that recent Scorsese movie. I had to turn it off after 10 minutes because it jumped the shark with attaboy puerility.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  New York is all about money if you don't have it. Actually, it's about real estate and legacy. Until you own a genuinely nice place (those start around $4 million) it's about real estate. After that, it's about preschool and grade school and making sure your kids have the connections to make something of themselves. Once those are shored up, it's about taste and the arts. Not before then, though, and most people don't get that far.
- msabalau 13y ago
  New York has been about art and culture for a very long time. That's because the artists are, economically speaking, a courtier class, and the best way for them to thrive (and therefore the best way to surround yourself with fellow full time working artists) is the locate yourself near the people with money.
ilamont 13y ago
Where would London fit on your continuum?
zw123456 13y ago
Come to Seattle and learn about another dimension.
- brenfrow 13y ago
  What kind of things do you think Seattle is know for, or breeds?
  - crucifiction 13y ago
    Marijuana and IPAs
doktrin 13y ago
This is an inspired, and inspiring, piece of writing. On a slightly snarky note, I always do appreciate a jab at DC, where I was both born and raised. It really is LA with bad weather and less attractive celebrities.
andy_ppp 13y ago
London would probably be "get on that fucking tredmill so you can buy a house you can't afford in an area you don't want to live, with a job you hate, to pay for a lifestyle you don't agree with".
- disputin 13y ago
  Precisely why I'm reading this post - in the hope of finding somewhere else. I was hoping there would be more mention of European cities.
lsc 13y ago
PG makes me want to move to Boston/Cambridge. And his summation of silicon valley sounds... almost sick. But then I review my own behavior, and perhaps I am motivated more by power than I like to think? I've always thought of the will to power, beyond power over yourself, as an ugly thing. But looking back at choices I've made? Yeah. I've wanted to change things. Even change things for others. And I've chosen power over money at several junctions. So, maybe I'm in the right place after all.
- visakanv 13y ago
  Will-to-power isn't ugly in of itself. It's what you do with it that counts. You can use it to support the weak and oppressed, you can use it to insure yourself and your loved ones (and more!) from damaging external stressors. Everybody wants more power, nobody wants less. Also, power-over-yourself is the most fundamental thing about will-to-power (in an enlightened sense). There's no point getting power over others if you have no power over yourself- then it's merely your appetites that have power over others, not you. As Da Vinci put, no man can have any dominion greater or lesser than over himself.
  - lsc 13y ago
    >power-over-yourself is the most fundamental thing about will-to-power (in an enlightened sense). >There's no point getting power over others if you have no power over yourself- then it's merely your appetites that have power over others, not you. As Da Vinci put, no man can have any dominion greater or lesser than over himself. Yeah, now you are talking about a different kind of power, which is really a different and nearly unrelated thing. "Self control" or what have you. The ability to control and direct your mind and body. Sure, it's a great thing, and can be a great tool... but it's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the power to live where I want to live, and to be secure in my person and my property. To work when and as much as I want to. To obtain the goods and services I want. All of these things require convincing others to do things for me, which is to say, power over other people; so to have a reasonable degree of power over your own life, you need a reasonable degree of power over others.
OldSchool 13y ago
One thing I don't see in the article or discussed here is that (at least I believe) a sign of reaching maturity is that you don't need to define yourself by where you live. While these places can be helpful in achieving your goals, ultimately wherever you go, there you are.
waitwhat123 13y ago
I need to get out of new york :(
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

185 points by joelrunyon 13y ago

This is one of my favorite ever PG posts. It's what is driving me to get out to the East Coast as soon as possible and eventually the Bay Area.

