How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Startup Communities | Hacker News Reader

How Early Exit Disease Stunts the Growth of Midwest Startup Communities

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58 pointsmtviewdave51 comments

Here's a Chicago Tribune story about Chicago's startup drain that was on the front page recently: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/globalcity/ct-global-city...

It seems the most important issue is the chicken-and-egg problem: Chicago doesn't have a large magnate company with lots of b/millionaire founders that then fund the ecosystem. Groupon was once thought to be just that company but hasn't turned out good.

The other problem seems to be plain and simple: being in the middle of nowhere doesn't help. From the article:

"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign turns out more engineering graduates than any U.S. school except the Georgia Institute of Technology, yet no tech scene has grown around it — or 140 miles north in Chicago. Fewer than half of these engineers remain in the state while 10 to 15 percent have gone to California in each of the past five years"

For a young person, there are many more opportunities to do sports (mountain biking, hiking, skiing, kayaking) in other places.

As a final point: Chicago, long the city of broad shoulders, is not famous for its counterculture, like Seattle or Portland is, so loses that chance for attracting people, too.

The only reason I'm still in the Chicago suburbs is because I work for a startup remotely.

Yes yes yes. I am from the Chicago burbs and a UIUC engineering alum ('09). Even though I would have preferred to move back to Chicagoland, there were simply not any relevant/compelling jobs in that area, or really anywhere else in the state. Around graduation, I got offers in several different states and inevitably moved. Most of my classmates - at least the ones who decided to continue with engineering after graduation - did the same.

ps - Chicago might not be famous for counter-culture, but it has amazing live comedy and various other fun cultural trends. It is a generally nice place to live and I would have preferred to move back after graduation, if there had been any good work for me there.

I think there is a real opportunity for companies to exploit the talent that is generated from Chicago and nearby universities.

Chicago doesn't just have Illinois, but UW Madison, Purdue, UMich, Northwestern, etc. The Midwest is churning out tons of qualified engineers.

And the cost and quality of life is dollar for dollar the best in America.

Also the engineering culture is more geared to industrial and mature technology companies and less to software. There are ton of engineers doing jobs that are vital but HN would probably consider boring. That might explain why there is less entrepreneurship. Engineers have work experience in and are exposed to industries that don't easily lend themselves to entrepreneurship.

Also, the work is bad. I recently took a look chicago's craigslist.

One machine learning job. For a company in Berkeley. The majority of java jobs were in CA [1]; of those remaining, perhaps one looked interesting. Rails has a similar story [2]. Indeed has a bit more stuff but the pickings are slim; lots of the jobs for eg rails are attempts at relos elsewhere. Of the jobs actually in Chicago, a common refrain is senior and/or 3-5 years of experience. Experience which seems hard to get in Chicago, so instead of getting people to stay, they need them to move back.

[1] http://chicago.craigslist.org/search/jjj?query=java

[2] http://chicago.craigslist.org/search/jjj?query=ruby+on+rails

[3] https://angel.co/salaries

It is interesting that you mention Portland there. Portland somehow doesn't seem to have the same serious intellectual culture that you see in the upper midwest (Chicago, Twin Cities, Wisconsin, Michigan). Silicon forest and fledgling start up scene notwithstanding, Portland doesn't have the educational institutions (UIUC, Chicago, Northwestern, U Mich, U Wisc, U Minn are all among the top STEM schools in the country) that the midwest offers. The lack of top universities in Portland is a bigger handicap than the locals would like to admit. It will be interesting to see if there are any long term trends that are likely to change this.

There are some pretty interesting jobs in Chicago. The third largest tech company in Chicago is HERE maps. As someone who has worked there in the past, it has by far the most interesting work in the city. Want to work on massive machine learning systems to process petabytes of data? Want to work on realtime systems for autonomous and connected cars? Like processing 3d LiDAR data? Like graph algorithms?

https://company.here.com/here/

It isn't a startup though. For startups people can check out http://www.1871.com/

Perhaps if the investors in these Midwest startups enabled founders to take some funds off the table from a round, it could help to alleviate this problem.

If founders have all the stress of low salary + not much savings + lots of work to do + maybe starting a family, of course a $10M exit starts to look good.

But if they're achieving good results, why not give the founders a small taste of the billion dollar carrot?

The article actually suggests this near the end, and discusses some reasons it doesn't happen currently.

