Startup founders throughout the Midwest are doing something new: staying
story.californiasunday.com
story.californiasunday.com
One is that we're finally making good on the promise of the Internet. The hype was that it made location irrelevant. And it did for a lot of things. But somehow VC-backed web and companies were immune to that, even though money and software are both digital.
Two is that this is great news for founders everywhere. Before they often had to choose between family and success. Now they can have both. (That didn't matter to me much when I was 25, but now it's easier to see costs of that.)
Three, I think this is great for customers and users. A frequent and frequently valid critique of Silicon Valley startups is that many only make sense in our hothouse atmosphere. E.g., Juicero. There are real-world needs out there that we're missing because we don't see and spend time with the people who have those needs.
Four, I believe that this is good news for both our cities and our startup community. The flood of money has driven up prices just like it did during the gold rush era. That's certainly a problem for people outside of tech. But I think it's also bad for entrepreneurs: it keeps getting more expensive to build a team and a company here. Turning down the heat a little will make it easier for us all to succeed without having to take gobs of money.
Edit: I mean that it's curious that the Midwest never seems to advertise toward immigrants or minorities in tech. What motivates minorities to move to the Midwest if it seems the culture doesn't seem to support racial integration?
Virtue signaling is a dirty term, but we just don't virtue signal about it the same way. We accept immigrants and they accept us and we get on with life. Anyone is welcome to come build here and they do. Not that racism and such isn't a problem, but I'd guess it's as much an issue in almost every major US city, certain places are obsessed with showing how enlightened they are.
For the record, I work with minorities and immigrants in multiple companies and they are all great at what they do. They want to be respected not tokenized. I've observed many SV companies are good about saying the right things about minorities but don't actually act in ways that support them, nor are they especially racially diverse.
You hit the nail on the head IMO.
In my case it was simply that the only Minnesotans I had ever known (and one turned out to be Canadian!) were very nice people. Yes, I moved half-way across the continent based on a dataset of N=2!
But further, your comment presupposes that "the culture doesn't seem to support racial integration" when (1) this assumption isn't based on anything beyond speculation and (2) it was honestly something that hadn't even occurred to me.
Stated plainly: as a minority, my experience has been that people who "advertise toward immigrants or minorities" typically have an agenda that I won't necessarily agree with and doesn't help me in any way. I don't need "support," although I welcome it; I need people to stay the fuck out of my way.
What precisely do you mean when you say "the Midwest never seems to advertise toward immigrant or minorities in tech"? Do you mean you won't find the same level of preachy self-righteousness in the Midwest as you do in more liberal coastal areas?
montrose did a good job of summarizing a recent Wall Street Journal article ("Why Cities Boom While Towns Struggle", March 13, 2018) about this very phenomenon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16611042
To summarize his summary:
> [R]emote exchanges of ideas are no substitute for the elemental human process of face-to-face communication. Innovators don’t do their work in isolation; they stimulate one another. -- Enrico Moretti
edit: Here's a link to a non-paywalled interview with Mr. Moretti about his book, "The New Geography of Jobs" (2012): https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/enrico-moretti-geograp...
Historically, many have. And today, when you can ping almost anyone in the world, it's not an obstacle. Not to mention, most big cities have a research university (if not multiple). Nobody is lacking for input. The claim about "elemental" processes isn't based on anything concrete. I work in multiple remote teams and it's never been an issue. We get more work done than if we had to see each other every day.
That's hardly an endorsement for SV alone unless SV has all the talent in the world (it doesn't). I think your post and some of the other posts advocating for SV have knowingly or not accepted a belief about how things work, but they are essentially mythologies.
Some work as loners, some work in groups. The biggest mythology of all is that it takes hundreds of millions in funding and unethical behavior to build cool stuff - it doesn't. That seems to be the SV way, many of us don't want that.
I think, maybe, there is less effort involved in connecting to a community if the community is also very local and very large (like it is in SV)? I don't really know.