mindcrime 13y ago
I've often thought about the allure of moving to the Bay Area and being part of "startup central", but I can't help but suspect that I have an overly romanticized view of what it would be like. And there are existence proofs that a startup can be founded - and succeed - in North Carolina. So while I get what you're saying, I have some major doubts about moving out there. Higher cost of living, more traffic, more smog, more competition for talent, etc., etc. - these all strike me as factors that argue against moving. OTOH, the energy, the vibe, the ambition that pg talks about here... I so want to be around that and more like minded people. And while the Raleigh / Durham area has a burgeoning startup scene, I don't get the impression that it can come close to touching the energy in, say, Palo Alto or Mountain View, or San Francisco. Guess I need to just drag my ass out West and take it all in sometime. I keep hoping a consulting gig will take me out there and give me an excuse to go for a few weeks, so I can check it out. :-)
- nickpinkston 13y ago
  I moved from Pittsburgh to SF, and I have zero regrets. I've found no where in the world better for people trying to build the future. I agree with PG that the best conversation is in Cambridge, MA, wealth-gathering in NY, but if you want to build your ideas - the Bay Area is the center of the modern enlightenment.
  - southpawgirl 13y ago
    I don't "get" SF, not as a place to live in (e.g. one that should satisfy all my needs, practical and intellectual). To me, SF is the mum in the Woody Allen sketch that keeps saying "Do your homework! Brooklyn is not expanding!" -- aka, no time for introspection or philosophical pursuits. I've found there, on top of social inequality, a curious brand of intellectual pragmatism, something like: if you cannot market it, then it's not interesting. But maybe it's a distorted perception?
    - _delirium 13y ago
      That was about 80% of my impression also. Not 100%, to be sure, but there was a huge pervasive pollution from the "what will the VCs think? how does this advance your career? how will you monetize?" mindset. Everything was dominated by a certain amount of what I might call intellectual strip-mining, rather than intellectual advancement: look for something that was already developed but not yet monetized, and come up with a monetization scheme for it, rather than inventing something genuinely new.
      - nickpinkston 13y ago
        Yea, there's no doubt that's true, but it's true everywhere. The people who are doing novel things are of course everywhere, but the filter is harder. In SF, you can find a lot of people doing novel things, but you need to filter like anywhere else. It's just that the raw number of creatives here makes these groups larger. I still have yet to find the concentration of these types greater than anywhere else in the world.
- impendia 13y ago
  I've lived in all of Durham, San Francisco, and Menlo Park (next town over to Palo Alto). Durham, in my mind, had a weird vibe. Despite growing up there, I think what I remember best is taking a swing dance workshop (in my mid-twenties) from Sharon Ashe. Sharon had been at the heart and center of the San Francisco lindy hop community, possibly the best swing dance scene in the world. She had co-founded the 9:20 Special, which still attracts a crowd of hundreds every week. But apparently she had burned out, and had too much of the cost of living and the competition (there isn't really any smog) and decided to move to Durham. She wanted a lower-key, quieter life, while still enjoying most of what she'd enjoyed in San Francisco. At the time, this struck me as a profoundly sad thing to do, and soon after I left town. I would say that compromise is at the heart of what Durham has to offer. This is ultimately why I left, but it has got great restaurants, good weather, a lot of culture going on, and above all a wide range of diverse, interesting, active, intelligent people. Just not quite as much of any of the above (except for the weather) than SF or Cambridge. Take that for what you will. e-mail in profile if you have questions.
  - benihana 13y ago
    Don't forget the beer. Durham (and all of the triangle) has amazing beer. I never really found the vibe to be weird. It seemed like a less pretentious Brooklyn (I live in BK now). And I can understand why you would think an area you grew up in is about compromise, but I respectfully disagree. Durham is a great mix of southern charm, unique quirky culture, down home feel, and high-tech progressiveness - I haven't been able to find that mix anywhere else. It's also large and varied - the area near Southgate mall is completely different than downtown Durham.
    - impendia 13y ago
      > a less pretentious Brooklyn (I live in BK now). Interesting. My main complaint about Durham was that it was very suburban; the idea of traveling between any pair of locations other than by car was wholly ridiculous. (But last time I was there, there were a bunch of new bars and restaurants downtown! This is a quite recent development.) There is no "Southgate mall" in Durham. That said, I'm not disputing that it has a lot of good points. Including the beer :)
- ycmike 13y ago
  I agree. I think if you're someone who really wants to make an impact with technology then get around people like you and stop trying to make the people around you like you. At this point, I am talking to myself :)
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    Yeah, I hear ya. I feel the same thing that another commenter here mentioned, it's the "nobody else around here is interested in the same things I am" thing. Even among the local startup community, we're one of a small number of enterprise software plays, and an even smaller number who are passionately focused on OSS. There are the OpenNMS guys, and I think Alfresco have an office around here somewhere, and Cloudera have something of a presence here... but still, by and large, I don't feel like there's much passion for enterprise stuff. And yeah, obviously Red Hat are here as well, but they're way past "startup" stage. Same for IBM, Cisco, etc. There are people here who do enterprise stuff, but they're mostly sequestered away inside big shops like IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, EMC, etc. and not really participating in the startup scene.
    - ycmike 13y ago
      I think it is best to optimize for collisions. Meaning, be in places where people running into to each to do interesting things just happens naturally. This phenomenon takes place in elite universities and startup hubs.

