Ask HN: Second-Best City to move for startups | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Second-Best City to move for startups

I'm going to move this year from rural America to somewhere that is much more startup-friendly.

For the sake of a lot of things: taxes, cost-of-housing, congestion, state debt, etc -- I am not moving to SV.

So. Where's the next best place for a guy with a family to move that has lots of tech-savvy people, a good community of investors, readily-available bandwidth, potential college interns, and the cost of living is low?

I'm thinking Austin. Anybody have a better place?

View on HN

Boston meets all your criteria, except for cost of living.

If you live in New Hampshire (like I do) you can commute to pretty much any place other than Boston proper, and reduce your COL significantly. And even that, I worked in Cambridge for a while and it was manageable if I avoided peak rush hour times.

The majority of the startup activity isn't IN Boston anyway, it's in the general beltway between 495 and 128.

Boston was a very, very close second place.

My feeling was that I could get out into the cheap countryside much easier in Austin, the cost of housing was generally much, much cheaper, and the traffic, bad as it was, wasn't up to par with the Boston area.

I'd love to hear reasons why I missed something.

I'm a 15-minute walk from Davis Square, where the subway is, and my rent is only $425 / month.

Not only is Boston the #2 city by number of startups:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/06/startup-centers.ht...

It's the #1 city by number of universities. It's really a fantastic place with a terrific startup scene, and one that's still growing and getting more connected.

The Davis Square area is certainly very nice, I lived in it for the last half-dozen or so years of my stay in the Boston area (late '80s-very early '90s), but there's no way a family is going to fit into a $425/month apartment that's anywhere near it.

For the criteria of taxes, cost-of-housing, congestion, state debt and general cost of living the Boston area is just plain bad and as far as I know getting worse.

Commuting from southern New Hampshire isn't a great option either, the cost of living there is still pretty high and unless you can do it off peak it's very congested. And there are a lot of tasty startups in Cambridge, you'd need to have a commute to there be practical.

While I believe there's a big separation from the Boston area to the next largest startup areas in the nation, I think Daniel's criteria that rule out SV also rule out it, although not as strongly.

We moved to Austin to benifit from the much better tax structure and lack of red tape when operating compared to California. Texas is very business freindly on purpose. They focus on it, and so far seem to be doing a pretty good job of it.

Austin is a nice place and the people are very nice, but in the summer the humidity and heat gets pretty bad. Too bad its not right on the ocean like California or Seattle.

Atlanta. It's a huge metro with a fairly low cost of living. Fair winter weather (no snow) and the summers are alright too. Lots of smart kids from Georgia Tech, plenty of security-related startups, lots of finance companies, etc. I also recently learned of an early stage tech statup seed funding firm based here (Shotput ventures).

Dallas!!! Our startup community has grown like crazy over the past year and just keeps getting better! We have cool stuff going on like ShopSavvy, Traxo, Swingly, Woopra and more! Check out http://launchdfw.com as well. feel free to ping me directly if you want to chat about it.

I think Seattle is one of the top 3-4 cities for startups (in the US).

As far as your criteria go, cost-of-housing etc. is going to be much lesser than SV, but much more than Austin. No state income tax, just a sales tax. Traffic congestion is pretty bad. Business pay 1.5% of total revenue (not profit) as B&O taxes to the state.

Like the other top cities for tech-startups, heavily liberal in terms of politics. I vaguely remember reading some report that said that Seattle had a higher percentage of college-grads than every other major city in America. evergreen forests nearby, "you can ski in the morning and sail in the evening" is how my Microsoft recruiter described Seattle to me in the 90s :)

It should be noted that there's a serious effort to institute an income tax in Washington state.

It's probably hard to predict the likelihood of success, but today we can safely say it'll happen a lot sooner there than in Texas.

The gross receipts business tax is obviously necessary to capture money from Boeing in years it's not profitable, and didn't hurt eternally profitable Microsoft when it moved there (from Arizona, the home of the personal computer), but it can be a real pain for a not yet profitable startup and obviously raises the level for ramen profitability.

Austin and Boulder are definitely active cities as far as Startups. NY and Boston are great too but living costs are pretty expensive.

Some years back, I knew someone with a hacker career who bought one of those "Best Places" books and used the CD that came with it to do some custom searches for someplace low cost, high tech. Much to their frustration and chagrin, no matter how they tweaked it, the results showing low cost places with good opportunities for high tech jobs strongly favored Texas.

Obviously, the data is old. But I would think Texas is still your best bet for family-friendly prices and access to the tech scene. The state is quite large, so there are several large cities you could look at. All you would need to do would be to confirm this general trend, then check out which of the larger cities had the other factors you are looking for. (I personally would avoid Houston. It's horribly polluted. But that's just me.) So I don't think Austin is a bad idea at all.

Good luck with this.

EDIT: You can do some city comparisons here for free: http://www.bestplaces.net/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com