Agreed on capital - all that VC money slushing around is more akin to chasing the next big thing rather than fixing real world problems. It's just that tech's reliance on unconventional methods of funding makes SV startups more prominent than startups in other industries.
There's almost nothing going on in SV that actually requires large teams or funding, that's just how things are done. Even if individuals have disadvantages v groups, those disadvantages aren't obvious when the phds and top of the class people at Google are building incompatible chat apps (what do they have, 4?) and those at Facebook are forgetting to renew security certs so that VR headsets don't stop working. There's a massive amount of inefficiency there, and at times mediocrity, and that's possible when everyone can pass the buck. It's not nuclear fusion.
Surely the people at those companies as individuals are capable of producing much more than that?
Individuals working alone, though, are very rarely successful. There are just too many skills for one person to have, and a solo founder loses the advantage of different perspectives clashing and collaborating.
Unsurprisingly, investors are very reluctant to fund both solo founders and large teams. Seed money to support innovative work ends up mostly going to groups of 2-5 people.
My main point is it is possible for individuals to do great things. The gap between that and 75,000 person companies is not just huge, it's massive.
Honestly, what investors will or won't fund isn't that interesting to me because it seems to be root of lots of short sightedness. Investors have concerns antithetical (in many cases) to building great stuff.
My belief is the market's reliance on investors has biased what is or isn't possible. If so many people weren't concerned about what they would fund, we'd probably see more solo founders and we'd probably see more success there. With investor money around, there's less reason to do that, unless you are a masochist.
But yeah, most projects aren't single person, and groups have advantages even if they can be.
Where I think it does matter is within the context of a company. There's still nothing better for innovation than getting the necessary people in together in a room. The high-bandwidth, low-latency collaboration enables creativity in a way that digital tools can't currently replicate.
But I think it matters less and less between software companies. Contrast it with physical manufacturing, where there's a real benefit being near your suppliers: you can show each other parts, work out issues, visit back and forth.
But in software, cross-company collaboration is almost all digital regardless. We don't know where our servers are. We don't know where our vendors' servers are either. Even if our offices are in the same city, we'll probably work out technical issues via digital means. I was just building something with Twilio, for example. They're blocks away, but I would never think about visiting them if I needed to talk with someone there.
People still need to meet but it doesn't mean every company needs to be in the same city for one industry.
But if the product is, say, some kind of automatic corn harvester, he’s pretty unlikely to give you much insight into the way to actually build it.
The SV techies have no monopoly on expertise in robotics and hardware and software engineering, but they certainly have expertise. They’re in a much better position to automate farming than farmers are.
Seriously, one would argue that SV knows more about farming than farmers?
Knowing how to build pianos doesn’t mean you also know how to compose music.
My point is that SV knows about robotics, software engineering, ASIC design, machine learning, LIDAR systems, compilers, operating systems, networking stacks, open source libraries, debugging, venture capital, and all the rest.
Composers vs. piano makers is exactly what I'm saying.
Nobody's denying that there's a concentration of technological knowledge in the valley. But the only time technological knowledge is useful when combined with an understanding of the actual problem. And for farming, that's with farmers, and on farms.
The SV-centric approach leads to impressive technological innovations that don't actually solve the problem. Juicero is one, for example. Another is The Melt, the VC-backed, tech-focused grilled cheese restaurant. In retrospect, it's pretty obvious they didn't have a clue.
Sure, the right kind of technical knowledge is useful. But the wrong kind is useless. And the standard SV arrogance is actively harmful.
Unless you think the VC-fed bubble can grow indefinitely, it is SV techies who need people from the real world. Not necessarily the other way around.
But is not SV also the home of companies like Google, Apple, etc., that make real, cutting edge stuff? (And lots of unsexy companies doing boring work too, nevertheless with real customers).
I think it’s fine to give credit to farmers and the insights they have. But SV has a great deal of unique skills, and casting them as somehow unable to solve real problems seems, to me, quite unrealistic.