joelrunyon 13y ago

Seeing as this came out in 2008 - I'm really curious to see if PG has any updated thoughts on the cities he mentioned as well as some of the new rising tech centers (Chicago, Austin, etc)

qntmfred 13y ago
not to mention NYC, and especially so since he specifically mentioned whether New York could grow into a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  I like New York a hell of a lot more than the strip mall called Silicon Valley, but New York is nowhere near SV as a startup hub. First, the VC climate is different and employee option pools are just shitty (5 to 20%). You won't find good engineers willing to work for non-founder equity. The people who work for 0.1% of a mediocre startup are not good and you'll have to hire $200-400/hour freelancers to fix their work after you fire them. (One startup offered me $275/h to fix its Rails app and I've never even used Rails.) Second, the quality of startups is just not there. Granted, 97% of the startups in the Valley are total garbage as well, because the VCs have no taste or insight, but at least SV has that other 3%. New York doesn't. Most of the founders are people who failed out of finance but managed to snag enough connections (as a consolation prize) to raise VC. Third, there are startups that luck their way into a few good engineers for a little while, but in NYC, they never keep them. There's a lot of title inflation in NYC (Senior Engineer by 24, Managing Data Scientist by 26) but the people with any ambition leverage their inflated titles into better positions in finance (starting around $300k) or at companies like Google and Facebook. New York is the place where you use startups to get better Wall Street or Google jobs.
  - wcummings 13y ago
    A title describes your responsibilities, not your seniority.

gavinh 13y ago

Perhaps the title should be "Cities & Ambition & My Snarky, Arrogant Generalizations".

southpawgirl 13y ago

This post is brilliant. It puts into words an unspoken but pervasive sensation I had in the small town I grew up in, before leaving for greener pastures: it didn't ask me (or anyone else) to be anyone or anything better than I already was. I hated it for its leniency, for its forgiveness that ended up being suffocating. It makes sense to choose to live in a demanding place.

rarrrrrr 13y ago

My city does a pretty good job saying "we like you just the way you are."

_delirium 13y ago

Living for a few years in the Bay Area, I didn't really end up with the same impression, though that could be my fault. My biggest impression was that the Bay Area wants to be extremely wealthy, but feels slightly inadequate about it. There was a constant palpable rivalry with both NYC and Southern California, a rivalry that was mostly one-directional. And on the Peninsula, in particular, there was a strangely obvious class structure. In particular the startup scene around Stanford was super-weird. I didn't know the Googlers (wrong years), but the kids I knew ranged from "comfortably upper-middle-class" to "extremely wealthy". Mostly my peers were their employees, not in the founder social group; the founder social group had a remarkable ability to raise "friends & family" money despite having no product (the most recent raised $750,000 from a company in China owned by an uncle, to develop mobile games). The demographics are so unbalanced that Stanford actually will give an automatic full-ride scholarship to any accepted student whose family makes under $100,000/yr, since not many admitted students qualify for it anyway. Overall I don't really miss it, though I did like eating VC food and drinking VC beer at the ubiquitous lavish parties. But the culture might be even weirder than NYC, in terms of what it promotes.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
In particular the startup scene around Stanford was super-weird. That's very interesting. Would you elaborate a bit more about this? What was it like, beyond the fact that those people have connections that most people don't?
- _delirium 13y ago
  I guess that's the main part, the Stanford founders I met (mostly second-hand, via friends who did work for them) seemed to have access to connections and surprisingly large amounts of "friends & family" seed funding. Maybe they were doing a ton of work behind the scenes to get it, but from my perspective it seemed like some pretty surprising piles of money accessible to pretty unproven companies (piles of money much larger than YC gives). My friends got decent pay out of it (even if below-market), so I'm not particularly bitter about it, but it was sort of an eye-opening "wow, people have friends/family who can kick in $750k just like that?" kind of moment. Also quite different compared to the vibe around other vaguely nearby universities: Santa Clara University, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly SLO, etc. They all come across as more "working class", socially, which contrary to what I might've thought some years ago, seems to correlate against being startuppy. The working-class Cal-Poly/Santa-Clara/etc kids seemed mainly interested in getting a stable job with a big tech company, while the upper-class-background Stanford kids were all into startups.

