Sorry, Chicago but Peter Thiel Is Mostly Right | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, Chicago but Peter Thiel Is Mostly Right

chicagobusiness.com

61 pointsbarry-cotter84 comments

I moved from DC to Chicago and I love it here. I don't know where Thiel is getting his data but there are a lot of talented ambitious people in Chicago doing amazing things. To me going to New York or Silicon Valley is akin to the goldrush. Their is a lot of competition, nowhere to live, and lots of sheisty people that want to rob you or make you work for free for them. Thanks but no thanks.

Chicago has contributed immensely to the tech world. For example, Ruby on Rails was built by engineers from Chicago based company. And I know for fact there are a lot of rails apps powering Silicon Valley and NY.

I guess my point is that there are smart engineers everywhere and its more up to your own individual drive how far you go. Good thing about Chicago is that's it cleaner and cheaper than San Fran or NY so I'll take my chances.

Chicago has some good stuff going on! Been in the scene since 2008 so I've seen the whole change happen.

http://www.technori.com - is older than 1871 and much more community oriented. http://hf.cx - is opening a Chicago CO-OP here.

We have some great tech groups: http://chipy.org http://www.chicagotechslack.com/ http://womentechfounders.com/

> Ruby on Rails was built by engineers from Chicago

Interesting, but do you have any examples of positive contributions to the tech world?

Please take your bad attitude elsewhere.

> Ruby on Rails was built by engineers from Chicago

Interestingly, Django also started in the midwest. Starting in Kansas[0] and then growing up in Chicago.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130301193540/http://www.django...

> Ruby on Rails was built by engineers from Chicago based company

Sorry to be pedantic, but...

First, RoR has a BDFL based in Chicago (originally from DK), but is an open source project built and maintained from people all over the world.

Second, the amount of wealth created by companies in NYC/SV leveraging RoR is easily in the billions (not real math, but back of the napkin).

The reality is that this isn't a black/white issue, but one with a whole lot of grey area and a VC speaking hyperbolically in an attempt to executing content marketing[0]. Let's move along and let the market dictate the reality, shall we?

[0] - http://avc.com/2016/08/understanding-vcs/

To be even more pedantic, but ...

The original version of Ruby on Rails was pulled from Basecamp. The work was originally for Basecamp, and done by engineers working on Basecamp.

While at this point in its life Rails is no longer mainly developed and organized by people in Chicago, it definitely was built by engineers from a Chicago-based company.

And, DHH has at times been pretty explicit that Rails still takes cues from Basecamp's needs from a framework.

> While at this point in its life Rails is no longer mainly developed and organized by people in Chicago, it definitely was built by engineers from a Chicago-based company.

But it wasn't even originally developed by people in Chicago. That's my point.

After graduating from the Copenhagen Business School and receiving his bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Business Administration, Hansson moved from Denmark to Chicago, Illinois, U.S. in November 2005.[0]

The first commit for rails was November 2004: https://github.com/rails/rails/graphs/contributors?from=2004...

All other commits in the first year were from people in Utah, Arizona, Chicago and New Zealand.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson

San Francisco is a pit, go south into the Bay Area. Much Better.

I pick my locales by homicide rates. Chicago and Sf both suck.

Areas of Chicago suck. The majority of Chicago is great, and generally very safe. (It also doesn't reek of garbage and urine like Manhattan).

You're pretty safe, maybe safer than national metropolitan cities in Chicago if you don't go to certain areas, such as the generalized west and south sides. Even then, the violence is even more localized than those generalizations.

Yes, homicides in the city limit are the worst in the US. Work in the loop? Probably will never have a problem (I think homicides in the Loop are like 1% or less of the city total). Last I can think of that wasn't at a festival in Grant Park was a murder/suicide where a white-collar employee shot his boss then offed his self a few years back). I worked in the Loop between 2004 and February of this year and I never had a single time where I even felt threatened. I never even got mugged, even while stumbling obviously drunk to the Metra. The Loop is very heavily patrolled.

The real homicide problems are in the very poor neighborhoods on the west and south sides well away from the financial district/Loop. Gentrification in the last 15-20 years has pushed those neighborhoods even further away from the Loop.

In short, homicide's not the big problem it seems in Chicago (yes, it's a problem - but not a city-wide problem - it's a neighborhood issue).

Homicides in Chicago are not "the worst in the US". We should be more numerate than this. Chicago has a lot of murders --- it's fair to point this out in comparing cities, because the city management needs to be accountable for the human rights catastrophe occurring on the south and west sides.