Sure, there are companies that make real, cutting edge stuff in SV. As there are in other places. But SV has far more noise that just would not even appear any any saner part of the world. Although I would really question whether Apple does (or ever did) anything cutting edge that wasn't... eh... borrowed from somebody else.
But really, what unique skills does SV have? Chutzpah isn't a skill, after all.
This isn't rocket science:
Nationwide broadband, Medicare for All, strong coffee, ready access to capital (eg SBA, grants).
Boom. Economic miracle.
Extra credit:
Then increase teacher pay to attract young families. Because families absolutely do relocate to choose better school districts. (Teacher pay mostly means cutting out all the middle men, waste. May mean more funding for schools in some areas.)
Lastly, subsidize child care, elder care. So people don't have to choose between family and work.
Oh, obvious afterthought, sorry:
Debt jubilee on all student loans. Pay for everyone's education going forward.
I didn't even have to go to a tech hub to get more than double that $35k job offer.
As an aside: I will never work for Caterpillar after seeing the way the recruiters treated students at the job fair. An actually overheard sentence (and whatever tone you are hearing in your head is likely less harsh than what was used): "Our requirements list a minimum 3.5 GPA, why are you wasting my time with a 3.2?" this was not a particularly egregious example either, but rather the typical way they talked to candidates once they found a reason to throw away their resumé.
You're welcome.
I am on the Engineering Accreditation Board now and this is the feedback that we need from alums.
I was looking at software jobs, with a preference for embedded. At the time there were very low paying jobs in the Fort Wayne area and some startups in Indy.
Now Cincinnati is booming, with Indianapolis falling not too far behind. Big 10 wise, Madison and Ann Arbor both seem to have more of a tech hub than Lafayette. The company I currently work for recruits fairly heavily from Illinois and Rose Hulman. I can track down some recent grads if you want recent midwest job-hunt info.
Most companies around the Cincinnati area don't want to pay more than 80k/year for a good, mid-to-senior linux resource (15+ years). In Indianapolis, I've had a job offers come in at 130, 140, 150, and 180K, but, I'm very hesitant to relocate to Indy because of the RFRA legislation that's in town.
When I looked last year it seemed like the midwest was mostly behind the coasts and Denver / Austin were maybe a year or two behind. When I say that, I mean that many of these midwest companies are running old RH 5/6, little cloud, operator style system admin. You have to manage your career to make sure you don't get stuck somewhere that lets your tech skills atrophy.
They were local and they hired from pretty much all majors in the College of Engineering. IIRC they weren't particularly interested in entry-level software people at the time despite listing it as an opening.
I think there is a real opportunity for state side digital nomads who want to live cheap while starting a business. Places like fort Wayne Indiana give them access to a lively downtown, cheap housing and access to 1st tier cities in a few hours drive. Source - I grew up there.
I'm glad we stayed put, especially as we've started to focus on real revenue and scaling, and less on trying to be hot for the purposes of raising a big early round. I feel like the market for engineers around here is becoming an advantage for us, and we're not having to fight the same talent wars as those on the coasts. That matters.
Also I’d like to think what we’re working on isn’t mundane!
It's a great time to be an engineer anywhere, including Madison.
I’m sorry you didn’t have a great experience with your last team.
As an engineer, I would head for Chicago or Minneapolis. Madison doesn't have "the next job". When that time comes, I wouldn't want to uproot my family.
I'm glad your rention is stellar. I would expect increased retention due to lack of alternatives.
Most companies believe their compensation is competitive. A lot of them are wrong.
The Midwest might be a place where companies can skirt those two things fairly easy.
For entrepreneurs thinking of building in the Midwest, you absolutely can. Let's not let that point get lost in a discussion about personal values.
Are there definitive stats on this because I would disagree especially compared to the Midwest?
Chicago would be an exception but crime would keep people away
Can any of this change? Of course, but it’s really hard to change culture and climate takes time (ex even after all these years CA still had a gold rush mindset)
There probably would not be much to do in Nebraska, but then I can't see Bay Area as being exactly an epicenter of culture either.