danhak 13y ago

He had me until he said this in the fifth section: "DC and LA seem to send messages too, but I haven't spent long enough in either to say for sure what they are." ...and then went on to opine on both those places, with relatively shallow stereotypes.

meritt 13y ago
What is LA about if not fame, vanity and an acceptance that it takes hours to drive a few miles?
- _delirium 13y ago
  Depends on where, but the nice parts of LA seem more down-to-earth and transit-friendly to me than the nice parts of San Francisco, believe it or not. If you consider only the Westside, bounded roughly by the 10 / Culver Blvd. on the south, Hollywood Hills on the north, the Pacific Ocean on the west, and Elysian Park on the east [1], which is roughly comparable in area to SF, imo it's much more livable than SF. Better transit & cheaper housing overall. [1] Roughly: http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1738808199#map=12/34.0541/-118.3664 http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1738808199#map=12/34.0541/...
- dima55 13y ago
  Heh. Thing about LA is that it's huge. If you look for that stereotype, you'll find it. But you can also find anything else.
- wwweston 13y ago
  It's true that there are some people who are there in LA because they've gotten the message that entertainment fame (vs a startup) is the only way they'll matter in the world, that there's vanity, and that traffic can suck away your will to live or do anything if you don't figure out a way to avoid it. It's also true there's lots of people who participate in entertainment because they love it. They love making stories, they love acting, they love singing, dancing, they love making sets, effects, animation, soundtracks, songs, whatever. They know their products can change minds and change the world, too. A lot of these people aren't so different from your typical hacker. There's also a lot of shenanigans and bullshit from people looking to hustle a buck or make their next fortune. I'm sure you can find the analog. I'll also note that I live in West LA in a few miles from my job, which takes me 10 minutes to commute to, and which pays wages which are probably average for an SF webdev job (though possibly somewhat above average for an LA webdev job). And you can find 2 bedroom apartments are available for under $2000, 1 bedrooms between $1000-$1500 (though you can get a luxury place or something by the beach if you really want to pay a lot more). It's certainly not a perfect place (I'd be happier with it if there were more varied weather, and more access to nature and quiet space), and of course, not everybody's experience with LA is like mine. In fact, LA is so big and so varied that what I've come to suspect over my experience there is that there simply isn't any single summary that can capture it.

gavinh 13y ago

The Valley urges its inhabitants to become more powerful... by creating cat photographer social networking iOS fart apps?

awakeasleep 13y ago

I have to call out Paul Graham's idea that social class is dropping of the list of important things. What it means changed a little, and I think it's now more important than ever. The thing is, someone like PG never sees or interacts with anyone lower than upper middle class. Other 'incompatible' classes are invisible to us. There is a whole world of people in this country that he wouldn't even be able to talk to. Depending on your state, between 59 and 80% of people graduate high school. That 20-40% isn't dropping out because they're running a startup. There is a class of people that takes advertisements at face value, as sources of information. There is a class of people that doesn't value education... There are millions of people that don't even have the same goals or life values as a middle class people do. PG you used the cliche "second class citizen" a bunch of times in this article without thinking about what it actually means!

barry-cotter 13y ago
There is a class of people that takes advertisements at face value, as sources of information. Not in America there isn't. Well, not a social class. The amount of tv the average American watches is insane, something like 4 hours a day. It is impossible to watch that much tv without developing some rudimentary media literacy. Maybe less, and less sophisticated than smarter, more educated people but the number of people who think drinking Bud Light will actually make them more popular and win them a hotter mate is pretty damned small. I agree with almost everything else you said. I do suspect that every YC cohort has at least one American who grew up poor by American standards though. I'm sure they're underrepresented though.
- ricardobeat 13y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if the opposite is true. It's unbearable to watch 4 hours of TV if your mind is constantly analyzing the content. Regardless, studies show that your ability to rationalize propaganda doesn't make you immune to it. The effect is much more subtle.
  - nicklovescode 13y ago

snogglethorpe 13y ago

This was a slightly silly essay that seems to essentially be more "places PG likes" than any sort of objective analysis... Great cities certainly do have a vibe, but Cambridge (MA), although it's a very nice place to live and obviously has tons of smart people, is actually a pretty sleepy place in general; for all it's charms, it isn't a "great city." The "density of the unfamiliar" which I think tends to characterize great cities isn't really so evident in Cambridge (the presence of MIT / Harvard / etc does generate some of this, but universities tend to be somewhat closed societies).