I live in the Midwest and would happily consider living here long-term in order to work at jobs like these, except that the jobs are generally terrible. They don't pay well, even by lower-cost-of-living Midwest standards. Yet they do all of the same nonsense that companies do in larger urban areas: open-plan office layouts (even when private working space out here is much cheaper than the already cost-effective prices you'd pay for it in a city), Agile/Scrum crap, various over emphasized alcohol-based social functions, ping pong tables, etc.

Why would a talented person stay around here for that? Most of us who like it out here like it because it's different than Silicon Valley or New York, and it suits our preference better.

You're not going to win with the talented people in the Midwest if you just try to make it feel like Silicon Valley Jr. -- you have to be different, with a whole different ethos that's a bit more about the style of life here. Many people choose to live in the Midwest because they like having more personal space, they want to raise a family, they value frugality and consider cost-of-living carefully, they might possibly actually want to own property some day, and/or they just may not personally derive much value from urban amenities.

But I've never seen start-ups or tech businesses here aim at providing a kind of working life that affords these values. It's all still the same "work hard play hard" bullshit as if by making yet another app or something-as-a-service, we're going to become masters of the fucking universe or something.

That stuff is already stupid even in the urban tech hubs. It just comes off even dumber when you're farther away from the tech hubs.

At any rate, I question the article's claim that there's a talent problem in the Midwest. The problem isn't that there are no talented people. The problem is that companies are not providing the opportunity for a lifestyle that matches up with the values of someone who would prefer to live in the Midwest.

If I have to work a million hours, put up with aggressive deadline culture, deal with Agile/Scrum "sprint cycle" idiocy, and feign social interest in rock climbing while I code or joining the same people I've been working with for 10 straight hours at a bar for 2 more hours of trite conversation where I'll be judged by how much overt social signalling my alcoholic beverage of choice emits, then fuck it. I'm just going to move to a big city and demand a big city wage and career opportunities.

On the other hand, if you can give me what the big city folks can't, like say a private office where I can actually get work done and feel productive instead of listening to the person at the desk next to me chew potato chips, or you can provide me with a work environment where 40 hours is exactly all that's expected, and also is exactly what is rewarded (i.e. you encourage workers to have a substantial life outside of work), and I don't feel like you're just doing a bunch of stuff like whisky night and ping pong to try to affiliate with the cool kids in SV, then we could talk.

The hilarious thing is that the reason why open office spaces are popular in expensive real estate markets holds no water in the Midwest where there's ample space.

People just do it to cargo cult the woo-magic ideology of open office spaces without realizing that the marketing hoopla around that just exists to avoid saying "we do open office spaces to cram more people into less space and save money on furniture."

Actually, a lot of the book Peopleware was devoted to showing that even in dense urban areas it is still cost-effective to provide private office space for knowledge workers. What you spend on extra real-estate is easily more than made up for with increased productivity, less sick time, fewer superficial conversations, etc., even over times spans as short as 1 year.

I think even in large cities, open-plan madness is still cargo cult and more about fashion and subtle ageism than it is about the economic costs of real estate. There's also some weird patriarchal aspects of it too, especially in financial companies where the offices and workflow are almost engineered to be like a Panopticon. I always enjoyed reading Joel Spolsky on his choice to commit to having private offices even in Manhattan, both for Fog Creek and later for Stack Exchange.

I'm sure there are cases where a company is strapped for cash, or where they need to be located in an extremely expensive part of SF/Manhattan/London/etc. If someone really used hard numbers to justify it, I'd have no problem with it. But the problem is nobody's using numbers. It's about fashion, signalling, and control.

I worked for an established education technology company that had offices all over. They bought a fancy new loft space in the Boston area and decked it out just like a SV stereotype: glass whiteboards everywhere, bean bag chairs, video games, gourmet coffee. The open seating was awful -- you had about 4 lateral feet of personal space, and your computer monitor practically bumped into the monitor of your neighbor on either side. There was effectively zero privacy. It was even hard just put a notepad of paper on my desk-slice and try to draw some ideas or take notes.

The company actually spent money, like > $10MM, to renovate their Columbus, OH, office to look the same. They didn't even have an engineering presence in Columbus. The people there were all veteran employees mostly within the HR, business, and regional sales departments. They all had private offices for years and were extremely productive with them, and also felt they had earned the right to work in offices given that many of them had long tenures with the company.

And the company paid money to remodel the whole office. They actively destroyed privacy features that directly created productive and happy workers, and spent money to do so.