But the number that matters experientially is the per capita rate, and on that scale, Chicago proper doesn't even rank in the top 20. It's a huge city, more than 3x larger than SF.

The Brennan center projection for Chicago's 2016 per capita rate is 26.6 per 100,000 people per year. I believe that is well within the top 20.

Do you reason differently? My understanding is that you live in Chicago.

It's in the top 5 for large cities, depending on how you define that (ie: is STL included?). It's not in the top 20 for cities period. I don't know if it shoots back up to the top for metro statistical areas (the Chicago MSA captures a lot of populous, virtually-no-crime suburbs, and then 4-5 of the worst places in the country, like Gary).

If you pick your locales by homicide rate, you should perhaps consider emigrating.

San Francisco was 45 homicides per 100,000 for 2014. San Jose was 32.

Kansas City was 78. Denver was 31. Dallas was 116. These were picked kinda randomly.

I think you're reading your numbers wrong - San Francisco had 5.3 murders per 100,000 people in 2014 (45 in total [1]).

[1] http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-San-Francisco-Californi...

Doh. Thank you.

Are you sure that isn't per million?

Because Wikipedia says that the rate for the USA as a whole is 3.9/100,000

Approximately the mish-mash of status-seeking claims you'd expect from someone who includes in the text of their essay that they were "simply smarter than most people in college" and "even at Accenture I basically just had more horsepower to throw at problems than most", while in NYC they're "constantly around people who are at least as smart as I am, if not smarter." [em: mine].

One gets the sense that had they moved to Toledo, instead of reading about Zuckerberg we'd be reading about the vital importance of Works Progress Administration architecture.

Influence in industry and culture doesn't scale linearly with city population. That's a banal observation. But not a single HTML tag can be left unspent in the quest to generate the thinkiest think-piece pretending instead that the observation is clever or far-reaching.

He's a consultant. It's a profession where measuring a city by HYPS grads per square mile doesn't seem weird.

Chicago (and the surrounding area up to Milwaukee) has a long history in manufacturing and machining, and I think we're squandering that advantage. That, or the expertise has been laid off and/or evaporated and it's just not available any more.

The academic environment literally has no idea how to integrate with this community, especially UIllinois. That comes with a bit of a bias - I'm an alumnus - and I honestly feel UI, especially Champaign/Urbana, is a basket case when it comes to outreach with industry. Or ask pmarca if you don't want to believe me.

I take Uptake (Chicago industrial IoT unicorn, http://uptake.com/) as a positive case of Chicago's tech scene embracing the area's manufacturing strengths.

I'm heavy in IoT projects and I'm wary of Uptake. Can't put my finger on it - maybe it's the extremely high sizzle-to-steak ratio. Or maybe just because I see everyone scammed by Groupon falling for it all over again.

I see groups like 640/Climate putting their shoulders into it and doing heavy work. I look at Uptake and see a floor of marketing reps.

I graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology. IIT, with UIC (University of Illinois at Chicago) had a lot of community outreach programs to get students to commit to community service. It sometimes worked, sometimes didn't. One of the programs I helped out in was to repaint the public spaces of the public housing near campus and do some basic repairs. Alot of it, at the time, amounted to painting over graffiti in the common spaces, fixing hinges on gates, etc.

As far as industry outreach, I felt IIT did a pretty good job. I can't speak to UIC or UI. I worked on research projects as an undergrad sponsored by industry interests. If we needed a dev kit or some low dollar product from a local industry manufacturer (such as Motorola), there wasn't usually an issue getting it gratis.

Champaign is really not culturally affiliated with Chicago. It's about the same distance from Chicago as it is from Indianapolis or St. Louis.

The quality and ambition of the CS programs at Chicago and Northwestern are I think more important pressure points for the tech scene here. But: I wouldn't want to concede that the Chicago tech scene is a real problem.

As a Chicago resident, my first reaction is to rebel against this.

Why do they call out Harvard-Princeton-Yale, when US News ranks University of Chicago higher than Yale(1). The Chicago area has 2 schools in the top twenty, I only count one in NYC and one in the bay area. And I see many other top 20 schools in "flyover country". Coasts have no monopoly on world-class academia.

How bout fortune 500 company headquarters? San Fransisco gets the prestige of tying with Milwaukee and Cincinnati in 6th, while Chicago is 5th and Houston is 2nd (to NYC at first).