secstate 13y ago
Toss in a healthy dose of MIT becoming a shell of its former hacker-self, and Harvard being, well, Harvard, and I'd say Cambridge is the least exciting aspect of the greater Boston area. Besides the fact that Bostonians are most definitely infatuated with pop culture and hipness. Maybe across the bridge things get more intellectual, but not so you'd notice. I will say in PG's defense that I've never seen a city more excited about selling you a master's degree as the key to your new future life ; - ) So I suppose they do value education (an brick-for-brick there's probably more post-secondary schools in the area around Boston than almost anywhere else in the U.S. or even the world.).
fjabre 13y ago
Completely agree with you about the universities being akin to closed societies. I've lived in Boston most of my life and if you aren't currently attending said universities and are not a gushing alum constantly attending university sponsored events then you will find Boston and surrounding areas to be very sleepy indeed. The puritan spirit is still very much alive and kicking in the bay state.

deleted 13y ago

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WWKong 13y ago

Having lived both in LA and Bay Area the biggest difference is that Life in LA doesn't come with any baggage. You don't have to change the world. You don't have to launch the next big idea. You don't chase money as hard as Bay Area (yes). You don't have to keep telling yourself and the world that "my city is awesome". You just live a good life with good food, good people, good work.

javajosh 13y ago
My sense is that people in LA really want to get to be on stage. No, you don't have to be a superstar, but people in the business want to keep working in show business, more than anything. And for exactly the same reason game developers keep doing it: because they love it. They love doing things just because people enjoy it, and not because it has to be done. There is joy in frivolity.

sanj 13y ago

This may be my favorite line from a PG essay of all time: So the kind of people you find in Cambridge are the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather. I say this as I build out an addition on my already expensive house, while holed up in a AirBnB victorian with drafty windows watching wet, sloppy snow make the streets into mess. On the other hand, I've chatted about web stacks with my landlord, auto-correlation functions with a dinner guest, toy accordion repair with my neighbor, and depth-perception optical nerve cross talk with my other neighbor. That's in the last two days. I love it here.

swalsh 13y ago
You'll find some of the most intelligent public conversations that can be had on the Red Line.

oscargrouch 13y ago

thats why i prefer nature over cities. The messages it sends is: You can be whatever you want.. The observations and love for nature is one of the big secrets of geniuses like Da Vinci and Newton.. florence or england, just give them the means to achieve their goals.. Cities are stuck in the era they shine most.. and if you listen to them now, you will be listening to the 20, 19 or even 18 century echoes.. not the XXI we are supposed to I think real genius has a transcendental and private path to somewhere, where they can listen whatever, and bring it back to our reality.. if they happen to listen to cities its just to give them new interpretations of it.. so we (the voyeurs of their work) can see it with new eyes.. If you listen up to most cities, you will see more what them want you to see than its own reality.. unless you belong there for more than 10 years.. and you already know it... its pretty much fake, delusional.. I dont know you, but i happen to like the real thing, i care more about the truth.. thats why nature is more seductive to me than city people or concrete walls

secstate 13y ago
I couldn't agree with you more. I'm here reading hacker news in a rural town in Maine (a summer town on the coast, granted, but hey, it's winter ... ). I love your note about cities being stuck in the era they shine. That's brilliant and so unbelievably true. I love cities and urban environments. I grew up in Chicago and spent time living in our fair city (Boston) before moving north. But I settled up here to be close to family and to not let my ambition get to heady. You can wind up feeling really important and powerful in a city, and the discovery that barring 0.01% of the population you aren't actually very important or powerful will destroy you if that's what you built your life on. Instead I've built a life around family, farming and hacking (which incidentally, farming basically invented ... every farmer has their own solution to a problem).
- kpennell 13y ago
  Cool!
kpennell 13y ago
Excellent comment. Thank you. I love how classless camping is. You can just be human to each other. Festivals can sometimes bring this out as well.