When I did my exit interview at the company, I spoke with one of those HR reps in Columbus and talked a lot about my frustration with the Boston office's open layout. She shared my sentiment and lamented how, at her age and her rank in the firm, it was extremely frustrating to be placed back into a fully open-plan office and have no privacy to conduct calls or spread out her work materials and get things done.

I asked her why the company chose to do it, and all she could say was that they had recently hired a new CTO for a major sub-division in the firm, and that CTO brought in sweeping changes that were meant to "modernize" the company, and specifically he decreed that all of the offices needed to be remodeled to have open-plan layouts because "that's what engineers want."

And this was in a huge company, where presumably these kind of remodeling choices would have to be debated by committees, face political opposition from other parts of the company, etc. It was just insane.

> Actually, a lot of the book Peopleware was devoted to showing that even in dense urban areas it is still cost-effective to provide private office space for knowledge workers. What you spend on extra real-estate is easily more than made up for with increased productivity, less sick time, fewer superficial conversations, etc., even over times spans as short as 1 year.

The typical retort to that around here is that group productivity matters more than individual productivity. I agree that the productivity of the group can be greater than the sum of the individual productivities of its members. No one has yet explained to me how lowering the sum of individual productivities leads to an increase in group productivity, though.

I hear this a lot too. All the research I've ever been able to find on the topic suggests the opposite. Teams become less productive when using open-plan style offices, not more productive.

But you'll never win that argument with a manager in a company that has decided to double down on open-plan layouts. If someone higher up is dogmatic about open-plan, then managers can't talk bad about open-plan or else they face career roadblocks. This gets funneled to HR, so then they create bullshit codewords like "team player" or "good cultural fit" that really just mean "someone who agrees to sublimate their natural need for privacy for no other reason than that we told them to."

The only thing you can do is rejection-sample employers until you find one of the rare ones where the upper management just happen to already share your views about offices and productivity.

It's also possible that employee productivity doesn't matter as much as the speculative price of the company's shares.

If the company's office plan looks like Google's, then surely they're going to generate earnings like Google one day. I don't think the analysis necessarily goes that much deeper than that.

We've gone from managerial pseudoscience of the early 20th century that attempted to measure and optimize productivity into full on mysticism that rests on vague notions of 'increasing opportunities for collaboration.' At least scientific management attempted to use quantitative analysis and empiricism to make employees more productive. In the new age, we just need vague slogans, beanbags, and chi consultants.

I definitely agree. This is why I almost always reject further interviews with a company that unnecessarily uses open-plan offices.

What bigger slap in the face can they give to a developer? They are basically saying, up-front in one of the earliest conversations they have with you, that your value to them is more determined by your ability to look like a good piece of office furniture than by the product of your software development labor.

Nah, the reason open-plan offices are popular in Silicon Valley is that SV has embraced a modern truism that the rest of the world recoils from: most of success is luck.

Open-plan offices optimize for luck (as in, chance encounters that spark new ideas) at the expense of pessimizing known, guaranteed, solid productivity. Most people won't be as effective in heads-down, concentration-required, focused, knowledge-based work in an open-plan office. But this is irrelevant: in today's economy, if you're doing something that anyone else knows how to do or that anyone else thinks is a good idea, you're a rounding error. The only work that generates any financial return is when you do something that everybody else considers too crazy to try and it works.

Open-plan offices in startups are usually because the founders hope that enough smart people in close proximity, dedicated to working on a problem, will manage to fill in the holes in the business plan that the founder didn't get to before they raised money. Open-plan offices in big companies are usually because management hopes that employees will generate the next big idea that keeps them from becoming obsolete.

There's a lot of cargo-culting going on too, and particularly in other parts of the country, people adopt the open-plan offices without the incentive structures, openness to new ideas, and ability to bring a product to market that allows companies to capitalize on it. But that's why Silicon Valley companies do it, at least.

Case in point, this company that is supposedly the "poster child" for the St Louis startup community.

http://www.stltoday.com/business/local/workers-play-and-play...

>The employees, most of whom started their workday at 8 a.m., were back at their workstations as the hour approached 8 p.m.

>And the catered breakfasts began last year as survival-mode nutrition for computer-coders who took to living at the office for weeks on end — one of them brought a basket of laundry and stayed 81 straight days — in a push to launch a new website.

Three digit alexa rank, that's not bad.

This is true in public policy, too. I live in St. Louis, where we're constantly chasing the tails of bigger cities and their neat, new bike-share-startup-trolley-incubator-green-space whatevers. And it'll never work. For St. Louis to ever have any hope of being cool, it needs to focus on the things that make St. Louis cool and give up on trying to be Chicago.