Facebook may be the largest social network in the world, and that's great for San Fransisco. But that doesn't give them a monopoly on talent. We have tons of impact here too, for example the biggest restaurant chain in the world (McDonald's) is headquartered in metro-Chicago. If you want to see power in the restaurant space, that's where to look (sorry if it's not sexy enough for you).

Chicago's GDP is 50% greater than San Fransisco's (3).

O'hare airport has 50% more flights than San Fransisco, and 10% more international travelers(4). Why does the less global city have more international travelers?

So in summary: we have better educational institutions, more large companies, a higher GDP, and are more physically connected to the world than San Fran. Just because we're not the cool kid on the block doesn't mean we aren't as powerful as you San Fran.

That all said, idk, they might be right. The people I hear about on TV do tend to be on the coasts, and a lot of the super succesful people do seem to end up working on a coast eventually.

(1)http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/... (2)http://www.metroatlantachamber.com/docs/default-source/resou... (3)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP (4)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_pa...

Talent is different from ambition. He was talking about ambition, not talent. You can have neither, either, or both.

Yes. A talented person does not necessarily feel compelled to achieve maximum career success.

there are plenty of people in si who dont have dick to show for their years there (other than real estate nowhere near their place of work)

I'm from Chicago suburbs, but worked in the city this summer. I agree 100% with Thiel. I'm trying _very_ hard to not have to work in the city when I graduate in December. I believe the passion just isn't here from the small sample of software engineers that I interacted with. I might be extremely naive to say that. I think evidence would support my theory such as there not being very many interesting startups in Chicago. Only a select few that I've heard of that I would want to work at. Chicago seems to be dominated by Finance.

Startups are hobbies in Chicago. Leave or work remotely if you want to work for one.

Source: I lived in Chicago most my life, and worked for two startups there. I now work for a Bay Area startup remotely.

Sounds about like my life path.

Agree that startup scene in Chicago isn't that awesome. I mean groupon back in the day realllly wanted to talk to me, but the business model wasn't so great.

The cool tech that I found in Chicago was finance.. the finance scene was pretty cool... but maybe not the ideal industry to spend your life in.

> The cool tech that I found in Chicago was finance.. the finance scene was pretty cool... but maybe not the ideal industry to spend your life in.

Definitely. The cool fintech in Chicago (not traditional fintech mind you) were the HFT/prop trading shops. Tech skills needed, with I-banking work environment provided (think seedy sort of things transpiring).

Well CME was cool in a few teams (heya match engine team).

I experienced this in the DC area. Few people I met were motivated. Everyone has an easy paycheck from their government contracts. Sure, great, smart, motivated people are there but I found them to be rare.

It's a comfy life, but if you have dreams bigger than being a project manager for a large defense contractor then it's not a great place to be.

While that may be true for some/most startups in Chicago, the startup I work for, M1 Finance, is definitely looking for people passionate about building a great product and company: https://www.m1finance.com/.

It's hard to have a reasoned discussion about cities because there's so much ego tied up in your decision of where to live. People don't want to feel like they've made the wrong decision, so they'll say bad things about other cities to rationalize their choice.

I moved to SF from Chicago about five years ago, and on the whole it's been an improvement for me. The comp increase more than made up for the cost of living difference, I have a stronger network of classmates from college, and there are more job opportunities. Certainly if you want to quickly grow a tech company to 100+ people, it will be much easier here than in Chicago. Outside of work, there are many outdoors activities (cycling, hiking, surfing) that aren't easy to access in Chicago. There's no snow and no suffocating summer. There's plenty to be cynical about, but that's true in any big city.

What I miss about Chicago is knowing people with a more diverse set of professions, being closer to family on the east coast, and having a more moderately-priced restaurant and bar scene. Things generally feel more relaxed in Chicago because the cost of living is lower. A downside is that Chicago tends to draw mostly Midwesterners, so as an east-coaster I actually know far more people in Seattle and SF than I did in Chicago (if you're from Iowa, Wisconsin, etc, then you'll probably find the opposite to be true).

I have a tendency to get enamored with cities I visit, or miss cities that I used to live in, so my trick is to try and spend time doing things that are specific to where I live. After moving to SF I started hiking and visiting wineries and eating Mexican food. If I moved back to Chicago I might start jogging on the lakefront again, or going to more improv shows and brewpubs. At any rate, it's a bit more enjoyable of a way to feel like you've made the right choice on where to live than bad-mouthing other cities.