eshvk 13y ago

> New York is pretty impressed by a billion dollars even if you merely inherited it. In Silicon Valley no one would care except a few real estate agents. The only defining common factor of all the VC shops in the bay area is money. Sure a lot of them made that money in tech but it is money that lets them have power. Also some anecdotal impressions: I lived in SF for two years. I think the constant humdrum of tech (specifically a strange breed of big data + machine learning + web tech) is making the place intolerably insular. When I first moved there, I thought the opinionated twenty something year olds who think that their youth and opinions mean that they matter were cute. Now, it is just fucking insufferable. Building a company shouldn't be purely about getting sold, acqui-hired or building products that no one outside your iphone addled tech circle will use. I think there is utility in moving out of the bay area to build real products. I recently moved to NYC. The tech scene feels refreshingly small, surprisingly under-dog like, I am reminded of Austin. Most tech folks I meet here are mellow, there is also a large overlap with incredibly smart ex-finance people who are humble and sociable. Everything also doesn't seem to be focused on shipping your shitty product and tweeting about it, there is focus on building something that is not primarily focused on acqui-hired or VC-driven. Also, more importantly, NYC is superior to San Francisco as a place for your social life. The men:women ratio is way more balanced, you are constantly reminded that your "coding skills" are not all that define you. When I first came to interview here, I had serious misgivings about the place (the climate is miserable), yet I think the thing that made me decide to move here was a conversation I over-heard in a coffee shop between two girls. It was about Python. The snake, not the language.

deleted 13y ago
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- onedev 13y ago
  If you have nothing useful or insightful to post, please don't post it. This isn't reddit.
hnriot 13y ago
I think you must have missed the good parts of SF, if you felt that your coding skills defined you. Try Cole Valley, or the Lower Haight and skip SOMA. I would take issue also with your men:women ration nonsense, SF is full of women. I suggest you stop eavesdropping conversations girls are having near you and get out more! NYC isn't the answer. NYC is an amazing place, it's full of life and vitality, but so is San Francico. NYC has better galleries, but SF has better weather. Might I remind you right now it's 70's in SF while you have snow...

midwestthrowawy 13y ago

I'm a 25 year old living in a smallish midwestern city. PG's "you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do" is something that really resonates with my experience here. Anyone want to play fortune teller and suggest places I should visit/consider moving? Some important personality points: - builder/hacker - eager learner - I'll step up for tasks right away - I deeply care about making people feel loved/included and finding people who care about me - likes public transportation

argonaut 13y ago
All of those points, except public transportation, are in favor of SF, IMO. And if housing is too expensive you can live in Berkeley or Oakland, near a BART station which is a good enough option to get you to SF. Assuming you get a job. SF has a strong hacker culture, tons of meetups and talks going on every week (education), and SV in general has a strong pay it forward culture.
_delirium 13y ago
If you can get a visa, Scandinavia. :) (Offer not valid for people who like sun between November and March.)
analog31 13y ago
Maybe we live in the same city! But... >>> no one around you cares about the same things you do is what I like. The diversity. I can get completely lost in a tech problem that I'm working on, and when I go out and talk to a neighbor, or chat with parents at soccer practice, the topic might be astronomy, biology, politics, or agriculture.
ycmike 13y ago
You need to get out! I'm in the Midwest too and am planning my escape route.
etjossem 13y ago
I moved to SF from Des Moines and it's definitely working out well. There is a strong builder/maker culture in the tech community here. Make sure to surround yourself with the right people - just like anywhere else - but everything else should fall into place. Good luck!

malandrew 13y ago

pg, out of curiosity, what's your view on Berlin and other international cities of note?

ycmike 13y ago
I believe in the post he said that his views are by no means nationalistic and that he feels someplace like Atlanta has the same problem as Munich. But I actually think this was in a "Startup Hubs" essay.
MatthiasP 13y ago
I guess he would have a much harder time getting a feeling for a city where he could not casually pick up what people are talking about due to language barriers.
- wellboy 13y ago
  Though, at entrepreneur meetups/event, it's funny EVERYBODY speaks English. Just yesterday at hy berlin, all the pitches were in English and 1/3rd of the people getting food/drinks are non-Germans. So almost every conversation between 3 people had one english speak and was thus held in English.^^

malandrew 13y ago

"Maybe the Internet will change things further. Maybe one day the most important community you belong to will be a virtual one, and it won't matter where you live physically. But I wouldn't bet on it. I would say that this is somewhat the case already, it's just that recognition online doesn't translate to the real world. Many people in open-source community wield as much power as the CEOs in Silicon Valley. Depending on what you've open-sourced, you have power over the powerful. Linus Torvalds and the community he fostered for example is responsible for empowering many of the powerful in technology.

ptc 13y ago

I'll just leave this here: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

grey-area 13y ago
What a hateful, small-minded little diatribe.

