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Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

It's uniquely SV only for those who spend all their life in SV. Go to NYC, go to LA, go to London, go to Tokyo, and you will find very ambitious and driven people working hard on their acting/band/fashion label/non profit/etc. Those people also tend to be way more open about the forms creativity other than their own takes, whereas the SV techie entrepreneurs tend to think that anything other than changing the world with a billion dollar startup is a waste of time.

Which is why on a personal level, after about a decade in SV, I'm very much looking forward to leaving soon, having realized that ambition, fulfilment, and impact can be realized in ways other than yet another iOS or rails app, and am getting tired of the monoculture.

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Thank you for putting this so well, my eyes were rolling so hard at the parent comment, which reads like a parody of SV self-importance--as if SV is the only place in the world where people work hard on things they are passionate about.

My writer and filmmaker friends here in L.A. are every bit as ambitious as my entrepreneur friends up in the Bay Area. And their ambition is not only "acceptable" but celebrated.

It is precisely this ultra-narrow conception of worthwhile human endeavors that has kept me from moving up north. I love working in tech in a city where people are pursuing a huge diversity of interests and careers.

> having realized that ambition, fulfilment, and impact can be realized in ways other than yet another iOS or rails app.

If you think that's SV you're probably not the ambitious personality type I was referring to, while also being unaware of what's getting the focus these days in SV (which is most certainly AI/ deep learning).

I've lived in more cities (3 months+) than most in this forum being a perennial digital nomad (And I don't know why people keep citing Tokyo - the culture is not pro entrepreneurship for young people at all, there is no real concept of a coworking spaces, etc. I did however meet a lot of white techies from SF so maybe that's why people are getting that impression!). It's a certain type of ambition/ personality that's encouraged here, for better or worse.

"3+ months" is a pretty vague timeframe (or not a time_frame_ at all, actually). Unless you already know the language and integrate extremely well into the culture of a country, spending less than a few years there won't mean that you know much about the country and its opportunities.

Superficially, spending a few months in a place sounds like you'll probably "get it", but I don't believe for a second that you learned much of value from each country with this lifestyle. You seem to have seen a lot of places, but you haven't lived them.

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