I think a lot of folks are misreading the author. The author isn't saying that people in Chicago are dumb. He's saying that talented people who move for ambition are moving primarily to New York and SF, and this is causing concentrations of intelligent and ambitious people to reside there.

Is he? Did I misread the section about how he was smarter than most people at Indiana University, and only now that he's arrived amongst his kind in NYC does he feel himself adequately matched by his peers?

Wait, I forgot, he's an admirer of Thiel's. Maybe it was just an aside about the pointlessness and futility of college.

Maybe if you didn't live in Chicago, you could figure this out!

When software development is automated away and developers go the way of Milwaukee's tool and die engineers and everyone moves back to the Great Lakes region to get access to our vast reserves of fresh water, I'm really going to lord threads like these over them.

I think this is largely just "location, location, location." For some reason there is this innate draw to major population centers of a certain "type" and it's forms a self reinforcing feedback loop. I think the term for it is network effect.

What I think is silly is people fall for it every time. Do a large number of successful startups come out of SF and NYC? Yes. Does everyone who moves there get to participate in one? No.

Even if you are a super-genius, with good looks, a good sales pitch, and ooze charisma, you still may not make it.

Yes, ambitious people go to these tech "Meccas" but I don't think it really increases any one individual person's chance of making it big.

I think the saddest part of it all, is even whilst living in the most connected age that has ever existed, we still find location so important.

"Yes, ambitious people go to these tech "Meccas" but I don't think it really increases any one individual person's chance of making it big."

How can this be true if you admit a large number of startups come out SF or NYC?

I don't understand your question. Imagine 70% of entrepreneurs head to SF or NYC because they've heard that that's what you do. Further imagine location has no influence on anyone's chances of success.

By construction, 70% of successes come out of SF or NYC despite the fact that being in SF or NYC is unhelpful. Large number in -> large number out. "A large number of startups come out of SF or NYC" is guaranteed by the premise you're questioning, "ambitious people go to these tech 'Meccas'". It's about as far from a contradiction as you can get.

Every so often there'll be a story about how there's a thing that "doubles" your risk of some type of cancer. Which turns out to mean your chance goes from 0.0000001% to 0.0000002%.

In much the same way, moving to SF may "double" your chance of winning the startup lottery. And buying two actual lottery tickets gives you twice as many chances of winning the jackpot.

If there's 20x the number of startups and 20x the number of workers, the individual odds shouldn't change.

Digital interactions are still mere shadows of real world interactions, and will remain so fover long time.

The Chicago tech scene is simply smaller than the Valley and New York scenes. Theres plenty of pockets of talent and ambition.

Thiel's point is interesting when juxtaposed against the fact that the vast majority of population growth in the US is happening outside New York and San Francisco. New York grew 5% from 2010-2015. Atlanta grew 10%. Austin grew 18%.

If there is an increasing concentration of big thinkers in New York and San Francisco, then what you're really seeing is a geographic stratification of the country. The elite are moving from the population growth areas and consolidating where the other elite already live.

juxtaposed

iOS will aggressively auto-correct wufe to wide,[1] but somehow didn't catch that.

[1] Autocorrect should never insert "wide" as a replacement--for any letter sequence--in a message to your wife.

Can this article please stop conflating San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

I think San Francisco is used here as a synecdoche for the Bay Area at large.

It shouldn't. People need to realize that, geographically, San Francisco is not a valley.

Not only that, but most of the tech companies in SF that are known for being in SF are selling web services and apps, not computers and hardware.

The term Silicon Valley comes from the South Bay region where there are a number of enormous hardware and computing companies.

SF should be called "App Hills". That would actually make sense.

Yeah... no kidding. Everyone on his list didn't work out of SF.

I wonder what he would say about Toronto.

Toronto is much different from Chicago in respect to the technology scene. Being Canada's biggest, and primary city for tech, there is a lot of passion and motivation to make concentrated in the community their. And the University of Waterloo is a mere hour drive away from Toronto and has been a major feeder school to tech companies for ages now. I visited Toronto for a hackathon in April and was amazed by the amount of companies in the area as well as the organizations that supports technology. Can't say the same about Chicago.

But Thiel doesn't really target tech workers, he makes a more general observation, and its also valid for Toronto. If are smart and ambitious enough you shouldn't stay in Toronto.

This is ridiculous. If you're Canadian and are smart and ambitious enough, you would move to Toronto.

Pretty much my entire graduating class in Canada moved to the US immediately upon graduation.

Drake would like a word with you.

from his perch in Hidden Hills?