Jd 13y ago

Here are some cities I've lived in: Tokyo, Xi'an, Harbin, Rome, Assisi, Florence, Jerusalem, Berlin, Munich, Lyon, Palo Alto, DC, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia My general assessment is that American cities feel more vibrant while European cities feel more sleepy. Cambridge is one locus of intellect for its own, perhaps the best left although I think American pragmatism chokes great thinking. For true intellectual engagement I think you have to poke around Europe and find the older generation of scholars and artists. As for Florence, pg should know folks like Pietro Annigoni that at least were keeping old traditions alive. Europe is in many ways like a very wonderful museum with a few old curators, but that old museum beats most new museums by a large margin.

jqm 13y ago

Interesting observations. I have noticed the inverse is also true (as a few posters have already pointed out). Some places just scream ignorance and sloth. But hey... do you want good conversation or good weather? If you do want good conversation how much is it worth to you? Enough to spend 50% of your income on housing? Sometimes being alone is where you get real thinking done. Not always, but often.

bane 13y ago

I grew up outside of DC and can probably say this about the city: Washington D.C. thinks of itself as the center of power of the entire universe. And in a lot of ways it is. But it's a weird city. Power in D.C. is indirect and complex. You can't really start at the bottom and work your way up to positions of extreme power (though it's a popular story)...hard ceilings are everywhere. To be clear, I'm not talking about the more or less irrelevant city government. The best way I can explain it is this, power in D.C. is build on a tripod. You must have all three of these things to be powerful: money, widespread popularity, and cunning (not intelligence). This is different than other cities, where elements of this tripod exist, but aren't necessary to be powerful in that city. For example, in NYC, money is sufficient to be powerful. But even billionaires have failed to attain power in D.C. In NYC political connections are useful for making more money, but aren't strictly necessary. In D.C. political connections are critical. In NYC, you have to have alpha-like mammal aggressiveness (not necessarily intelligence), but in D.C. it's reptile like cunning that's needed. You can draw different but similar differences with other cities and power. Power in D.C. is also incredibly transient and fickle. In theory, power in D.C. can accumulate to the point that a single individual can more or less wipe out all life on the planet, then just a couple years later has trouble keeping reporters off of his vacation property. It's a tower of power that's built on sands that shift so fast it makes the stock market look like a simple linear function. Everybody falls from power in D.C. It's the tallest tower there is, but the downward drop is inevitable. The key is making a soft landing when you do. That way you can take a "fall back" position to power in NYC on the board of an investment company or the Bay Area where you can become an Angel investor. But you'll notice that people who are really powerful in one place rarely move from where they know how to operate, and when they do, rarely gain positions of equivalent power in their new homes. They just operate differently. Throwing money around in D.C. might make you popular for a bit, but without cunning you'll just be that guy who throws lots of parties. It reminds me of the old saying "Rich is being a millionaire basketball player, Wealthy is being the guy who signs the checks" add to that "Powerful is the guy who proposed the bill that got turned into a law with teeth that regulated the NBA and bankrupted the wealthy owners."

sounds 13y ago
"cunning (not intelligence)" - well said. Intelligent people often think intelligence trumps cunning. Truth is, cunning people are very, very successful. Don't underestimate them. (I have.)

hawkharris 13y ago

I can relate to the intellectual energy that PG describes. Going to a high school in Cambridge, equidistant from Harvard and MIT, I used to feel intimidated by the city's collective brain power. It was the kind of place where confidence intervals are a subject for smalltalk and ads for genetic research are geared toward everyday commuters. I can't speak for everyone, but I think something interesting happens when you live in a place like Cambridge for several years. You start to feel less intimidated by the competition for knowledge. Don't get me wrong — you still try to keep up — but Cambridge begins to calibrate your ego. You realize that you're never going to be the smartest person in your domain, let alone every domain. For this reason I appreciate the city more as I get older, and I'm glad I moved back to work as a software dev.