> Bay Area as being exactly an epicenter of culture either
It depends on what you want. The SF Bay Area is not NYC in terms of fashion or theater. If you want that, you go to NYC. If you want a good clubbing scene, it's either LA or NYC. However it has a bit of everything. If you like the city, there's SF and Oakland. There's also a lot of suburbs and quaint downtowns like Palo Alto if you like that. There's always something going on regardless of whether you're in the city or out. The food scene is good. Wine country is next door. Tahoe isn't too far, and there's a lot of places to hike nearby. There's also fishing and sailing on the Pacific, or canoing in the rivers. Yosemite is doable. Also the weather is almost always temperate year round, hovering around the 60s-70's. These are a few reasons as to why housing is so expensive here. I didn't even go over the professional reasons.
Comparing the Bay Area to Nebraska is disingenuous. There's no equal in the MidWest, though Chicago would be the closest.
The US MidWest is just a really hard sell to almost everyone except to the people who grew up there. There's just too many other alternatives in the US. (I used to be a consultant going here and there)
Certainly, California has more diverse nature than most of the Midwest does. But culturally... as far as theaters, museums, music etc. goes, SF is behind not only New York, but Chicago as well. Food scene, once you pass French Laundry and couple more places in Napa isn't Chicago either, just more expensive. I've left far less money at Alinea than at Atelier Crenn, and while of course this is highly subjective, there really was no comparison between the two.
Weather is nice, but the second year it became incredibly boring; I like my seasons. But then, I've moved here for personal, not professional reasons. And professionally, while I was making quite a bit less money in Chicago, I could live in a hot area, 1 minute from subway, 15 minutes walk to work, 10 minutes walk to NEXT or Moto (yes, I like my food) and somehow had far more money left to squirrel away than I do living in some cheesy apartment complex in a middle of San Jose nowhere.
Certainly, if you get into a startup that actually makes it, gets acquired, or something like that, you have a better chance of striking it rich than in Chicago. But as far as I know, most people don't. And it's not that work here was that much more interesting -- doing yet another JS framework du jour, or yet another noSQL database (because rewriting MUMPS, just not quite as good, is always fun) isn't that exciting once you get old enough and stop jumping at every new and shiny thing. I'd much rather do something interesting at Wolfram (well, if Chambana weren't just as boring as SFBA) than doing yet another chat app in SV...
We can just agree to disagree on this one. The SF food scene alone is pretty vibrant and constantly evolving. However this isn't just a Chicago vs SF or Napa. It's hard for Chicago to compete against the entire SF Bay Area in terms of food. Also, you may be confusing the cost of Bay Area food with NYC.
> Weather is nice, but the second year it became incredibly boring
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but most people don't like dealing with nasty slush and ice for months on end in their daily lives. Moreover, if one climate in the Bay Area gets 'boring', there are plenty of micro-climates. Also, as I've mentioned before, it's pretty easy to get to Tahoe or go to the desert if you want something really different every weekend.
> Certainly, if you get into a startup that actually makes it, gets acquired, or something like that, you have a better chance of striking it rich than in Chicago.
Ignoring the SV lottery, the Bay Area is just a better place professionally for techies than the Chi Metro.
> But then, I've moved here for personal, not professional reasons.
I don't feel that you're disproving my point that mostly locals like the MidWest better than elsewhere. Besides my main point isn't just that the SF Bay Area is more appealing than the MidWest. If I wasn't very clear, my main point was that there are many other metros in the US that are more appealing overall than the MidWest at large. Of course, different people like different things so not everyone will agree with me.
EDIT: > Crime in Chicago is very much concentrated.
Unless the data is wrong or I'm misinterpreting it, crime in Chicago doesn't look concentrated like it is in most places or in the Bay Area . It looks pretty well distributed.
For the difference in cost of living, I probably could fly myself from Chicago to Tahoe every week and still come out ahead. And to each his own, but I like looking in the window and knowing what season it is.