Indeed, lest our baseball team become the butt of a gambling joke in the Back to the Future franchise. (;

That said, absolutely this. However, I'll add one more thing: The projects that we see getting built seem like they're more tourist-oriented than geared toward improving the standard of living for the city's denizens.

Ultimately, I think the policy thing, especially surrounding the damnable tourist-oriented Loop Trolley, is going to be one of those "lots of dollars squandered while we try to re-learn how to make our city a sustainable (and safe) place to live, work, and play and not just visit" ordeals. That's really quite unfortunate, but the reasons are cultural: We Americans just don't like being told that we're wrong or that something is a bad idea.

"Oh yeah? Well, I'll show you." And then ridership doesn't meet projections, and those politicians wind up losing the Mandate of Heaven^W^W^Wnext election, and then we get the same thing all over again.

It's funny. Not too far off is Madison county, and as far as a semi-rural county goes, I think they actually got the whole infrastructure development thing (more) right (than most urban Midwestern areas). Trails to rails, gradual "nicening" of facilities (i.e., implicit bus stops at intersections to explicit signage to full-out bus shelters), lots of green space between communities, more encouragement to build tighter towns and cities that don't sprawl all over the place, etc.

I found using MCT for the six years that I lived up that way to be on par with, normalized for density, biking Berlin and riding the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe's buses and trains when I last visited there. That's pretty hard to pull off, and it was readily apparent that those were facilities meant to be used by the folks who lived there, not as a vehicle for tourism.

> The problem isn't that there are no talented people.

You're right, there are tons of talented people in the midwest. The problem I saw over & over was there's no incentive to learn something new when the majority of openings are Java and Drupal shops. I saw so much quiet desperation at the meetups I attended. These people would jump on any chance to break out of their bubbles and learn something new. But if startup founders want someone who can hack on their Scala codebase from day one like they'd find in the Valley, that's not going to happen. Everyone already optimized for the available work.

(And your other comments are spot-on too)

This is definitely true ... and there are a lot of little hubs (like the defense work opportunities near Wright-Patterson in Dayton) that perpetuate this problem by doubling down on "enterprise" solutions.

As a scientific Python and Haskell developer myself, it has been exasperating trying to find anything in the Midwest. I have heard good things about some of the stuff popping up in Pittsburgh, but thus far nothing over than has panned out either.

It's a tough one: there are a lot of great cities out here to live in, like Madison, St. Louis, Evanston/Chicago, Ann Arbor, and Pittsburgh just to name a few. But when I go looking for job opportunities that have any slight relevance on my skill set, there's just nothing here. ... Illiquid market problems.

I have recently started thinking about Yinzerville myself. I'm particularly interested in trying to parlay my defense radar experience into that Radar Engineer role at Uber...

> As a scientific Python and Haskell developer myself, it has been exasperating trying to find anything in the Midwest.

If you ever get out to Boston, drop me a line. I'd love to talk Chicago-style pizza & functional programming.

I lived in Boston for a long time, > 8 years. I actually just left there over the summer b/c the job market was so poor. I interviewed top to bottom. I worked in a finance company there after I finished grad school there, and I left and worked remotely (from Cambridge) for a Python-focused start-up, then left that to do functional programming for an ed tech company. I couldn't deal with how little professional engineering actually happened in these jobs, and I searched and searched for jobs in the area, but found nothing reasonable.

I'm still actively looking in Boston, and would enjoy living at least in New England (my dream job would be something about functional programming but located in Burlington VT (I know... dream on...)).

But I will say I was very disappointed with the Boston job market. It superficially seems like there's a lot there, but so much of it is open-plan office marketing fluff crammed into Agile-heavy incubator spaces, which I don't consider to be real jobs. Sigh.

the solution is to work remote if you want a higher salary and to keep your lifestyle. our best employees and contractors are in places like texas and ohio and we're based in california and pay above-market salaries becausd we're small.

for what it's worth there are companies in large coastal cities that do not match the SV mold. you just have to be extremely upfront and non-yielding with your requirements when seeking them out/interviewing.

as far as the smarmy office bullshit, i can't stand any of that stuff either, although i do enjoy a lot of urban amenities like restaurants and the general feeling of anonymity.

> the solution is to work remote if you want a higher salary and to keep your lifestyle.

Easier said than done. Most companies that hire remote either want someone who has worked remotely before or "will make an exception for an exceptional candidate". That's a pretty high bar for someone struggling just to stay relevant.

