NYC Should Bus In Hackers from Carnegie Mellon & MIT
metamorphblog.com
metamorphblog.com
DC, Pittsburgh, Baltimore are popular too, though much less so.
I was just in a position picking between two offers. One paid about $8k more than the other in salary, but the lower offer sounded more fun. I took the lower offer. Promptly after my start date they told me about a bonus I'd be getting that I didn't know about that comes to about 10k, so I ended up coming out ahead, but even if that hadn't happened I'd be OK with my decision.
Why does a particular city need a "startup scene"? How is having NYC known as a place that tech companies like to call home, versus tech companies just going about their business without drawing attention to the fact that they are in NYC because it doesn't mean anything to the 90% of their customers who don't live there, going to do anything for NYC? Attract more businesses for more tax revenue? Then why would the type of business matter at all?
Reversing that question, why does any startup need a particular city? What does it matter that DuckDuckGo is in Valley Forge, PA (even though everyone says Philly, because Valley Forge is toootally inside Philadelphia city limits when it's down the Turnpike past even King of Prussia. Might as well say New Ark, DE is in Philly)? It's still a decent upstart search engine, and would be the same decent site if it were in Bethesda, MD (where people would probably say it was in DC).
If the price is right, you can find talent anywhere (cities don't have a monopoly on growing smart people out of test tubes), and if the biz is right you can find funding anywhere (or would an investor seriously give up a good opportunity just because the company's HQ is more than a lunch-hour drive away?). None of these things have particular geographical components, unless you're in some dead-end, old, mining enclave on the side of a mountain in up-state Pennsylvania. Or maybe not, maybe you got so good of a deal on land that you don't mind the capital cost of getting started from stone-age-scratch.
But at any rate, it means nothing to me if, say, Orlando, FL has more tech firms than Philly. That's them, not me. Where they are certainly has to have no more impact on me than if they lived next door to me.
As a startup employee, a practical reason to live somewhere with a "startup scene" is so that I can get another job easily if something doesn't work out. I don't want to have to move from Valley Forge to Orlando when DuckDuckGo tanks.
That's the thing, can anyone in any industry in this age afford to not have a sizable interest in computing and internet technology? Even Doodie Calls couldn't get away with running a paper business, and all they do is drive around in vans and scoop dog poop. If you're big enough to have employees, you're big enough to have tech need that can't be filled by your 15 year old nephew for weekend soda money. Maybe in 1985, when the vast majority of the population had no idea you could even link computers together nation-wide, it made sense to band together to take down the few companies that had tech need. But today is completely different.
Where I grew up in Ohio, there were two kinds of jobs: entry level jobs that paid nothing, and jobs for older people and experienced professionals that paid well. There was nothing in between.
If your city has no "startup scene" (no entrepreneurship), then there is no class mobility. People have to leave to move up, and they often never come back.
There are people looking for work specifically in the startup space in NYC, I was one of them about 3 years ago. When I found companies it was immediately clear which founders were good to work for and which were not. Just becuase you have a "startup" doesn't mean you are a going to attract talent. It has to be a good startup. The bar of what is an attractive startup for employees might be lower in Silicon Valley because so many people are there for "startup culture" above all else. In NYC there are other options that are good and a startup isn't better simply becuase it is a startup, it has to be better on its own merits.
I asked the question you are asking on HN about 3 years ago, someone gave me the answer above (thought startuply didn't exist at the time), and ended up at a startup I wound up loving to work for not 2 months later, so good luck and maybe the kharma will be passed on.
Both have a recognition problem.
Also, there are multiple definitions of "good". Cool problems are great, but if you're offering below market rate compensation, you can't offer below market rate risk.
Many hackers can do arithmetic on equity. 1% after dilution is >$1M only on a >$100M exit, which is relatively rare.
We've no objection to you getting rich. However, it isn't worth much to us either.
But the post-SarBox "more work for less compensation" trade off is anything but attractive, and to bring this back to NYC, it's clear it's one of the areas that don't particularly respect hackers (I suspect most are that way (the D.C. area is) and places like Boston and Silicon Valley are the exceptions).