I'm not really a midwestern local, but of all the places I lived or visited in the US, I would certainly pick Chicago well ahead of Bay Area. It might be more "interesting" professionally (although I'd rather work on something actually useful, not the next Juicero or Theranos), but having some money left is pretty sweet, too.
Bay Area companies have made a lot of what we know of modern life in the 21st century possible. It's not just limited to IT either. This is the birthplace of biotech. It's a lot harder to take your comments seriously when this is what you're writing; it also shows that you're not familar with the professional side of the Bay Area. There are just a lot of companies as well as a big variety of them that give your professional life a lot more flexibilty. The concentration of companies also allow for more serendity i.e. it's not uncommon for people at Googles or FB to just meet by chance and end up working on something together. People are less risk averse and more open to new ideas. I can go on. Does this lead to ridiculous things? Of course. Mistakes are inevitable. At the same time, it's also how major breakthroughs are made.
There's a reason why a lot of things start here and not elsewhere. That said it's not totally exclusive to the valley; it's just no longer in the Midwest. Of course I could be missing something, and I've been totally wrong before and I could be wrong now or in a few years.
> For the difference in cost of living, I probably could fly myself from Chicago to Tahoe every week and still come out ahead
For SF, maybe; but the Bay Area is more than just SF. Outside of SF, Chicago is only about 20% - 30% cheaper than many other parts of the Bay Area metro.
Seriously, sure, there are breakthroughs made in SV, too. But if you adjust for the signal/noise ratio with all the absolutely useless things that SV comes up with (and that's the majority of them -- exactly because it is only in SV that you can get financing and sometimes even sell for billions stuff like the aforementioned Juicero) you could find that cornfields of Illinois are just as innovative. They just have to come up with something that, you know, is useful.
As for prices... for anecdotal reference, I am paying about $1000 more a month for a two-bedroom on the outskirts of San Jose, in a crappy apartment cardboard apartment complex with no walking accessibility to anything, no public transport, and nothing to do than I did for a place in a Chicago midrise, with stuff like elevators and garages, 2 minutes from subway, 10 minutes walk from some of the best restaurants in the country, walking distance to downtown, real soundproofing etc. etc.
Sure, I guess Gilroy might compare with Chicago prices slightly better (but then, houses there are at least 2-3 times as expensive as a comparable Chicago suburb; and Chicago wouldn't stink of garlic, either). And a place 3 hours away from anything... why would I want to live there in the first place?
It doesn't literally have to be just Google & FB. There are plenty of other companies here such as MS, Amazon, NVidia, Intel, AMD and so on. Having a large number of programmers, engineers, and scientists in one location tends to produce a lot of breakthroughs and innovation, similar to what happened with the glass makers in renaissance venice.
> SV does tend to exaggerate its importance. Part of the brand marketing,
Yes, I guess the place where the first commercially viable microprocessor and smart phone were created isn't very important. Most of the work of the foundation of what later became the internet was done here as well. There's a really long list of acheivements that overshadow the bread and circus that's inevitably forgotten.
> As for prices... for anecdotal reference, I am paying about $1000 more a month for a two-bedroom on the outskirts of San Jose
Again, I feel that you're missing (or continuing to ignore) my main point. Despite its problems, Chicago is probably still a great city. The problem is that it has a lot more competition (not including the SF Bay Area) in the 21st century.
I've always assumed this is the same everywhere, but I've never received a competitive raise outside of my first year with a company. If you come in and make some big adjustments that save money, you might (maybe) get a bump, but after that they take it for granted. I've only ever kept up with inflation (especially health care inflation), by changing employers, so "next job" is a huge consideration.
This might not matter if you're a 20 year old deciding between renting a 8' room for 1500$ or 200$. But it most certainly will matter once your in your thirties with a family comparing buying the 3 million dollar crap whole in palo alto vs a nice decent house at 300K (in madison).
I think the best way to go is spend 5 years working in the bay area, save as much as you can. And then get OUT while you still can before you set down roots and meet someone.
Would you say there's any other advantage to your location besides being able to pay people less and having cheaper rent?