The correct strategy I'd advise these days with my own experience being the caveat is that one should try to get as far along in a career as possible as early as possible anywhere that jobs may be and then only start to think about quality of life and all that other jazz that occurs outside these hubs once you can command the terms of your employment with any prospective employer.

It is far, far harder to get as far with the abundance of technically-lackluster non-amibitous 9-to-5 lifestyle companies that are abundant outside hubs on one's resume despite being very talented otherwise and to land one of these remote jobs for prestigious, highly ambitious coastal city companies making tons of headlines and making lots of people rich. Most of these non-ambitious culture companies are extremely caste-oriented and culturally tend to value tenure at a company or non-employment factors like veteran status to technical proficiency or even experience in management and individual contributor alike. These are the companies that people like to talk a lot about what "things used to be like" in political debates where people stayed employed for 10-20 years and employees almost have a family-like relationship to each other rather than drinking buddies relationship.

There's some merits to this kind of culture and approach to life but it's something I think only works for some people long-term and perhaps even then only at a certain stage of life and it's in your best interest to understand what kind of culture you really do want NOW and to be honest to yourself about what kind of sacrifices / trade-offs you are willing to accept.

You are pretty unlikely to go from rags-to-riches founding a tech company in Tulsa, OK as an extremely smart, ambitious person with a lot of capital (not rags anymore though, catch-22) around unfortunately unless you can cart around a small army of loyal, dedicated workers that want to keep working with you ahead of their own personal interests to oh... not live in Oklahoma (no offense to OK, just an example). It may work in industries with much longer timelines for success than tech such as restaurants perhaps, but even among ambitious chefs they tend to go to areas where they can compete and learn among the most well-regarded before opening their own restaurants.

i should probably add that all these people are in the 35-55 year old range. we're not paying 25 year old kids to work remotely, because i know for a fact that doesn't work.

Absolutely. I'd love to hear a solution that doesn't involve putting in 4 hours a night into an Open Source project, after finishing my 9-hour day job. That's not very feasible for someone with kids.

> Many people choose to live in the Midwest because they like having more personal space

I've been in the bay area for about a year now and this hits on what has been by far the hardest part of the transition for me, and what will eventually drive me away.

Things are so congested and crowded that it feels like some sort of dystopian novel. And there's also this weird subliminal cultural value that people actually like it. I get judged when I suggest to people that continually waiting in line for basic necessities is maybe a shitty way to live, and that it'd be kind of nice to open my window and not look directly into my neighbor's window. Having come from a very rural upbringing, it's hard to not feel like an outsider.

The rest of your analysis is spot on in my experience too. Some of the most talented people I know live in Nebraska because they want to be close to family. And while the cost of housing is drastically lower, companies also tend to not pay very well at all - and the successful ones instantly try to emulate SV culture instead of having the confidence to be themselves and embrace their own local culture.

In one year's time you have observed well and grown wise. I moved to the Bay Area 18 years ago -- I share those observations and agree very much with your conclusions.

> ...weird subliminal cultural value that people actually like it. I get judged when I suggest...

Yeah there's a bit of a cult to the place, for sure. I guess it requires believing in the Unicorns that the author of the OP alluded to.

> Some of the most talented people I know live in Nebraska because they want to be close to family.

Yes, and in my experience I find the much of the best talent I know in my clients' businesses in Southfield Michigan and in Japan (auto tech. industry), and for similar reasons -- strong family ties.

Thanks. It's been a rough few weeks and it helps to hear that I'm not the only one who feels this way.

Where do you live? Minnesota here. One factor I'd agree with is the pay issue. I see local startups and post-startups with lovely websites showing their cool workspaces and how much people love working there. But then you find out during the interview process that they pay like $75-80k for people with 5 years of experience and 100k for 10 years. Sorry, but at that salary level I'll stay at an engineering company, even though the culture/work isn't as 'awesome'. And the bad part is that since the number of high-tech employers isn't that large, they don't have any problems filling their ranks with people apparently happy with these salaries.

I once looked at software jobs at Indiana University a few years ago. Take a look at their current published salary docs.

Level descriptions: http://www.indiana.edu/~uhrs/salary/level_guides/LG-IT-systd...