manuelflara 13y ago

Loved the article and its key idea that big cities send some kind of message about what people living there care the most about. Barcelona's message is clearly "enjoy life".

wwweston 13y ago

"Every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you can read people's thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thoughts. What ever that majority thought might be- that word is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don't really belong there." - _Eat Pray Love_, Elizabeth Gilbert.

hnriot 13y ago

" in London you can still (barely) hear the message that one should be more aristocratic." spoken like a true tourist. that is just nonsense.

cperciva 13y ago
You know PG was born in England, right?

k0mplex 13y ago

Paul is describing an 80's New York. Paul doesn't use the word culture once in the essay. The word art only appears in reference to Europe and Paris. The strongest signal from New York is now much more about art, culture, and taste than about money.

midas007 13y ago
Perhaps he got an advance preview on that recent Scorsese movie. I had to turn it off after 10 minutes because it jumped the shark with attaboy puerility.
michaelochurch 13y ago
New York is all about money if you don't have it. Actually, it's about real estate and legacy. Until you own a genuinely nice place (those start around $4 million) it's about real estate. After that, it's about preschool and grade school and making sure your kids have the connections to make something of themselves. Once those are shored up, it's about taste and the arts. Not before then, though, and most people don't get that far.
msabalau 13y ago
New York has been about art and culture for a very long time. That's because the artists are, economically speaking, a courtier class, and the best way for them to thrive (and therefore the best way to surround yourself with fellow full time working artists) is the locate yourself near the people with money.

ilamont 13y ago

Where would London fit on your continuum?

zw123456 13y ago

Come to Seattle and learn about another dimension.

brenfrow 13y ago
What kind of things do you think Seattle is know for, or breeds?
- crucifiction 13y ago
  Marijuana and IPAs

doktrin 13y ago

This is an inspired, and inspiring, piece of writing. On a slightly snarky note, I always do appreciate a jab at DC, where I was both born and raised. It really is LA with bad weather and less attractive celebrities.

andy_ppp 13y ago

London would probably be "get on that fucking tredmill so you can buy a house you can't afford in an area you don't want to live, with a job you hate, to pay for a lifestyle you don't agree with".

disputin 13y ago
Precisely why I'm reading this post - in the hope of finding somewhere else. I was hoping there would be more mention of European cities.

lsc 13y ago

PG makes me want to move to Boston/Cambridge. And his summation of silicon valley sounds... almost sick. But then I review my own behavior, and perhaps I am motivated more by power than I like to think? I've always thought of the will to power, beyond power over yourself, as an ugly thing. But looking back at choices I've made? Yeah. I've wanted to change things. Even change things for others. And I've chosen power over money at several junctions. So, maybe I'm in the right place after all.

visakanv 13y ago
Will-to-power isn't ugly in of itself. It's what you do with it that counts. You can use it to support the weak and oppressed, you can use it to insure yourself and your loved ones (and more!) from damaging external stressors. Everybody wants more power, nobody wants less. Also, power-over-yourself is the most fundamental thing about will-to-power (in an enlightened sense). There's no point getting power over others if you have no power over yourself- then it's merely your appetites that have power over others, not you. As Da Vinci put, no man can have any dominion greater or lesser than over himself.
- lsc 13y ago
  >power-over-yourself is the most fundamental thing about will-to-power (in an enlightened sense). >There's no point getting power over others if you have no power over yourself- then it's merely your appetites that have power over others, not you. As Da Vinci put, no man can have any dominion greater or lesser than over himself. Yeah, now you are talking about a different kind of power, which is really a different and nearly unrelated thing. "Self control" or what have you. The ability to control and direct your mind and body. Sure, it's a great thing, and can be a great tool... but it's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the power to live where I want to live, and to be secure in my person and my property. To work when and as much as I want to. To obtain the goods and services I want. All of these things require convincing others to do things for me, which is to say, power over other people; so to have a reasonable degree of power over your own life, you need a reasonable degree of power over others.

OldSchool 13y ago

One thing I don't see in the article or discussed here is that (at least I believe) a sign of reaching maturity is that you don't need to define yourself by where you live. While these places can be helpful in achieving your goals, ultimately wherever you go, there you are.

waitwhat123 13y ago

I need to get out of new york :(

deleted 13y ago

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