For comparison, I pay about $600 / month for a High deductible plan that pays nothing until I pay $6k. This is through a company with about 300 employees. I'm in an urban area (Indy).
That said, there are a lot of complicated industries where domain expertise trumps tech ability (healthcare is a prime example). Most successful health tech companies are not in CA (epic in Madison and cerner in Kansas City as two big examples). As more people learn to code I think there will be a growth in startups with relatively simple tech that is just well suited for the problem it addresses. Solutions that don't scale to millions of users / are not optimally performant but are designed by users can win in a lot of sectors
Especially in Minneapolis there are tons of universities and cost of of living is much lower than the west coast. It makes it a lot easier to keep your employees once they want to start a family, something far too many companies neglect.
Sincerely, Denver
And businesses barely pay employees enough to afford a mortgage, or even rent, so you can't tax the residents. How do we get our infrastructure?
And as much as I hate it, I do understand it. CA asked for this problem and now it will be hard to reverse. What would you do if you had millions of dollars tied up in your home and it was your only asset of value?
Argh- I'll save myself some typing :) - I commented on this here on another post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16540488
That's what Denver said.
>It is still in the best interest that the area continues to grow.
Best interest of who? How so? For every person who benefits there's gonna be another who loses.
We'll just have to found a Little Valley and store them all there.
This is an important aspect that I can't assume is only important to the Midwest, but something that I come across myself here, also in the Midwest.
Occasionally an over-enthusiastic recruiter will reach out about a relocation opportunity. I sometimes can't help but reply "No. I love it here." Much to what I assume is confusion.
We can still move fast and break things out here in Fly Over Country. And our salaries can afford us better opportunities in comparison. I think a lot of 'Coasters have a hard time even rationalizing that. No technology I've encountered is locked down to a location.
None of which are relevant if San Francisco's transportation policy is effective and you go car-free.
A car is very much a rite-of-passage here still, sure. For those that can afford it (that is the bad part about it), it's the most freeing, invigorating thing you can own at 16.
Being car-free seems completely asinine here; you're going to need it for something. That's the lifestyle here. No worse than a bicycle. And one day, when we can go emission-free; it really won't be.
I started my first development job in 2013 and I'm making 2.4x more, now (without school). In comparison, (as you know) my cost of living is significantly cheaper.
I get where you're going, but just to give you more perspective...
I'm not trying to convince you that the midwest sucks or whatever, but that there are options out here if you want to work in coastal job markets without the cost of living. That said, nobody move here, the weather is awful and the food is bad.
But can you find an investor there that will fund you to spend 2 years breaking stuff with 50 engineers on staff and no revenue?
Some startups are much harder to launch outside of Silicon Valley where an investors are willing to make speculative investments on expensive ideas that may never pan out and where the investor can keep a close eye on his/her investment.
It was cool at first, but annoying secondly as the product became an ever-moving target designed to fit an assumed goal the current pitch deck was tossed to.
I liked the swivel chairs, though.
Honestly there's probably more [startups] here, but I haven't looked since my second kid. As hinted in previous comments, it's really geared towards family here. If I didn't have one, I'd probably be elsewhere. Though - to be honest - I'd also probably not be in development, either.
But I'm questioning whether there are many VC's outside of Silicon Valley that are willing to pump $10M+ to fund a startup for a few years when both product and revenue are years away.
Edit: To clarify, I think SV is increasingly insular, and there is untapped innovative potential outside the bubble.
It’s also important to note that the high reaches of other creative industries espouse values very similar to those of The Valley.
> Case acknowledged that the investment culture of Silicon Valley is unique. It “encourages fearlessness,” he said, “and that’s something to be admired.” It can also be difficult to replicate elsewhere.
This is one of the many things that keeps SV dominant. Unless this changes in the MidWest, things will stay the same. It will still be more beneficial for your company to move to California than stay if you need money. Investors in other parts of the country (and the world) are just less risk tolerant than California.
