Wait, really?
As with any organic, self propelled, system.. it matures and growth turns to maintenance, and eventually decay. Is the general argument here that SV has become a victim of it's massive organic growth, has it eaten up one of it's resources (housing, healthy diversity, etc) to the point where another city/system can now flourish??
There are billboards on the state border encouraging people to live in Indiana (live in Gary?!) because Indiana isn't going bankrupt.
And it isn't just the obvious form of corruption that everyone can see and hate on, like Blagojevich trying to outright sell a vacant senate seat. It's also the subtle form that pays public employees slightly too much to do not quite enough, and then a pension that gives them even more for doing even less, while their replacement adds even more to the burden. You can't just fire all those people and take away their pensions, because then you can't provide municipal services to your residents, and that is more acutely painful than being slowly bled to death.
Edit:
In slight support of those billboards and some cousin posts, Indianapolis is one of the most affordable cities in the US for buying housing. And the pool for tech talent is largely untapped.
Public transit sucks, though. The city has a huge area and is almost completely flat, so it has taken extreme advantage of its ability to sprawl. Any sudden spike in growth will immediately lead to commuting nightmare traffic, all around the entire city.
The Chicago and Illinois Democratic party machines are almost certainly corrupt (or just rife with corruption), like most single-party states. But it's not clear to me how this impacts ordinary life for citizens.
Indianapolis is fine. I generally think, if you're going to move to a Midwestern city with no critical mass of tech companies, you might just consider throwing a dart. There are more tech workers in Chicago than Indianapolis, but in no Midwestern city are you going to exhaust the supply.
We generally need to get away from the notion that the locale in which you start your company is make-or-break. What we don't need to do is suggest that there's a Midwestern Ur-city where everyone needs to go.
It impacts ordinary citizens by raising their taxes and making the siting of production facilities in that locale even less attractive to companies, which tends to compound the problem. Real jobs leave. Fake jobs spring up. Companies that offer real jobs get squeezed harder to pay for the fake jobs. When they finally reach a breaking point, they leave and take the jobs with them. Spiral further down and repeat.
This gets thrown around on HN a lot, but the root cause of the problem is the implicit and seemingly unassailable assumption that everyone has to work in order to eat. People actually get angry at the idea that someone might get the minimum portion of life's necessities without sweating on them first.
Until that is addressed, no city in the US is totally safe for a business founded to do productive work, and the safest cities are those where enough new businesses are founded to employ all the people who would otherwise be forced to do make-work jobs to survive. And I think that's why people want to found companies in places that are already considered to be friendly to startups. The tightness of the labor market is not a bug; it's a feature. It means that more of your taxes go to infrastructure and vital services, and less to stealth welfare.
The best place to start a business is one that doesn't need for you to start it there.
Yes, there are talented programmers in every metropolitan area but the Bay has significantly more of them than anywhere else.
You can get really good engineers in bay area, it just cost more than many are willing to pay.
I.e. "loudest" isn't really the right word to describe the only group that is even allowed to speak publicly.
An underrated advantage in SV is its top tier legal and capital talent. WSGR, Cooley, Fenwick, ... are outstanding. For VCs you can start with Sequoia at the top and work your way all the way down to angels. L+S did a demo in Andy Bechtolsheim's garage and walked away with a check for $250,000. That just ain't happening in Chicago.
(Northwestern, the other top-tier Chicago school, does have an engineering program).
We should probably dispense with the notion that regions "need" engineering schools to feed a tech industry. That is probably not generally how it works. Portland has a thriving tech scene, but not many people travel for engineering school in Portland. Boston has world-class engineering schools, and an anemic tech scene.
The graduate rankings for CS aren’t great, but the CS faculty are teachers first and researchers second; this may be to your advantage as an undergrad who is not eyeing a career in academia.
It has 5500 undergraduates, and until the last 5 years or so, less than 100 of them were CS students. So yeah, you won’t see as many of us out in the world as you will graduates of a school with 25k students.
It’s also a global institution in a cloister 7 miles/45+ CTA minutes from the nearest part of Chicago that white professionals set foot in (extremely segregated city); its effect on the city as a whole is going to be muted. People come from all over the world and then promptly disperse all over the world.
I hope Chicago or Saint Louis gets Amazon's second HQ but not at too great a cost.
What you're really trying to say is that there's no venture capital market here. That's true. (And, as a result, there's no real venture law here). Venture capital is a rounding error in the global financial markets. Don't extrapolate lack of VC to lack of capital.
Obviously, none of this is helpful for tech companies that want to raise a round in Chicago. If you plan on raising, you should probably at least start in SFBA or NYC.
http://static.crunchbase.com/reports/annual_2016_yf42a/crunc...
But this isn't the 70s+80s anymore when frankly you had to be in SV. Nowadays there are tremendous advantages to being here but you can be successful elsewhere. Instead, today SV competes for the market rather than owns its.
As for the topic, I think Thiel is a pompous twit. What I will say is that places like Chicago can be quite competitive by being less competitive and more organic. Here, it's I'm doing Snapchat meets Uber. Not quite Dot Com but awfully close. A YC side effect.
If you've got a real idea, it doesn't become real by being here despite here having huge advantages. Was Zuckerberg wrong for picking up his toys and moving to a rental in Palo Alto? Not really. But Xero isn't here. Hell, Xero isn't even American.
So it's kind've like Hollywood. For a few decades, they had tremendous advantages. Now Hollywood competes and other cities do production and location work. But Hollywood is still central to the industry and will be for the foreseeable future.
In contrast, the entirety of Canada has about 500-600 homicides per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Chicago#Murder_and_sh...
Gonna need a source on that one
I don't know enough about Chicago to know exactly how far our an hour's drive is or to know exactly what 'nice' means in this context but it seems like there are areas where the median price is quite a bit lower than 200k.
[1] https://www.trulia.com/local/chicago-il/type:home_prices_sal...
Imagine if Motorola was first to have a major smart phone get popular like the razr instead of Apple.
Seatlle has amazon and microsoft.....chicago has nothing comparable I think.
You can't really use this as an "advantage" since it disappears rapidly once it starts become a tech hub.
But mostly Chicago just sucks. Its all the shitty parts of the midwest without any of the good ones. What you really want is Indianapolis, Columbus, Minneapolis, Louisville, etc...
Shameful Indianapolis trolling.
There's something you don't hear every day.
Logan Square apartments would get more expensive, but the market would respond to that the way it did with Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, Bucktown, and Ukranian Village: by gentrifying westward into Humboldt Park, Hermosa, and Belmont-Cragin.