Salary ranges: http://www.indiana.edu/~uhrs/salary/pa-ranges-201516.html

If you prefer not to click, I'll summarize:

  Entry level: $41-53k/yr
  Junior: $53-69k/yr
  Senior: $69-90k/yr
  Tech Manager: $90-117k/yr
  Tech Executive: $103-134k/yr

I would literally need to be the manager of an entire department to earn more there than I do now, as a lowly worker peon. In Alabama.

Every last person working there now must have already explicitly decided, "I am never, ever, ever moving anywhere else." I politely extricated myself from the interview process, offering the feedback that their salary ranges are not competitive.

The talent is available. But it just isn't going to sell itself to the lowest bidder.

I think Midwesterners are just too conservative for a startup scene to take root here. Venture capital, computers in general even are too new of ideas to depend on. We're used to industries springing up around us, then running away to China or California, so investing in a 10-year plan when the next market crash could destroy the industry utterly seems kind of stupid.

Besides, as the article said, $10M is more than enough to look down on your neighbors for the rest of your life, what more benefit could $10B give you?

Well, conservative's a hard call. It's not so conservative that startups or new businesses are impossible, and it's not like everyone you encounter socially will look befuddled at you if you claim to be working for yourself. It's still the US here, and not some culture completely unfamiliar with the entire concept of working for yourself.

It's just that if you ask anyone around here "Would you like $5 million now, or a chance at an unknown percentage of somewhere between $5 billion and $0 in 10 years?", even the entrepreneurial types are going to take that first one most of the time.

Interesting thought: $5million is totally "f you" money around here in the Midwest; that's retire instantly for a fairly nice lifestyle, plus a quite healthy buffer. In Silicon Valley, that's still nothing to sneeze at, but it'll certainly seem like a lot less; a lot more people for your monkey brain to see around you that are still richer, a lot of single houses that can soak up that entire fortune and more, etc. You could retire instantly, but you'll have a lot more pulling you away. I wonder if that has any influence in the results?

And of course there's also the fact that anyone who won't settle for anything less than the % at billions above will move to Silicon Valley. There's a lot of places in the world where you can make a successful startup, sometimes HN even has articles pointing that out, but there's not very many places you can get the rocket-powered VC capital to either grow a unicorn horn or die trying.

When I read articles like this, all I can think about is Pretty Woman. When the main character laments, "What do we do? We don't make anything." And the response, "We make money."

I don't care for the culture of start-sell-repeat.

This hits close to home. I am a software developer in Grand Rapids, Mi and we have a so so burgeoning startup scene here.

We have a couple incubators here but they are not particularly great and their money is expensive with few useful benefits. We have a decent concentration of software developers in town. Cheap office space and ok rents make boot strapping a bit easier. But like everywhere else we don't have nearly enough software developers here on the founders need to start scaling. I can think of a number of companies in town that are having problems due to a lack of devs.

But at least we have large tech meetup scene that likes to share.

YC used to do one batch in CA and one out east each year. I see they've moved both summer and winter to the west coast now. Was it that hard to get established in two places that even they couldn't do it?

It was because Paul and Jessica were having a kid, and it's disruptive to a child (not to mention quite a hassle) to shuttle between two coasts every 6 months. Palo Alto won out as the nice neighborhood to raise a family in. When YC discontinued the Boston SFP, it was still largely run by the original founders and didn't have many (any?) additional partners.

Exactly echos complaints about the New Zealand startup scene. The catch phrase here is "The three B" meaning Boat, Bach (holiday house) and BWM. Lots of founders sell out for just $10-$30 million which sets them up nicely but often means the startup/product gets buried inside a big company and jobs move overseas

I know multiple amazing developers in the midwest. They work remotely for bay area companies.

This also explains why nobody in the Midwest values academia, value isn't imminent unlike hauling around rocks.

What is your threshold for valuing academia?

what are you talking about

People in Midwest, I lived there from aged 0-22, value tangible things with present day value.

Here's some fantastic examples of my home state, Kansas, "valuing" academia:'

[Kansas school funding cuts mean summer comes uncomfortably early: Governor Sam Brownback’s $51m budget cut affects at least eight districts and thousands of students as he ‘experiments’ with reducing income tax](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/05/kansas-educat...)

[Budget cuts would cost largest Kansas school districts $67M](http://fox4kc.com/2015/06/09/budget-cuts-would-cost-largest-...)

It has been a shameful year for Kansas, and with teachers all up my family line, my heart goes out to all those families and teachers who are affected by these cuts, let alone the long reaching impacts to those students who have had their education cut short, literally.

The simple explanation for this phenomenon: bad founders tend to sell early (if they succeed at all).

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