Silicon valley is obviously the new wall street in terms of attracting the big brains and bringing a focused collection of hard working or brilliant individuals - yeah, we need the infrastructure to make the world spin faster but it can really bring out the worst and most myopic visions even from the “best and brightest”. I like automation and disruption, purely for its own sake, because we can. But the hyperaccumulation of wealth driven entirely by advertising is absurd and is effectively non-productive and I hope more people refuse to take classical VC funding and instead opt for organic growth and/or pure public raises. The only reason a web app development company (basically all these startups) that is 6 months old needs 5 million bucks is to create a legal fiction that from its inception is designed to create liquidation events that make VCs extremely wealthy, done in a way that gives the impression of “risk taking” without any real risk being taken because of the ability to create unicorns from deliberate successive raises - all of these entities exist within the same monoculture, with huge overlap in board of directors and investor groups.
I think that ICO related innovations can help in potentially mitigating the development and solidication of this monoculture as we have seen in Wall Street, but unfortunately the criminality of some of the newer players in this field is staggering and equally disappointing
Tech almost certainly doesn’t need Silicon Valley and a decoupling of peoples thinking in those terms will be very useful step in the right direction
I think since the type of warfare of the future is largely informational, and governments are increasingly neo-fuedal and authoritarian, in the future SV will be seen as a base of operations of the enemy of tech. Not only does tech not need SV, but they are going to largely be at odds. SV will probably still have the highest concentration of VC to IPO cycles but the problem is so many of them aren't solving problems with products or services and are generally focused on how to turn customer data into an advertiser money pit while they angle for the IPO boom and exit (betraying users more and more the closer the exit is)
I'll tell you what tech does need though... non SV big money representation on the hill.
That said, there some good things in SV like the EFF, and I don't have much knowledge of the area other than riding my Harley up 1 to visit a friend a few times. I do know Pelosi is a a horrible authoritarian in democratic clothing and it surprises me SF hasn't gotten rid of her yet.
One thing I forgot to mention is how bad, constitutionally speaking, NSL's and other pressures from the government are. We just don't know how prevalent it has become, perhaps the government is NSL strong-arming companies left and right at the moment... Which is why the legislation that enabled NSLs is unconstitutional imho.
Tax incentives means competing on price, which is a loser in the long run. Lower taxes sounds good until you consider the implications: less money invested in the society itself.
> “We have a lot of quality-of-life advantages: not a lot of congestion, good restaurants, low home prices,” he said. “It’s a place where a young family won’t bankrupt themselves buying a house with a yard.”
* Not a lot of congestion just means they have car-dominant sprawl that hasn't hit a huge economic boom yet. That's a downside to me.
* Somehow I really doubt their restaurants are significantly better than the bay area, NYC, or Boston.
* Home prices aren't so much a quality of life advantage as a cost of living advantage.
Or, perhaps the Laffer Curve? Maybe revenue actually increases? Look at Texas: huge budget surpluses and lower taxes and public schools ranked higher than California.
I am not trying to debate which state is better, but I am trying to make the point that lower taxes does not correlate to a lower quality state. A poorer state does correlate: such as Mississippi for example, but low tax “rich” states do just fine.
> I am not trying to debate which state is better, but I am trying to make the point that lower taxes does not correlate to a lower quality state.
Well, "quality" is a pretty subjective word, but it does seem to generally lead to certain things being worse, like social safety nets, education, etc.
For example, in the case of Texas, it also has an insanely high maternal mortality rate, and while public schools there may outrank California's, California has an extremely strong public university system.
Compare it to Hollywood. Sure you can make movies anywhere, but you don’t.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-silicon-valle...
But so far the companies, business, and performers are still based in Hollywood.
Question is: after a distributed generation or two, does that still hold as a natural law?
As you say, actual filming has become somewhat more distributed though that is somewhat constrained by the whole ecosystem of associated trades that are needed to setup and do filming.
Programming isn't like this.
Or an article from this year listing LA as the 3rd-best place, after Atlanta and Vancouver, for moviemakers to live: https://www.moviemaker.com/archives/best_of/best-places-to-l...