Toronto is certainly growing and certainly the most ambitious and challenging city in Canada. However it's not near the level of Bay Area or even NYC for tech. There's a small community that you can be a part of but the general feeling of energy isn't there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikkRm0Y6yLE

LA is on on point with New York as well for tech opportunity.

From what I've seen (I live in LA) it's much more driven by Silicon Valley companies opening up offices down here than by locally originated start-ups, though there are of course many exceptions.

Which ones have offices in LA? Do you recommend any of them? I'm looking to move down there myself.

I know Google and Amazon do but LinkedIn, Uber, Square, and Facebook don't.

Snapchat is headquartered in LA. Microsoft, Oracle, Netflix, and Symantec also have large offices. Riot, Activision, SpaceX, Dollar Shave Club, EA, Hulu, True car, Buzzfeed, Telesign, Spokeo, Tinder, eHarmony, and MAXCDN are the major tech companies in LA that I can think of off the top of my head

Unless you're looking to get into tech related to entertainment LA is a backwater compared to the Bay Area.

sssh ;) don't tell them

> If you are someone who is dreaming big—really big—it helps to be in an environment where other people are dreaming big.

And you would think that if you were dreaming big, it would be better to be in an environment with people who know how to make big dreams come true.

Its not whether he is right or wrong, it was incredibly rude and poor form.

Thiel prides himself on iconoclasm. He really likes to ask people, "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" For that reason I'm surprised about his attitude towards Chicago, and the non NYC/SF USA at large. I think there's a lot to be gained by shrugging off the accepted wisdom that anything of ambition must be done in these two places and embracing the unique opportunities in a great city like Chicago, Columbus, Nashville, Pittsburgh, etc..

Wacky metric.

I am thinking of creating a metric that somehow computes the magnitude of skill of self-congratulation of residents as a way of ranking cities.

Or how about a metric of published authors per capita. Pondera County Montana would actually rank pretty high.

While I agree with Thiel on a lot of areas, I think he underestimates the power individuals to be more ambitious despite the norms of the local population.

I work for a startup, M1 Finance (https://www.m1finance.com/), based in Chicago which I believe to be an extremely ambitious team: http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co/2016/09/09/a-chicago-fintec....

Right...of center? Is that the context? Probably right.

Chicago reminds me of Frankfurt - lots of skyscrapers but very boring. Chicago is also pretty much the murder capital of the US if I'm not mistaken.

Have you been to Chicago? If so, have you been outside of the Loop?

I just came back from a trip there yesterday (opportunity to visit after a great Strange Loop in St Louis) and I've been walking through downtown-ish areas most of the time - from the lake to union park in the west.

People I met were nice and all but also felt conservative/boring (not many flashy people on the streets) - I didn't find any interesting meetups when I was there either.

I'm a huge Blues Brothers and Ferris Bueller's Day Off fan so I was doubly disappointed :(

I'd be happy to learn that I just did it the wrong way / had bad luck and all the cool folks are somewhere else.

I wanted to put your comment in context. On the area, downtown is not particularly interesting. There are more charismatic areas radiating out from there. You're onto something with the lack of flash. It's a Midwestern city, so that kind of goes with the territory. That said, I'd argue that that's part of what constitutes Chicago's appeal: it has many of the amenities of New York (great food, culture, and architecture as well as reasonably good nightlife) with less conceit and more Midwestern nice.

As for the murder concern, other commenters (tptacek in particular) covered that.

Thanks for sharing your perspective, I'll probably come back some day and I will try to think of what you wrote here then :)

Regarding the "murder concern" it was more like being seriously disturbed by it.

The downtown area seemed safe enough for me to stroll around also during night time but waking up to a news reporter somewhat happily announcing that the doctors saved the baby whose pregnant mother just became victim to a drive-by shooting in south Chicago the evening before is just.. I don't know, fucked-up shit like that doesn't happen (often? ever?) where I'm coming from. All in all there where 5 dead and 43 injured over that weekend alone. So that clearly played a role in my remarks regarding Chicago and my feelings towards staying there.

That's true. I didn't intend to be dismissive. Chicago does have a serious issue with violence.

I hope you do get another chance to visit. I haven't gone there in a few years, but I have good memories of the city.

We're not a flashy city, but what we lack in Subway station Boba Fetts, we make up for in better whiskey distribution.

It's usually not fair to judge a place from a tourist perspective - regularly drinking with the locals might be a better way to learn about them ;) Next time I'll go to a local bar in order to properly get into the "Illinois Blues" Skip James style.

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