One important factor at work here is the Internet. Effects companies, for example, are all over the place, including London, New Zealand, Vancouver, LA, and even here in San Francisco. Big movies will often use multiple companies, something that would have been very challenging 30 years ago.
Silicon Valley does have capital and talent. But it's not like that capital is in doubloons in a vault. It's purely digital. A big reason it's not more mobile is that VCs wouldn't deign to stop in a flyover state. Talent isn't quite as mobile, but a) advances in technology mean talent is less necessary, and b) the rise in remote work means the location of talent is less and less meaningful.
BS. The online form literally takes 5 minutes to fill out. "Creative artists" earning under $300,000 are exempt from paying city taxes, as are small businesses grossing under $100,000.
Take 30 seconds to search and you can find stories of folks who got shafted for thousands because they didn't even know such a thing existed and needs to be reported early even if you do. The fact you most get an exemption is another example of big brother showing who's boss for no gain to the city.
How about you stop being a libertarian keyboard jockey and actually try to get involved in running a business or two in Los Angeles, like I am doing? Everything you have posted is bullshit.
My wife happens to be a "creative artist" who does a lot of work in the film industry here. She is also the type of person who did not do basic research into starting a business and did not bother to find out what taxes she was supposed to be paying. I don't know why you think that being an airhead is the city's fault. The fine was not "thousands of dollars," it came out to $80-something for two years of unreported city taxes. It was literally a letter and a couple of phone calls to settle that.
http://www.laweekly.com/news/did-you-just-get-a-500-freelanc...
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-horowitz-taxes-ta...
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/LA-Freelancers-Get-...
Not to mention the links from the grandparent making the case of the declining industry: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621760
Oh, and the recent hidden trash tax, 35 million a year: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-trash-bills-los-... (Rent went up $100 in an already soaring rent environment.)
Paid shill from the city government? Sure sounds that way. It's obvious you've never lived in sane tax environment like New Zealand where you file in about thirty minutes a year on their website. That's what you're competing with.
They also aren't unfair in the sense that LA can't do exactly the same thing. The theory of places like Atlanta and Vancouver is that the film industry has positive externalities, so in theory there's nothing wrong with capturing some of that value and paying the people who create it. It's a free country, after all, and if LA isn't willing to bid as high, then perhaps the market has spoken.
Personally I'm not a big fan of tax incentives, but unfair isn't a word I'd particularly use to describe them.
The same analogy can be made for NYC with the finance industry.
The Four Asian Tigers have already surpassed SV on that. There's obviously a government-related cultural gap that won't win them any popularity contests.
Salaries are also way higher in the area then they used to be (expect maybe $50,000-60,000 in the area, at least for new grads in the area for larger name companies). It's not SV wages, but it's not city living either, and the area is great.
To follow some of the people in the area, I'd look at @DonWettrick [0] on twitter, he's an educator in the area and a lot of his students are a part of Launch Fishers and are coming into the local start up scene. If you care about the next generation, definitely a class to keep up with!
Quite interestingly, it's not been that terribly difficult to find tech jobs paying 80-110k here where one might find a good rental for 600-700/m (I should add home ownership in Nebraska is quite large).
I quite like the idea of the west-coast salary in a midwest cost of living. Hoping it stays that way :)
If interested you could check out http://siliconprairienews.com/
Honestly, location matters to an extent, but it's really what you make of it. I know people across the country, they intro me to others. Many I never meet in person, yet we all help one another. I think it's more than possible to grow connections in the absence of presents, just harder.
It isn't part of the breadbasket / midlands culture ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/w... )
It doesn't have the midwest linkages in Facebook ( https://petewarden.com/2010/02/06/how-to-split-up-the-us/ ).
It isn't part of the hopelessly midwestern culture ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3B9iu3QAwM ).
So nope... Colorado isn't midwestern.
EDIT: Well I lost that one. It's about the Midwest. They did mention Thiel though, just not in that way.
EDIT 2: And now the title has been changed (an improvement), making me look like (more of) an EEEDIOT!